After John the Baptist and Mary of Nazareth, perhaps the two most prestigious saints are the ones we celebrate today, Simon/ Peter of Galilee, and Saul/Paul of Tarsus. Each has his own feast, too--Paul on January 25, when we celebrate his Conscientization, and Peter on January 18, when we celebrate his Confession of faith. Paul was not "converted" from Judaism to Christianity--the latter didn't exist yet, to be "converted" to, and to call it that confuses and sets a bad example. Indeed, he never stopped being a Jew, or a Child of the Abrahamic faith (nor do we) and didn't undergo the surgery that many did, to undo his circumcision. Nor the mental surgery required to disown his Hebrew self. Instead, Paul was "conscientizado", an awkward word for us in English ("conscientisized") --had his conscience brought to a new awareness of a relationship, and the meaning of his sometime Enemy who is now his Friend of the Damascus Road. And so with Peter, who recognized our Friend Jesus not only as the Capernaum rabbi who made house calls, but as the eternal Rock of Ages and the One who fulfills all our expectations of a Liberator. Conversely, Jesus saw that Peter's faith was thus the "fundamenta", as our Psalm's Latin tag title has it, the foundation stone of his new "Church," our own Conversion to Restore the Earth. (This fundamentalism is not Falwellian, fragmented, foolish, or fragile--but is solidly based on an everlasting Friend, and our faith in him and the God he taught us is our loving Paternal and Maternal Parent, our Nurturer.

Peter is still the hardworking laborer of Galilee Fisheries, who sailed out into the deep of the Mediterranean Sea, all the way to Rome, where he became the Big Fisherman, the one who organized our still continuing voyage into the midst of Empire and beyond it into the coming Human Community. It was at Rome in the year 64 of our Common Era that Peter and Paul probably met their deaths at the hands of Nero, who made even Gringo Emperors look like pikers. So unlike in their lives, so different in style, skills, ability, upbringing, class origin, they also had different "death-styles." Paul, university-educated, a sophisticated, cosmopolitan person of the Diaspora, those Jews who for centuries had lived outside Palestine. A C.I.A. "asset", hired to ferret out disloyalty to Empire, he could not have been more different from Simon Peter, an uneducated fisherman from the edge of Empire. They argued, for Peter--like most working-class people in the States today--before Easter was conservative, even against his own class interests. Paul had been radicalized by a mystic and liberative experience with the Risen Jesus, whom he probably never met except in Visions. But Paul's commitment to his rabbi mentor constantly went deeper, and he even came to help conscientisize the headstrong Peter--for even though he was a Paulos (a "little guy") he bragged afterwards that he had huffed and puffed and stood up to Peter on behalf of the Gentiles who wanted "in" to the Church without cosmetic surgery.

Paul thought his way into his radicalism, and into Jesus' Revolution. His intellectual commitment became far-reaching and to this day permeates any theological discussion of the gospel he heard in Jerusalem and crossed the oceans to tell us Gentiles about. Paul had Peter's dreams to help him, for Jesus came to both men in their hearts and minds to limn the outlines of a world-transforming project. He wooed them into a Church which is not ever to be sectarian or Shut In, but EKKLESIA--called out. And so the rest of us are called out into the Vanguard--the scouting party to explore a new and

Conversion of Paul Michaelangelo,

Vatican Fresco

 liberated future for the human family. The Call led them both to Rome, the bloody heart of the bloody Empire, not because it had been determined by market research to be the safest, most congenial place for us, but because it was the riskiest, most dangerous, and most important place to do the ministry of gospel.

They were both executed, according to their class status. Simon Peter, after all a Jewish nobody, met a nobody's death--tortured to death by crucifixion, like his nobody Jewish rabbi, Jesus. For sedition and conspiracy. But Paul was a citizen of the city of Rome, with special status, credentialed all over the world, as privileged as a gringo in Guatemala. Peter came to Rome to put the Empire on trial, whereas Paul was brought to Rome that the Empire might put him on trial. They both came a cropper there, and were judicially murdered by capitalist punishment. Paul was beheaded, a merciful instantaneous death which was a privilege for criminal citizens, quicker even than lethal injection, Junior Bush could learn from Nero. Peter was tortured as a rebellious slave, nailed to a cross in Nero's garden for the entertainment of an upscale dinner party. Together, they lost their lives but ultimately won their case, and ours, at Rome. And their martyr's crowns.

In ancient Rome this feast day of Peter and Paul was celebrated with a degree of solemnity approaching that of Christmas, for they had come to replace Romulus and Remus as the fathers of the city. Remember these twins, suckled by a Mother Wolf? They entered into the founding myth of the entire civilization. Peter and Paul won over the very mythology of this town, its empire, its might, into the service of the Church. But within a few hunded years it had itself become an Empire, and from the Rock of faith a mountain of imperial religion was built, which we can now see as part of the problem.

