A Family Reunion - Celebrating St Peter and St Paul

Saint Peter was having one of his better days. He hadn’t denied being a friend of Jesus, or chopped anyone’s ears off. He was indeed on cracking form at Caesarea Philippi, answering the Teacher’s questions correctly and soaking up the praise. ‘Who do you say that I am?’ asked Jesus. ‘You are the Christ,’ replied Peter, ‘the Son of the living God.’ ‘And you are Peter,’ said Jesus, ‘and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will never prevail against it.’ (Matthew 16.13-19)

You often hear Christians talking down the Church as if it is a sort of booby prize that Jesus was given even though he had deserved so much better. Jesus came to found a Kingdom, they say, but all he got was a Church. It is of course true that in the first two millennia of Church history much has happened to elicit a very proper penitence, even a sense of shame. But there is no denying that the Church is central to the whole person and purpose of Christ: it flows from him as surely as his promise to build it flowed immediately from Peter’s recognition that Jesus was the Christ.

The Church , then, is not just a temporary answer to a few organisational challenges; still less a solution to that old question, ‘your place or mine?’ It is, rather, at the heart of the Gospel, and at the heart of the Creed, to be affirmed in the same breath as our belief in the Holy Trinity and our expectation of eternal life with God. There is no Church without Christianity, and there is no Christianity without the Church: it is, as St Paul insists, the many-limbed Body of Christ, chosen by God to perform the work of Christ, transforming the world by bringing to it his truth and healing.

But the Church is far more than just a charitable organisation spreading sweetness and light. It is, in itself, our first glimpse of heaven: not a temporary structure cobbled together until something more permanent could be arranged, but in its service of community, and fellowship together, and above all in its worship of God, the Church is the vanguard of the Redeemed, the first course of the Heavenly Banquet, the Overture to the celestial Symphony. In short, it is the Beginning of the End.

And that’s why the gates of hell cannot prevail against it, and why countless cruel and psychotic Emperors, from Nero to Stalin and from Diocletian to Mao, have failed to erase the faith-hope-love of those who take up their Cross every day and follow in the steps of their Lord. The Church is ultimately unconquerable because she sits enthroned like an eternal Bride with her Bridegroom, and like a Consort with her King. The Church, for all our failings, is no booby prize, but a Pearl of inestimable price.

It is a profound joy to celebrate this Gospel of the Church on June 29th, the Feast of St Peter and St Paul. Like children of estranged parents who long-since went their own way, we Anglicans can today celebrate with Peter, Prince of the Church and the first of the Bishops of Rome, supreme pastors of the Catholic Church. And we celebrate with Paul, who first found words to express the hope that is within us, and to tell of all that God has done in sending his Son into the world. His words have been the bedrock of all Reformed theology from Luther onwards, insisting on salvation by faith not works, and on the need of grace above all things.

In these two anointed ones, the unity and universality of the Church are vouchsafed, and by them we are made one. Peter, whose memories of Jesus filled the gospel of Mark; and Paul, whose encounter with the risen Christ kindled his missionary zeal to preach the Word to the Gentile world: we praise God for them both, and refresh ourselves in this celebration, that we may be renewed in our task of being what we proclaim – the light of Christ in the darkness, and the love of Christ in a world of noise and hatred.