Today we celebrate the lives of two great apostles of the early Church. We remember the fisherman, Simon Peter, who brought faith in Christ especially to Jews, and the academic Jew, Saul, who became St Paul and who brought faith in Christ especially to Gentiles. What are we celebrating? Their lives? Their achievements? No, I think we are primarily celebrating their faith which has become our faith. Let’s consider how their faith in Christ grew, and how the growth of their faith can become a pattern for each of our lives.



St Paul never met Jesus Christ until Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus. We travel that road today. We too never met Jesus Christ when He was alive as a person, both fully human and fully Divine, here on earth. Yet Christ comes to us, as He came to Saul. We too experience His Light in our lives. Whenever we sense the possibility of the presence of Christ, our response might be similar to that of Saul as set out in Acts, chapter 8, verse 5, “Who are you, Lord?” In other words, we want to be sure it is truly Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit who are guiding us into the will of the Father for our lives. How can we know?

We can know when Christ is present in our lives because He brings us a deep sense of inner peace. St Augustine reflected, and I quote: “It is in [Christ] and from Him that we [each] have peace, whether it is the peace He leaves with us when going to the Father or that which He will give us when we ourselves are brought by Him to the Father.” That promise of peace was given by Jesus Christ, according to the Gospel of St John, chapter 14, verse 27: “Peace I leave with you,” Christ said to the apostles and to us, “My peace I give to you, not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”

A beautiful awareness of how Christ brings each of us inner peace was given in the fourth century by St Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan and the teacher of St Augustine: “It is part [of the life] of those who have been perfected [as Christians] not to be easily influenced by worldly things or be troubled with fear or tormented with suspicion [of others] or stunned with dread or distressed by pain. Rather,” wrote St Ambrose in his sermon on Jacob and the Happy Life 2.6.28, “as if on a shore of total safety, they ought to calm their spirit, immovable as it is in the anchorage of faith against the rising waves and tempests of the world. Christ brought this support to the spirits of Christians when He brought an inner peace to the souls of those who had proved themselves, so that our hearts should not be troubled or our spirit be distressed. . . . The fruit of peace is the absence of disturbance in the heart. In short,” concluded St Ambrose, “the life of the righteous person is calm. . . .”

Now, we each seek that “anchorage of faith,” but at times we may feel that we have not fully “proved” ourselves to be the Christians we hope to be. However, we are each worthy to receive the peace of Christ. We are worthy! Axios! We, like St Paul, have proved ourselves to be faithful Christians—by our baptism and chrismation, by our seeking to follow Christ over many years, and by coming to this Divine Liturgy today. Now it may well be that we cannot yet say at every moment of the day those powerful words of St Paul from the Epistle to the Galatians, chapter 2, verse 20: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” However, whenever we do experience that peace of Christ linked to some action or prayer in our lives we can indeed rejoice that at that moment “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

Like Saul, Simon Peter did not always live as a faithful servant of Jesus Christ. He was often puzzled by what Christ said to him; and, as we know, he denied Christ three times. Yet Simon also repented again and again and returned to Christ. The Church of today is not built especially on people like Saul or Simon or you or me. The Church is built on the faith of Paul and Peter and the faith of each of us. In the Gospel of St Matthew, chapter 16, verses 15 to 17, Christ asks the apostles, “Who do you say that I am? Simon Peter replied, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ And Jesus answered him, ‘Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. 18 And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.’”

Some Biblical exegesis—some critical study of this text—is helpful for us to appreciate the importance of our faith and the faith of St Peter. In Greek the words “on this rock” are a feminine demonstrative pronoun and article. These words, “on this rock” do not refer to Peter. Christ would have used the masculine pronoun if He were referring to the person of Peter. Christ is saying that He will build the Church on the rock of the faith of all the apostles and of each of us. Furthermore, this conversation between Christ and St Peter took place in Caesarea—Gentile territory, the very region to which St Peter was later called by the Lord, as set out in Acts 10, to baptise Cornelius and his household—the first Gentile members of the Church.

A beautiful understanding of this Biblical text from chapter 16 of the Gospel of St Matthew is given by a fourth century bishop and founder of the Antiochene school of exegesis, Theodore of Mopsuestia, who wrote that these words from St Peter are, and I quote, “not the property of Peter alone but it came about on behalf of every human being. Having said that [Peter’s] confession [of faith] is a rock, [Christ] stated that upon this rock I will build My Church. This means,” wrote Theodore, that Christ “will build His Church upon this same confession [of] faith. . . . It was … this confession which was going to become the common property of all believers.”

Khouria Sylvia and I have been to Caesarea Phillipi, where Holy Tradition believes that St Peter expressed his confession of faith. Two thousand years later it is still a calm and peaceful place. St John Chrysostom preached that Christ took his apostles there because it was, and I quote, “far away from Judea, so that being freed from all alarm, [the apostles] might speak with boldness all that was in their mind” [end of quote]. We too can be “freed from all alarm today” and “speak with boldness” to Christ all that is in our minds, as we receive Holy Communion and express our own faith in Christ.