Sol. of Sts. Peter& Paul, Saturday – 29th June 2022 — Gospel: Mt 16,13-19
Flawed Heroes
Reading the biographies of St. Peter and St. Paul from Scriptures, we find more closely that they were quite flawed in their lives. They did not always act like super-heroes. The wisdom of God is again manifested in the very fact of choosing sinful, errant individuals to be the cornerstone of the living, human and divine, edifice known as the Church. What made them great was not their talent, personalities, or intelligence. They were leaders and saints because they cooperated with the Holy Spirit to do the will of the Lord. Jesus selected a rough fisher who often acted without thinking matters through, in order to show us that God can use even coarse stones to make a beautiful structure. In fact, God prefers the rough rocks so that God can chip away at them and shape them in order to form the needed edifice that will have a firm foundation. Jesus gives Peter the name Cephas meaning “the rock” – the rock on which the church will be built. In the same way, God chose the ultra-conservative and traditional Jewish Pharisee and tent-maker to announce the message of salvation to those who were not Jews and who were made out of a different material than the believers of old. Thus, Saul of Tarsus became Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles. Both Peter and Paul had to go through a lengthy process in order to grow in their understanding of, and their relationship with, the God who had called them to be the foundation of this new structure of God’s revelation.
