Dear Parishioner,
In its early days, the church was very much a Jewish church as it was the Jewish people who accepted Jesus but as time went on Paul began to preach also to non-Jewish people, Gentiles. Over time the church became very much a church of Gentiles. It was Peter who maintained the unity of the church whilst Paul taught that Jesus was the fulfilment of Jewish hopes and taught the Gentiles Jesus was indeed their saviour.
These two outstanding apostles were each very different: Peter from Galilee, a fisherman, poor and uneducated; Paul – perhaps also a Galilean, according to Jerome – well educated, a lawyer, and quite possibly was a Roman citizen, whilst his training was in the rigorous code of the Pharisees. Their stories did however become entwined and despite their very different backgrounds they eventually gave their lives to an embryonic Christian faith.
Both men came face to face with Jesus, albeit in rather different ways; both were called by him to follow him. The impulsive and weak Peter struggled all through Jesus’ ministry to understand and believe in the meaning of Christ. When Jesus walks on water, Peter asks for proof that it is indeed him, goes to meet him and then the doubts set in and he starts to go under. ‘Oh ye of little faith’ seems to have been the mark of the man who struggled for much of his life to make sense of his relationship with Jesus. Yet it is the same Peter who is prompted by the Spirit to profess ‘You are the Christ, the son of the living God.’
Paul, as Saul, is the zealot entrusted with hunting down and dispensing with those dangerous Christians and who approves the stoning to death of Stephen; yet he has that earth-shattering encounter with the risen Jesus, and as a result is stripped of his power, left blind, dazed and confused. When the Spirit made the scales fall from his eyes, the newly baptized Paul would go on to preach the gospel throughout the Mediterranean world. In the wealth of spiritual material he left us in his writings Paul said: “For God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ” (2Cor.4:6). The words are appropriate for both men.
By way of footnote, the date for the Feast is 29th June but in England and Wales if a Solemnity falls on either a Saturday or a Monday it is transferred to the Sunday.
Deacon Alex
