Solemnity of Sts Peter and Paul – Sunday 29 June 2025
Some years ago, I was very fortunate to be on the island of Patmos, one of the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey. Patmos is an island associated with the apostle John. He was exiled there during the Diocletian Persecution at the end of the 1st century, and it is held that there on the island he wrote the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation.
In one of the monasteries on the island, however, is the most extraordinary museum with the most priceless religious treasures from antiquity. One of the artefacts that particularly attracted my attention in the museum was an ancient icon. It was quite unlike any other icon I had seen. Most icons as you are aware are square or rectangular. It is quite unusual to see a round icon. Yet here was a round icon, and it was an icon of the embrace of Saints Peter and Paul as we see on the front page of our parish bulletin this week.
It is a wonderful depiction of two of the foundational figures in Christian history. On the left is St. Peter, principal amongst the apostles, the one upon whom Jesus chooses to build his Church; on the right is the figure of St. Paul, the great missionary apostle whom the Spirit raises to bring the Good News to the world. Ours is an apostolic faith. The four marks of our Church are that it is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. By this last feature, we mean that we are only here today because of the witness of the first apostles. If it were not for the witness of these people we would not know of Jesus, for Jesus left us nothing he wrote himself. We, today, only know Jesus because the people who encountered him, those who were close to him, spoke about him, wrote about him, and lived from him. Our faith is derived from their faith. We proclaim Christ risen because they dared to proclaim Christ risen.
However, the beautiful icon of the embrace of Peter and Paul, the two foundational apostles of our Christian experience, also demonstrates another important feature of the life of our Church. I think it demonstrates that at the heart of our life as a Church is a most important juxtaposition. For Peter and Paul as historical figures represent two constituent dimensions of our life as Church.
As the first Bishop of Rome, as the first among equals, as the sign and source of our community’s unity, Peter represents what we call our communio. This is our life lived with and through and for each other. The Church is a community of people, a fellowship with each other, structured and ordered. This communion of life, however, is never simply for itself. It is a community that exists in mission. The figure of Paul represents what we call our missio. This is our mission as a community – to reach out beyond ourselves and to draw others with invitation into that communion of life with which we have been gifted. Communion and Mission – these are the two vital dimensions of the life of our Church.[1] As Pope John Paul taught, our imagination of God as Christians is that God is a divine community in missionary tension.[2] In other words, God exists eternally as a Communion of life which is eternally open to yet further inclusion. The Mission of God is to draw the whole of creation into God’s life of Communion. And if this is so for the life of God, then it must also be for us as a Church. We too exist as a community in missionary tension – a people called into fellowship with one another but never simply for ourselves, but rather to be a sign to those in our wider society of God’s possibility.
We cannot have communion without mission, we cannot have mission without communion. The two must co-exist in a dynamic inter-relationship, and it is a partnership that is so beautifully depicted in the icon of Saints Peter and Paul.
Another way of expressing this inter-relationship which the two great apostles represent is the recognition of a particular tension at the heart of our Catholic genius – the tension between what we call, on the one hand, ‘the intuitional’ and on the other hand what we call ‘the charismatic.’ This is a tension that should never be sought to be resolved but rather one with which we are to live such that the fire and energy of discipleship of the Risen Christ is always animated. As a Church we are a structured, ordered community, an institution. It gives us identity, shape and presence. It is a vital dimension of a life together with a shared belief and common purpose. At the same time, as a Church we are to be open to ever new promptings of the Spirit which breaks open the crust of our complacency to disclose new possibilities for discipleship. This is what we call the ‘charismatic’ element of the Church. The ‘institutional’ and the ‘charismatic’ exist in tension, holding each other to account. One without the other leads us awry in different ways. Only when both exist in a creative and faith-filled tension does the Church truly grow. Peter and Paul even today must embrace. It is their embrace of one another that represents one of the key features of the Catholic genius: that life flows not from a perspective that is either/or but rather from a perspective that is and/both. We can never afford to think of ourselves as either an institution or a movement. Rather we must always think of ourselves as both an institution and as a movement.
Today we remember two great figures of Christian history – St. Peter and St. Paul. Their joint memory recalls us to our very identity as a Church, and as a Catholic community. Their memory together recalls us to our commitment always to build up, and nurture, our experience of community just as it recalls us to think of new ways to reach out to those around us and to speak the word that both invites and challenges. May we find ourselves in this embrace so that might truly celebrate what it is to be Catholic.
[1] See John Paul II, Christifideles Laici, “On the Vocation and Mission of the Lay Faithful in the Church and in the World,” Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, (30 December 1988), nn. 18, 19, 32.
[2] See John Paul II, Pastores dabo vobis, “On the Formation of Priests in the Circumstances of the Present Day,” Post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation, (25 March, 1992).
