BUILT ON THE CONFESSION OF FAITH IN CHRIST

SOLEMNITY OF SAINTS PETER AND PAUL, APOSTLES

Acts 12: 1-11; Ps 34:2-9; 2 Tim 4:6-8,17-18; Mt 16:13-19

Christ Dwells in Us through Our Faith

We celebrate the two great apostles of the Lord, Saint Peter, who is the first Pope, and Saint Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles. These two apostles contributed to the spread of the faith by their commitment to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Peter had an attachment to Jesus Christ from the moment of his conversion.  He attained a position of leadership in the Church through his faith and commitment to the Lord and his mission. His love for Jesus Christ and zeal in confessing faith in his divinity won him the primacy of position among the apostles of the Lamb. The Gospel contains the declaration of the Lord giving Peter the head of the Church. The position came to him due to his profession of faith in the identity of the Son of Man revealed to him by God. “‘But you,’ he said ‘who do you say I am?’ Then Simon Peter spoke up, ‘You are the Christ,’ he said ‘the Son of the living God.’ Jesus replied. ‘Simon, son of Jonah, you are a happy man! Because it was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you but my Father in heaven. So I now say to you: You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church.” We understand faith to be a gift of God, and its confession to be our cooperation with God in the gift we receive. The Father revealed the identity of his Son to Peter as Jesus confirmed. But Peter is called happy because he cooperated with God’s gift by his confession of what came to him through revelation.

Our profession of faith in the revelation of God, which is always God’s gift of his Son to us, is in stages. The profession of faith in words is the first stage of our cooperation. It is required for our transformation to commence. The words of our Lord confirm what is yet to come from this first level of profession of our Christian faith in him. “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church.” The Word of God we believe and confess takes over our being and commences the work of our transformation into a dwelling place of God. We are required to maintain our profession of faith throughout the transformative work of God in us. As long as this is the case, the gates of hell will never gain anything in our lives. But if we abandon our confession of faith in Jesus Christ, then the work is lost. Peter did not understand this when he tried to dissuade our Lord from following the will of the Father, which was his confession of faith in the Father. The Lord referred to him as Satan, making us understand that abandoning our faith at any time makes us a dwelling place of demons instead of the Word of God. When Peter understood this principle of spiritual life, he was ready to lay down his life rather than cease his confession of faith in Jesus Christ. When Herod put him in prison after beheading James, the brother of John, Peter calmly awaited his death. God, in whose hand our life and death lie, came to rescue him from prison to continue the work of feeding the young Church placed in his care.

Unlike Peter, Paul did not know the Lord during his earthly ministry, he encountered the Lord on his way to Damascus, where he was going to disrupt the Lord’s work of building his Church for the salvation of souls. Saul, the Pharisee, was working for Satan, the enemy of the Son of Man, by operating without faith in the Son of Man. His encounter with the risen Lord opened his eyes to this truth, and he received the gift of faith in Jesus Christ. He subsequently became an epitome of confession or proclamation of faith in Jesus Christ. He tells us what constant and continuous confession of faith in Jesus Christ translates to in our lives. Confession of faith transforms the earthly life into a spiritual or heavenly life. The Word of God builds us into his Church, a place of sacrifice to God. “My life is already being poured away as a libation, and the time has come for me to be gone. I have fought the good fight to the end; I have run the race to the finish; I have kept the faith.” We must confess our faith to arrive where Paul has gone before us.

What does it take to keep the faith? To keep the faith we need to keep our focus on Jesus Christ, the author, and the end of our faith. Since he is the cause of our faith, it can only grow in his company. If we lose sight of him, we are finished and our faith and the house of God in us are lost. The lives of these two apostles are shining examples of consistency in our profession of faith in the Lord. Keeping the Lord consistently in our focus requires developing a deep prayer or interior life. The task of building an interior life is difficult in our gadget-infected age. We have to fight for it by all means. Paul spent three long years in the desert of Arabia to learn to fix his gaze on the Lord. We must prioritize the interior and not the exterior. As the Lord taught us, in our prayers, almsgivings, and abnegations, we must act in the secret place of our hearts, so that the Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward us with heaven within us. Let us pray for the grace to see God in the daily events of our lives and to praise him duly. “I will bless the Lord at all times, his praise always on my lips; in the Lord my soul shall make its boast. The humble shall hear and be glad.” Our daily confession of faith in the Lord consists in this.

Let us pray: O God, who on the Solemnity of the Apostles Peter and Paul give us the noble and holy joy of this day, grant, we pray, that your Church may in all things follow the teaching of those through whom she received the beginnings of right religion. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.