Homily for the Solemnity of St Peter and St Paul 2011
Abbot Cuthbert Madden
Today, in this last week of the school term, we have paused for a moment to come together to celebrate Mass in honour of the Apostles Peter and Paul. This is an important thing to do. This assertion may well startle you if you have not thought through what it means to be a Catholic Christian. Let me explain what I mean.
In our world today there is a tendency to compartmentalise life. This is particularly true when we consider the role of religion. One of our recent Prime Minsters proclaimed that he didn’t do religion – by which he meant that his religion was an entirely private affair and that his beliefs did not impinge on his behaviour as a politician. In some respects it is easy to live life in this way: I do my religion on a Sunday and the rest of the week I spend exactly as I want.
This is not what the Catholic Church believes and it is not what we learn from the life and teaching of the Apostles Peter and Paul. We believe that Christ’s teaching permeates throughout the whole of our lives. If we truly believe in the teaching of Christ little by little we discover that our faith cannot be limited to a few minutes at the beginning and the end of each day and to the space of an hour on a Sunday. When we pause to pray regularly and reflect carefully on the words of the Scriptures we find that what Jesus has to say to us affects every moment of our lives: it shapes the way we live, the things we will do and will not do, the way we conduct our relationships with other men and women. We may not always make the right choices. We may often find ourselves needing to retrace our steps in order to find our way back to the Gospel way of life – but we know that the whole of our life matters, that it needs to possess an inner integrity, a coherence.
This is what we discover in what we know of the lives of St Peter and St Paul. Of course we are only aware of the broad steps by which they came to that wholeness. We know about their contrition for their greater sins. We know of their steadfast preaching of the teaching of Jesus. We know something, a fragmentary something it is true, of their lives of prayer. And we know that at the end they believed that it was better to die for love of Jesus Christ, trusting in his promises, than to deny that Jesus Christ was the Son of the Living God.
Our celebration of this feast today, then, sees Jesus posing the same question to us which he put to Simon Peter so many years ago. Jesus asks us, “Who do you say I am?” Frequently this is not an easy question to answer. If we answer by saying “John the Baptist, Elijah or one of the prophets”, that is to say, simply a holy man, then there is no compelling case for us to follow the Gospel way of life – but at the same time we may well find that gradually we lose all sense of real direction in our lives; a loss which may well not have much effect for many years until the moment comes when it seems that all of life is quite hopeless and purposeless. If we answer, “You are the Son of the Living God”, then we have to face our inability to live this life without the help of almighty God. We have to recognise that often we will need to turn to the Lord and say, “Lord, be merciful to me a sinner” – but it may be that we will discover a clear aim, a real purpose, which will bring us safely, though not without suffering and heartbreak, through life to eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven.