I feel a bit sorry for people who have their birthday on Christmas Day. Unlike most people, who can celebrate these two occasions separately, meaning double the fun and presents, those unlucky ones have their intake of both reduced by half – that feels unfair. I wonder how St Peter and St Paul, arguably two of the greatest figureheads of the Church, feel about being lumped together in the celebration of their birth to eternal life, their martyrdom? Pretty much all the other Apostles, originally chosen by Jesus, have their own individually dedicated feast days, except for my patron saint, who is paired with Simon the Zealot, and also Judas Iscariot, who doesn’t have a feast day for obvious reasons. Considering St Peter’s and St Paul’s respective foundational impact on the life of the Church, honouring each with a dedicated feast day would seem highly appropriate. And yet, very early on, those two giants have been inseparably celebrated on the same day, 29th June. It was first documented in 258 AD, more than half a century before Christianity was even decriminalised in the Roman Empire. So there must have been a good reason to do it this way and to keep that tradition alive over all those centuries.
One of humans’ deeply ingrained traits is tribalism, defined either positively as belonging to a tribe or negatively as being set against one another; usually, it’s a mix of both. The most obvious contemporary examples are found among football fans or in ever more polarised modern politics. The Church faced such a challenge so early that it’s extensively documented in the New Testament, particularly in the First Letter to the Corinthians, where it was the first subject St Paul addressed: “it has been reported to me […] that there is quarrelling among you [;] each one of you says, “I follow Paul”, or “I follow Apollos”, or “I follow Cephas”, or “I follow Christ.” (1:11). That opening line was followed by an extensive, 3-chapter-long argument presenting Jesus as the only one to follow, closing with a rather moving presentation of their individual roles: “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labour. For we are God’s fellow workers.” (3:5-9)
St Paul’s intervention wasn’t one-sided. In the Second Letter of St Peter, he addressed a division similar in nature: “count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” (3-15-16) Peter and Paul’s mutually conciliatory tone is striking, given their significant differences and clashes, as recalled by St Paul: “when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.” (Galatians 2:11) Their opposing views reflected the wider challenge faced by the early Church, a clash that label lovers would define as between “traditionalists” (Christians of Jewish origin) and “liberals” (mainly Christian converts from paganism). The conflict that had the potential to tear the early Church apart was resolved in a way that set a pattern for centuries to come: a gathering of Church leaders and representatives of Christian communities to pray, discern, and discuss, and to find a satisfactory solution that would enable the Church to grow. The council’s decision was formulated in an interesting way: “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements…” (Acts 15:28) St Paul described the arrangement in practical terms: “I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised,” (Galatians 2:7) a sentiment echoed in today’s prayer of Preface.
One of the consequences of the tribalism I mentioned earlier is uniformity, a drive to make everyone the same down to the tiniest detail in its extreme form. The shared celebration of St Peter and St Paul, despite their significantly different vocations, spiritualities and methods, is a powerful reminder of the diversity of individual vocations and the ways of fulfilling them, all done in the unity of one purpose: “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)
