Address given at Templederry, Nenagh & Killodiernan on Sunday 26 June 2016, the 5th Sunday after Trinity, but celebrated as the feast of St Peter, transferred from 29th June.
In early May on a trip to Rome I paid my
respects to St Peter’s head.
Both St Peter’s head
and St Paul’s are kept together in a beautiful medieval shrine above the high
altar of the great Basilica of St John Lateran, the Cathedral of Rome - or so
it is claimed. These relics are some of the greatest treasures of the basilica,
and they’re venerated by many pilgrims visiting the holy sites in Rome.
I don’t believe in the
sanctity of relics myself – and the older they are, the more suspicious I am
that they’re faked. But I would not want to belittle the piety of those who do
believe they are holy.
It’s a common, very human
thing, to keep mementos that remind us of people and events that are dear to
us. I’m sure you do, and I’m no exception - I live surrounded by bits and pieces,
which mean a lot to me for the memories they evoke. And it surely does no harm
to keep something to remind us of Peter, that great Apostle. Even if we do find
the idea of a 2,000 year old head a bit gruesome!
So as we celebrate St Peter on his feast day,
let us remember his life and reflect upon it.
The NT tells us a good
deal about Peter – rather more than we know about the other apostles, except St
Paul.
Peter’s given name was
Simon, the son of Jonah, and he worked as a fisherman at Bethsaida on the North
shore of the Sea of Galilee, with his brother Andrew. John’s Gospel tells us
that it was Andrew who first met Jesus and brought his brother Simon to meet
him. Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus said to them, ‘Follow
me, and I will make you fish for people’, and they both ‘immediately
left their nets and followed him’.
It was Jesus who gave
Simon his nickname Peter, meaning ‘Rock’. As Matthew tells us in today’s 3rd
reading (Matthew 16:13-19), Jesus tells him, ‘You
are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church’.
We also know Peter was
married. Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell us how Jesus healed Peter’s
mother-in-law at their home in Capernaum. But we are told absolutely nothing
about his wife, nor whether they had any children. Was he widowed at the time
of his call? We just don’t know.
The Gospels place
Peter very much at the centre of Jesus’s small inner circle of disciples. He
was there with James and John at incidents where the others were not present -
among them the Transfiguration, and Jesus’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane.
The Acts of the
Apostles goes on to portray Peter as a leading figure in the early church in
Jerusalem and Judea. So much so that the authorities marked him out as a
ringleader of the troublesome Christians: twice he defied the Jewish Sanhedrin
court by continuing to testify to his faith, and King Herod had him arrested
and planned to kill him - Peter escaped through the intervention of an angel,
as we heard in today’s 2nd reading (Acts12:1-11).
According to ancient
tradition Peter later left Jerusalem, and after serving as Bishop of Antioch for
several years, he moved on to become the first Bishop of Rome. There he was
martyred along with Paul, most likely in Nero’s persecution of Christians there,
who were blamed for a great fire in 64AD. His body is said to be buried under
St Peter’s Basilica in Rome - even if his head is kept in St John Lateran.
These are the bare bones of Peter’s life.
But we must dig deeper
to discover why he made such an impact on his fellow disciples. What sort of a
person was he? And how did this fit him for the leading role he played in the
early church? Here are three things that I notice about him.
First, Peter was blessed with spiritual insight.
We see it in today’s 3rd
reading - he is the first to make that great confession of faith, ‘You are the
Messiah, the Son of the living God’, in response to Jesus’s
question, ‘But who do you say that I am?’
But perhaps we see it
best in the story of the baptism of Cornelius, a Roman Centurion. In a trance Peter
sees a sheet filled with meat that is unclean in Jewish law, and he hears a
voice commanding him to eat it. When he objects, the voice tells him not to
call unclean that which God has cleansed. Peter grasped the essential truth
that God welcomes all people, whether Jews like himself or gentiles like you
and me. Soon after, when he meets Cornelius and his family, he tells them, ‘I truly
understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears
him and does what is right is acceptable to him’, and he goes on to
baptise them all.
This was highly
controversial among early Jewish Christians, who believed that gentile converts
must first become Jews - undergo circumcision and follow Jewish law. Later, it
was Peter’s support for Paul’s case at the leaders’ Council in Jerusalem that
swayed the crucial decision, that gentiles should not be required to follow the
old Jewish law. Without Peter, the infant church would probably have remained
just one more millenarian Jewish sect, worthy of no more than an historical
footnote, if it was remembered at all.
Second, Peter was a brave and decisive - a man of
action.
This was evident on
the day of Pentecost when Peter assumed the role of spokesman for the
disciples. Empowered by the gift of the Spirit, on the spur of the moment he
decided to speak out about his faith in Jesus, his Lord and Messiah. How brave
he was to open his mouth, a provincial from Galilee in front of a crowd from
all over the Empire, only 50 days after the Jewish authorities had connived to
have Jesus brutally put to death. He was risking his life – what a change from
the man who had denied knowing Jesus three times after his arrest. We are told
Peter spoke so powerfully that day that 3,000 accepted baptism in the name of
Jesus Christ.
It was also part of
Peter’s brave, decisive nature that he sometimes acted and spoke impetuously,
without thinking things through. Several times, Jesus had to reprimand him. When
Peter tried to dissuade Jesus from teaching that it was necessary to go to
Jerusalem where he would be killed, Jesus responded, ‘Get
behind me, Satan!’ And when Peter refused to allow Jesus to wash
his feet in John’s version of the Last Supper, Jesus answered, ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me’.
Third, Peter was faithful to Jesus through
thick and thin.
Peter learned from the
times Jesus reprimanded him, and continued to follow Jesus faithfully, where
another might have left in a huff.
His faith did waver at
times, but when it did he sought safety in the love of the Jesus he recognised
to be the Messiah, the Son of the living God. When Peter started to sink
because the wind frightened him as he tried to walk on the water, Peter cried
out, ‘Lord
save me!’, and Jesus reached out to catch him.
And Peter did remain
faithful. Starting with his calling in Galilee to fish for people, through his
travels with Jesus learning to be his disciple, through the trauma of Crucifixion
and the bemusement of Resurrection in Jerusalem, then later as an apostle
obeying Jesus’s great commission to make disciples of all nations and baptise
them, right up to his final martyrdom in Rome - Peter was faithful to Jesus.
It was these qualities, I think, that made
Peter the leader of the apostles that he was.
Spiritual insight, decisiveness
and bravery, and faithfulness – these were the qualities that Jesus found in
his friend Peter.
These were what made
Peter the right man, at the right time, in the right place to lead the infant
Church, which Paul likened to Jesus’s body, to continue Jesus’s saving mission
to the world.
I believe these are
still the qualities Christ’s Church needs in its leaders today, to enable us
all to continue Jesus’s mission through the 21st century.