In Washington D.C. the Episcopal church got Congress to charter an official church for the American empire, back in the 1920's of the last century. It's called "the National Cathedral" and that couldn't be done nowadays, for sure. West Point was the other hand of that, with its Episcopal chapel and State Church, a training ground for generals and proconsuls for the world. But it's real name is the Cathdral of St. Peter and St. Paul--and it is set upon Mount Saint Alban, the highest hill in the new Rome, above the imperial architecture of Capitol hill. And named for the Saints who long ago began to call a Church out of an Empire. That a human community might emerge from a place where emperors fiddle and set fire to the world around them.

The lessons today are all about nourishing people for that project. Seek out the sheep. Feed them with justice. Be urgent, be persistent, be insistent. We will back up the pericope to "just after daybreak," at verse 4 in chapter 12, which is itself an appendix to the gospel.

At daybreak, the bereft and hungry disciples, "desanimado" and downhearted in their grief, disappointed in their empty nets, find at the lakeshore a Stranger whom they do not recognize, who addresses them as "Children" and asks, "You have no fish, have you?" They say, "No." And he bids them cast the nets to the right side (the lucky side) of the boat, and assures them that there they will find some. Not necessarily magical--someone standing on the shore can often see a school of fish not visible from the boat itself. So they do that, and now they take so many fish that they can't handle the catch. It is John the beloved, "who trimmed the flapping sail" who knows at once it is rabboni, their KYRIOS, for abundance has always been a Sign that He is with them, in bread on the hillside, with the wine at Cana, in the water at Jacob's well in Samaria, and when he "poured out the Spirit without measure" while he was himself baptizing in Judea. Simon, abashed at being found in the buff, now puts on his baptisml garment and wades in, to help the others ashore, and then they find a charcoal fire, with fish roasting on the coals. The KYRIOS has already set out the breakfast on the beach. This mysterious stranger bids them bring some of their own fish to his meal. And it is Simon Peter who hauls the Church's net ashore, and they count out one hundred fifty three fish. St. Jerome said zoologists told him this was the total of species of fish, and so they symbolize all who will come into the Church. Augustine cited numerology, but I was never good at math, and so am glad for Jerome's simpler scoring. Another wizard (H. Kruse, cited in the Jerome Bible Commentary) says it is a numerologic code in Hebrew that spells out "the Church of Love."

But it is only now, after their own catch is hauled ashore and presented to him in an untorn net, reminiscent of his seamless robe, that Jesus makes the Eucharist, gives them all the communion, himself thereby fully present to them, and to us. And now the Risen Jesus at this table of forgiveness, gives Peter a chance to undo his three denials of the Crucified one, and catechizes him into a renewal of discipleship, along with John the beloved, to leave behind a Church which is a community of Love, with Peter as "Prince" (i.e., First) of the Apostles.

There is no doubt about Peter's Primacy, nor that of the ancient Roman see which he founded with his blood. It is not a primacy of power, but a primacy of Love and service that Jesus leaves him in John's gospel. His successors' arrogance cannot undo the promises of Christ. The Risen Jesus here promises Peter a primacy of witness as well--a death like his own. The compiler of the evangel then notes the martyrdom of Peter when he has Jesus prophesy "the kind of death by which he would glorify God," for he said to him, "when you grow old you will stretch out your hands and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go." And in spite of that warning, "After this he said to him, 'Follow me'". Eusebius, following Origen, records that Peter was crucified, head down, in penance for having denied the Lord.

René Girard, in his "I See Satan Fall Like Lightning", describes the 'mimetic contagion' whereby we all learn denial of our deepest loyalties, when we go with the crowd. Peter is not distinguished from the other disciples in his volatile character, for "they all forsook Jesus and fled."

Pilate, remember, suffered from it too and strangled his sympathies and the better angels of his nature, as most of us do, at the sight of the 'snowballing' violence of the majority, which intimidates us, as war intimidates all into patriotism, which Samuel Johnson called the refuge of scoundrels. The contagion to crucify Timothy in Terre Haute caught up the populace of the "Republic" most recently. We want victims for our violence--we learned it again from McVeigh.

Peter, the Rock, became the Scandalon, the Stone of Stumbling, and himself tripped on it. But unlike Judas he was rescued by the Risen One, restored, and invited to share the Table forever with the Church throughout the ages, and to feed the flock. Invited to that Table too is Paul, who himself found Peter's denial a skandalon, and said so "to his face." They are joined together with us in this day of mutual forgiveness and our celebration of the founders of the City of God, so broad and far.

GRANT GALLUP.
gallup@tmx.com.ni  

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