As we move away from our focus on the Easter event and the Easter experience that defines us as Christians we return to our day to day life, acknowledging its mundane ups and downs. Being a Christian isn’t something for special occasions, something we experience only when we’re at the top of the mountain. As we heard in the story of the Transfiguration we have to come down from the mountain, return to the ordinary, and that’s when our faith really kicks in.
So where do Peter and Paul fit in? Ordinary? Extraordinary?
They are the giants that stand at the beginning of the long journey that the church has followed since that Easter event, a journey that has touched billions of people, through wars and plagues and famine, and through joy and triumph and love. So Peter and Paul are special people. Or are they?
Paul was a torturer and murderer – he presided over the first documented killing of a Christian. Peter was impulsive, arrogant, unreliable – when his best friend was in trouble he ran away claiming he didn’t know him. Are these really the people we hold up as examples of the Christian life? Of course they were converted, they became different, and in that they are examples of how God uses the most unfavorable and unlikely material to work out his plan. They were special in the role they played, the task they took on. Extraordinary, but also ordinary in their very human flaws and weakness.
Special as they may have been in their roles in the early Church, they were certainly not unique. They stand as giants at the start of the Church because their stories are well known and can encourage all of us. Paul started churches quite a few places, but there were others whose names and stories haven’t been passed down to us who were there before him in many cases. The communities in Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome itself, were more important than any founded by Paul. Peter for his part became a symbol of the centralized power the church centuries later because he was the one who went to Rome, which was for a time the center of political power. In Peter’s own time the bishop of Rome was not the most important bishop, insofar as that concept even existed.
So Peter and Paul are special because we need heroes, people we look up to, but the story of the church in its origins and forever is a story of many, many people, all a mixture of success and failure, some whose names are known to us. Peter and Paul are important to us, but not so much to God. As Jesus himself spelt out the greatest would be the least, as Peter and Paul came to understand so well. We also need to understand and recognize that that makes us important in the story of the church, along with billions of others whose names are known to only the few who loved with them.