Vicar's Letter - June/July 2004 - Saint Peter, Saint Paul and John the Baptist

The month of June sees the festivals of three foundational figures in the life of the Church – on 24^th June we celebrate the Birthday of Saint John the Baptist and five days later the martyrdoms of Saints Peter and Paul.

If these three happily sit round a table in the celestial realms taking tea together, eternity for them is indeed a transformation, since whilst on earth they were very wary of one another.

One could be forgiven for thinking that placing the festivals of Saints Peter and Paul on the same day was a piece of mischievous irony.  The two men rarely met and when they did, it was principally to hammer out compromises and agreements.  They were very different people in almost every way, with highly distinct perceptions of the nature of the Christian mission.

It is a synthesis of their two positions (or perhaps more accurately the two polls of opinion, which they are portrayed as representing) that underpins the development of the Church and her theological reflexion.  This synthesis, what many would, perhaps a little simplistically call a compromise, is a living settlement, rather than one with a final and unalterable communiqué.  Subsequent generations have revisited questions and attitudes gently move one way and then the other.

The tensions between Saint Peter and Saint Paul that the New Testament describes have been lived out day by day in the life of the Church ever since those apostolic times.  The apparent dichotomy between fidelity to the tradition and the need for renewal, or the importance of revealed law and freedom in the spirit are at the heart of most, in not all of our debates.

The settlement of one generation may be viewed by those who come afterwards to have placed too heavy an emphasis on one of these principles and there is a shift in towards the other.  Whilst this makes for a degree of discomfit, particularly for those who like their religion constant, it is the impossibility of arriving at the definitive solution to the conundrum that enables the Church to adapt to her context.

It is this creative tension at the core of our inheritance of Faith that permits the Church to hold together such a diverse range of views within her ranks.  Too often, unfortunately, whilst folks are happy to enjoy the space that it allocates to them, they resent the place that it affords to others.  It is not the disagreement that undermines the unity of the Church, but the manner of its presentation.

Endeavouring to seal oneself from the supposedly corrupting influences of others, by which we mean alternative points of view, is to be severed from that dynamic tension that is the life-blood of the Church.

Step into the picture Saint John the Baptist.  We think of him as one of our greatest figures.  In the days when hierarchy was in vogue, he sat at the top table of the Communion of saints.  However, in his day, he was more of a problem for the nascent Church than a blessing.

On earth, he never made a commitment to Christ and His Gospel in any overt way and there was, to his end, a distance between him and Jesus of Nazareth.  None-the-less, he was too significant a figure in the history of Jesus’ earthly ministry for the first Christian chroniclers to ignore him.  We cannot be sure to what degree their accounts wove him into the momentum of events in a way that relies on interpretation after the event.  What is obvious is that this outsider was highly influential in the circles that developed into the early Church.

Much as some try to pretend that it is otherwise and may wish it were so, we have to recognise that the life and reflexion of the Church is influenced by the world around us.  Contemporary language, thought patterns, social developments and much more shape the way we think about ourselves, the decisions that we make and the work we undertake.

We should never ignore what is going on around us.  This does not mean that we permit ourselves to be blown around by every breeze of fashion that blows across society; but we should listen to the trends and be realistic about the impact that they are making on us.

The remembrance of Saint Peter, Saint Paul and Saint John the Baptist recalls the foment in the life of the early Church.  We might feel that little has changed over two thousand years, but that may be because such uncertainty is intrinsic to our character.  The pity is that we have not really learnt to live with that much better than did our forebears.

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