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29 giu 2025

29/06/2025 Holy Apostles Peter and Paul

29/06/2025 Holy Apostles Peter and Paul

Reading 1 Acts 12,1-11 Psalm 33 Reading 2 2Tim 4,6-8.17-18 Gospel Mt 16,13-19

Today the liturgy of the Solemnity of the Apostles Peter and Paul takes the place of the Sunday liturgy. We pause to contemplate their different paths of life and faith. We celebrate them together, because it is the same Lord who called them and who they served and witnessed, the same Spirit with whom they preached the Lord Jesus, the same God the Father who receives glory from their lives.

By celebrating their memory on a single day, we give thanks to God for the very different gifts with which he enriched them, gifts that are complementary and necessary for the edification and sanctification of the Church.

Celebrating the two Apostles together, besides being an invitation from the Lord to unity for all Christians, is a practical teaching not to consider any Christian perfect, self-sufficient. Here and there in the Church some priest or bishop have the temptation to do things all by themselves , or to behave as if their pastoral and preaching work depended on him, without unity with others. To venerate Peter and Paul in a single celebration is to proclaim that the Church is the Lord's and not men's, and that each of us needs the charisms of the others to properly serve the Kingdom of God.

The first reading brings us to one of the recurring moments in the life of the disciples of the Lord Jesus: they must be rejected and persecuted, they must suffer, because he suffered.

Peter has been thrown into prison, and can now only await death. The decisions of men, however, even if they are powerful, like Herod, are not final, and therefore do not have to be frightening. The Church prays incessantly for him, and God has decided to listen to the invocation of his Church. God's intervention is prodigious: his angel acts with Peter like a mother with her child: he suggests him what he must do until he is safe and can manage by himself. This page conveys to us great serenity and confidence in all difficult or impossible situations.

The suffering of persecution was also the constant companion of St Paul. He mentions it in his letters, and he mentions it today in writing to Timothy. When the apostle speaks of the sufferings he endured for the sake of the gospel, he does so not to complain, but rather to praise the goodness of God who delivered him and used those difficult situations so that the gospel could be spread everywhere, including the places of the powerful who rule. “The Lord stood by me and gave me strength”, “The Lord will rescue me from every evil threat and will bring me safe to his heavenly kingdom. To him be glory”!

The sufferings of the two Apostles are the path that led them to offer their whole lives for the Kingdom of God and to give credible testimony to Jesus.

For both of them, and so for the disciples of all times and places, the Lord Jesus is the centre, the starting point and the point of arrival. The passage from the gospel shows us exactly Peter's profession of faith, who confidently declares, unlike all the people, that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. We know that he himself struggled and experienced ups and downs in being faithful to this declaration, but having recovered from his denial, he completed it, declaring his love for Jesus and making himself available to serve the “sheep” to which Jesus destined him. Indeed, the Lord had promised Peter “the keys of the kingdom of heaven”, a very important and definitive ministry, a ministry that must last as long as the Church, against which “the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail”!

That is why today we gather spiritually around the successor of Peter, who still bears the burden (for himself) and the grace (for us) of those keys that give us access to the eternal joys and forbid them to those who wish to divide and ruin.

Together with him we pray that the kingdom of God will reach all peoples through preaching, and that the heralds of the name of Jesus will have Paul's strength and courage not to desist from this unique task. He founded churches everywhere, so that in all places there would be those who call upon the name of the Lord.

Those who, like him, have “been won over by Jesus”, cannot help but make him known and loved, because in this knowledge and love lies salvation, life, peace, joy, and the communion of individuals, peoples and the whole world.