No Peter Without Paul
Twenty-Seventh Week of Year II Wednesday October 5, 2016
The Responsorial Psalm commissions us like Paul and Barnabas, “Go out to all the world and tell the Good News” (Psalm 117).
In Galatians 2: 1-14 Paul declares his
call equal to Peter’s, because it came directly from Jesus, as Peter’s did. Peter
represents the authority of the apostolic Church. Paul, however,
seems to have been raised up by the Spirit of
the risen Lord to bear witness above all to the primacy of an inward communion
of faith and love, the perpetually new work of the Spirit…. There we have what
we might call ‘the primacy of Paul.’ It was charismatic rather than
institutional. Paul was the one who bore witness to the absolute, radical
authority of the Word over everything and everyone….
Peter
and Paul could have divided the early Church. But they died in communion with
each other:
The two ‘primacies’ met at Rome, intermingling
in the blood of martyrdom. There the ‘glorious witnesses’ welded into one
communion the leadership of the protos
[Peter] and the authority of the prophet [Paul]. The Christian community at
Rome… now became the place of total, perfect confession of the apostolic faith,
with no split in its faithfulness both to its roots in the historical group
which Jesus had gathered during his earthly ministry [through Peter] and to the
new experience of the Spirit of the resurrection [through Paul].1
That
is why the church in Rome has been entrusted with the special “stewardship of
unity,” the task of keeping all the churches in the world united in the faith
for which Peter and Paul died together. This entails the duty of preserving and
encouraging throughout the Church the strength of both primacies: the
institutional authority of Peter and the charismatic leadership of Paul.
Our
basic priorities are those Jesus listed in the Our Father. Because in Luke
11: 1-4 the wording of the Lord’s Prayer is different from Matthew 6:9-14, we know this prayer was
not given as a formula to be memorized and recited — although this is very
useful — but as a listing of the priorities
of Jesus’ own heart that we must adopt if we want to pray as Jesus did. And
they are all asking for the same thing: the final, complete triumph of Christ
in the “end time” when he will come in glory.
The
“daily bread” we ask for is Jesus, the Bread of life and bread of the heavenly
wedding banquet, where all will be perfectly forgiven and forgiving in the
“unity and peace” of the kingdom.
As
“stewards of Christ’s kingship,” we live for this alone. We have abandoned all
earthly desires to live in the sole expectation of Christ’s return, for the
acceleration of which we have devoted all we have and are. Our life is a
response to the words, “Go out to all the
world and tell the Good News!”
1J. M. R. Tillard, O.P., The Bishop of Rome, Michael Glazier,
Inc., 1986, pages 74-117. It would be more precisely accurate to say the
“authority” of Peter and the “leadership” of Paul.
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