A homily for the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles, June 29, 2025
Readings from the Mass During the Day: Acts 12:1-11, 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 17-18, Matthew 16:13-19
Anyone who’s ever been laid off or received a buyout from a company — especially after a long period of service — knows the flood of emotions the pink slip or fat envelope brings.
Anger.
Frustration.
Fear.
Uncertainty.
Puzzlement.
Doubt in your abilities.
Grief.
Life has changed. Radically. Is it for the better? What’s next? Is there a “next”? Will anybody decent hire you?
And many of the same heady feelings surround the decision to leave a job voluntarily and start elsewhere. Maybe in the same line of work. Maybe in an adjacent field. Maybe doing something completely different.
More questions. Different questions.
Is your current job that awful? Is the new job really better?
Is the company stable? Will your paycheck bounce?
What’s the boss like? A leader, a slacker or a tyrant?
Are you too old? Too young? Do you have the right experience? Do you have the right skills? Can you adapt to the way the company works? Will you want to?
And, really: What’s the boss like?
What if the new boss who recruited you is a nobody from Nowheresville with kooky ideas about uplifting the lowly and an inability to stay in one place very long? What if he wants you not only to hop onto his bandwagon but to drive it eventually? What if the new boss gets into trouble with the authorities, even though it’s a political witch hunt? Where will you be then?
And what’s with this “fishers of men” silliness?
Saints Peter and Paul had a lot of questions when they encountered Jesus. Or, rather, when Jesus snared them, one in person and one through divine revelation.
Each of them had to quit their longstanding day jobs to become the leaders of those who chose to follow Christ.
Each of them had to leave behind the lives they knew and pick up the heavy load that evangelists carry, the weight of the Good News of Emmanuel that has the power to flip a selfish and greedy world on its demented head.
Simon Peter, the rock on whom Jesus built his church, already had the upper-body strength he developed by hauling fish-filled nets out of the Sea of Galilee. At the Nazarene’s command to transform himself from a fisherman to a spreader of the Gospel, Peter shifted his heave-ho determination from pulling ropes to tugging at heartstrings.
To do that “fisher of men” thing (a beautifully lyrical Biblical play on words).
Peter’s love for Jesus was tested; Peter’s denials on the Friday we came to know as Good showed that his love was bent but never broken. And Jesus accepted Peter’s pledge to tend and feed God’s flock.
At this point in their relationship, Peter must have known what he was signing up for. He had three years of day-in, day-out experience at Christ’s right hand, and no small number of calluses on his feet.
The Petrine legacy lives today through Pope Leo XIV, who also accepted the heavy lift of radically changing his life to tend and feed God’s flock.
Leo and all of us rely heavily on the words that Paul wrote to the congregations he gathered throughout what we came to know as the Western world. Paul’s letters tell of his travels spreading the Good News; they wag his disapproving index finger at people who have slipped from the path of righteousness; they offer insights into the mind of God through Jesus, someone Saul-cum-Paul never physically met.
If Peter is our direct link to Jesus, Paul makes us believers ponder how we can follow because we share his virtual experience of the risen Lord. Peter ate and walked and sweated with Jesus. Paul did not.
Saul, the violent and vigorous persecutor of Christians, became Paul through the amazing grace of God that cured his blindness and let him see not only the divinity of the Son of God but also the virtue of Christ’s ways.
Christian charity.
Divine justice.
True peace and harmony among all people and all peoples.
Was Saul actually knocked off his horse by a mystical bolt of lightning or flash of light? Scholars disagree. He certainly was weighed down by the load of entrenched dogmas and rituals whose time had passed but whose familiarity he could not chuck out. Those may have pulled him to the ground so he could rid himself of tired old ways and pick up the new.
The purest.
The truest.
Each of us can take the words and actions of Peter and Paul and weave them into our lives today and every day. We can use our God-given abilities and personalities just as they did, through words and actions.
When Jesus told Doubting Thomas
“Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”
he could have been referring to Peter and Paul, the one who saw and the one who didn’t.
Jesus definitely was referring to us, if we believe, if we spread his truth, if we love God and our neighbors as ourselves, if we love each other as Jesus loved us.
A heavy lift? No, not really.
