Preached by Fr Chase on 28 June 2020
The readings that we’re given for this feast want us to celebrate the triumphant and persevering witness to Christ that the two great princes of the apostles, Peter and Paul, made by their lives, and the foundation that their witness sets for the ministry and edification of the Church. For a while now I’ve wondered, though, what it would be like to celebrate this feast with a different set of readings, less laudatory in tone. Rather than a reading from Acts about Peter’s miraculous rescue from King Herod’s prison, what if we heard from Galatians about his confrontation with Paul in Antioch because Paul thought Peter’s ministry with the gentiles there had taken a hypocritical turn? Rather than a reading from Second Timothy about Paul’s preparations for martyrdom in Rome, what if we heard from Acts about that time he stood in witness over the martyrdom of Stephen in Jerusalem? Rather than a reading from Matthew about Christ giving Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven, what if we heard about those other times when Peter wasn’t so well-suited to the moment, when he asked Jesus to depart from him on account of his sin, when Jesus called him Satan and told him to get behind his back, or when Peter denied Jesus and wept and then was put back together around a charcoal fire?
If we only attend to the laudatory readings, I worry that Peter and Paul will sound too much like distant and legendary figures, the Remus and Romulus of a universal Church, set for a pedestal but set apart perhaps from the wear and tear of our lives down here on the ground. Peter and Paul belong on the pedestals we have given them, but in these days when all sorts of statues are coming down for some good, some misguided reasons, we have to admit that Peter and Paul too are complex figures with complicated legacies. I’m thinking here particularly of the history of the papacy and some of those things we read in the letters of Paul about slavery and gendered codes of conduct. What do we do about these things? Jump on the iconoclastic bandwagon and cancel those parts of Scripture and Tradition that we judge by the fluid standards of our times to be embarrassing, obtuse, or otherwise offensive? Hardly, although there are complicated examples we could explore.
We are confronted with a question about how to put people on pedestals, even our saints, even our foundational saints. It can’t be for us a simple matter of holding somebody up as an unqualified, imitable success story of grace, accomplishment, or virtue. If honouring a person is a way of loving that person and not just pushing a narrative or promoting an agenda, then we also have to acknowledge their limitations and forgive their failures. We have to be willing to cooperate with the Spirit in not effacing but reconciling their legacies with the true advances that we make in scientific method, moral reasoning, social consciousness, and religious belief and practice. The only pedestal that Peter and Paul sought was the one they could share with Christ crucified. The pedestals they keep aren’t so much set in stone as in the spirit of humility that made them who we actually honour them for being, another Christ.
I’m reminded of someone I’ve introduced to you before in my preaching, an inmate named Madonna at the prison I used to say Mass at. He was on fire with Scripture because, as he said to me once, “Father, look at who Jesus chose to surround himself with. The apostles are people who are just like me!” Madonna was someone who knew in his gut that a feast of the apostles is a feast of our own flesh and blood and dust and ash. We see in them in perhaps an exaggerated way how grace can triumph in our stumbling natures, how grace will triumph when God is all in all, but we also see in them how unfalteringly faithful Christ is with us when we get things wrong, when we mess things up, when we get knocked off our pedestals (or in Paul’s case literally his high horse).
Thanks to Madonna, I was thinking about how I would have preached these readings, the readings we actually get for the feast, inside the prison, and it strikes me that the message there would hold just as well for us here. The strongest gates are the ones we close ourselves behind. Those aren’t prison gates, which angels and apostles and sinners have crossed over and staked as one of the places where Christ chooses to be found. Those aren’t the gates of the underworld, which Christ broke open when he descended into the dead and which cannot withstand the siege of the Church’s witness. The strong gates we close ourselves behind are the pieces of the past that we keep telling ourselves we’re no better than. They’re the things in ourselves and in others that we can’t or won’t forgive. They’re where we think we’ve got things all figured out and nobody’s going to tell us otherwise come hell or high water, but even those gates aren’t really locked. We could say in the spirit of Psalm 139, “O Lord, where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? Whatever gates I find myself caught behind, whatever places I feel myself stuck in, you are there. Your hand shall lead me, your right hand hold me fast.” If we put ourselves into this first reading, just as Peter was flanked by two guards (who a tradition says later became saints themselves, Martinian and Processus, buried in St. Peter’s Basilica and commemorated this upcoming this week on July 2), Christ guards us with his saints. St. Peter to our left jangles the keys to interior freedom. St. Paul on our right brandishes the sword of God’s word to silence the voices of shaming accusation. Christ himself lays his life down at our feet, like a pedestal, to support the steps we don’t always know how to take forward in faith, humility, and the truth that sets us free.
We obviously are going to hear these readings differently from somebody who is actually in prison, but given that freedom of ours, these readings, this feast, and our current events call us to mind of our criminal justice systems. They call us to the mercy of visiting and ransoming the captive. For some of us, that might mean actually getting into the prisons in various volunteer and educational capacities. For all of us, it entails a greater proactive sensitivity to the societal factors that feed the incarceration complex: poverty rates, childhood literacy rates, legislative agendas, immigration policies, judicial protocols, consumer habits, racial bias. As Pope Francis once said about prisons to prisoners, here but for the grace of God go I, so by God’s grace we ourselves find ways to bind back injustices in our systems and to loosen the bonds on our own flesh and blood.