Daily Reading for June 30 • St. Peter and St. Paul, Apostles (transferred)
Nobody knows where Saul is, although it is said he has changed his name to Paul. Now he appears in Jerusalem, asking to meet Peter.
If we can trust the second-century writer Onesiphoros, the figure who entered the room that day and walked forward to meet Peter and James was not impressive. We have Onesiphoros’s detailed description of Paul: “A man rather small in size, bald-headed, bow-legged, with meeting eyebrows, and a large, red, and hooked nose.” . . . Appearances aside, he was a brilliant scholar, sophisticated, a mind like a razor, politically astute, at home in any society, with the social advantages of full Roman citizenship.
The introductions over, the questions began. It was probably not easy sailing. Luke suggests that the local communities still mistrusted Paul; as he puts it bluntly, “They did not believe that he was a disciple.”
Whatever the outcome and however long it took to make the alliance, that was the first encounter of Peter and Paul, who were to become two of the great change agents in history. The relationship between them fascinates Christians for many reasons, not least because their differing gifts, personalities, and roles provide a pattern of contrasts that were to be important in the formation of the future church. These two were to have their moments of deep disagreement and confrontation. Given what we know of both of them—one a seasoned fisherman in the harsh environment of the lake, the other a seasoned debater in the cut and thrust of the Greco-Roman schools of rhetoric and law—we can imagine the intensity of their disagreement over eating with Gentiles! Who knows what went on between them as they hammered out their response to the challenges presented by the first council of Jerusalem? . . . Yet, at the end of the day, the instinctive conservatism of the one met the far-seeing vision and boundless energy of the other to rocket the news of their Lord from one end of that empire to the other.
From For All the Saints: Homilies for Saints’ and Holy Days by Herbert O’Driscoll (Cowley Publications, 1995).