Acts 3:1-10 Galatians 1:11-20 John 21:15-19

Martyrdom is first and foremost about giving witness to the Gospel message and the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. The Greek word martyrion means testimony or proof. One can be a witness in a court trial and one can give witness by preaching, by teaching or by giving really good example. In the popular modern imagination of fear, the word martyr has lately and wrongly been equated with an indiscriminate suicidal assault on and killing of others as a demonstration of extreme personal rage and hatred. Such behavior subverts any balanced and constructive religious message. It certainly has no place in the Christian Gospel. Christian martyrdom is about proclaiming the Good News of Christ’s Gospel even though such proclamation and example has in history resulted in persecution and death for the actual martyrs.

The liturgical remembrance of the deaths of Peter and Paul focus chiefly on the fact that they were both able to preach and teach their ways from the Jewish center of the world (Jerusalem) to the Gentile center of the world (Rome) in an era when to be noticed by the Roman emperor was considered the apogee of success. Essentially each had reached a global audience for the Gospel message. The usual penalty for bothering the emperor for an appeal from a local court was death. Paul probably knew that when he appealed to the emperor as was his right as a Roman citizen (see Acts 22:22-30). He had been arrested in Caesarea (in Palestine) and maliciously accused by his brother Jews equally as zealous and intolerant of the evangelizing disciples of the Risen Jesus as Paul himself had once been. His case was heard by the Roman Procurator of Judea, Porcius Festus, who had been appointed to that office by the Emperor Nero in 60 AD. Hence, we can date these final chapters of Acts as remembrances by the second and third generations of Christians who were by this time increasingly from various Gentile backgrounds. So increasingly Gentile were the Christian communities of the 60s and even more so from the 70s onward, that it was already becoming the accepted practice to speak maliciously against “the Jews” or “the Pharisees” or “the Sadducees” as we read in Acts and in the Gospels. The rich and holy Jewish ancestry of the Gospel faith was forgotten in merely four decades, in spite of the guidance of the Holy Spirit!

One needs to read Acts 21 to appreciate the progression of events in Paul’s situation which would result in his death in Rome by imperial condemnation. But, that death must yield in importance to the preaching and evangelizing which Paul had done and would continue to do even along the way to Rome. Paul had perceived the active and intervening hand of God in every event and circumstance. Perhaps Paul exaggerated some, from a modern perspective. But, from the point of view of early Christian apologetics and catechesis, how Paul engaged the life he was given from God demonstrated God’s desire that the entire world ought to hear the Gospel by which was offered universal salvation. He had hoped and worked so that everyone might be saved!

Peter’s road to a martyr’s death was less detailed by the early Church. Aside from Jesus’ prediction that Peter would deny him when persecution set in, and today’s Gospel text of the Post-Resurrection Jesus-Peter dialogue on the shore of Lake Galilee which referred to “the kind of death by which he [Peter] would glorify God,” not a great amount of information survives in writing. But, what does survive, primarily in the Acts of the Apostles, is much like that about Paul, i.e., recollections of how and to whom Peter preached and taught. The remembered quality of Petrine martyrdom is entirely about proclaiming, explaining and spreading the Gospel of Salvation. There is no glory in dying. Everyone gets to do it. Some die nobly and for a grand purpose. Most of us die merely because we’ve reached the end of our own particular lives. There is, however, glory in living! To live the Gospel in the here and now is tremendously important. To truly embrace life in the present world as a gift, most blessed and loving, from the God of life is the first insight into the Gospel. Once the believer appreciates one’s own life as part of God’s own life, then there is no disconnect between how believers live here in the present life, and how believers live eternally with God after death. A very effective homilist I heard once asserted that “If you don’t like this life you live now, there is not much chance you will like life in God’s kingdom!” That speculative exhortation makes more and more sense as I live my own life. I’ve met more than a few “grim Christians” who do absolutely nothing to help spread the Gospel, while their visible attitude does much to discourage life. Who would want to join them in their unhappiness? The Gospel is literally “Good News.” It must be “good” in whatever terms are current and important to the particular era and geographical location in which the Gospel is preached and lived. Remember the Gospel principle mentioned in previous months: Culture Incarnates the Gospel while the Gospel Critiques the Culture. Notice how in Acts both Peter and Paul seized upon and changed not only local Jewish but also Gentile cultural realities as tools and vehicles by which to announce the Gospel (see Peter to Cornelius’ household in Acts 10 and Paul to the Athenians at the Areopagus in Acts 17).

This remembrance of Peter and Paul, as cutting-edge heralds of God’s Word and of the Good News of Salvation, as enthusiastic witnesses and advocates of progress, growth, evolution and change might be really encouraging to us today who live in a modern global vortex in which so little seems stable. The Gospel offers hope in the midst of a necessarily dynamic reality. Cardinal John H. Newman, a 19^th Century English theologian, wrote, “To live is to change, and to live well is to change much!”

Peter and Paul! Heralds of the abundant life preached by the Christ himself (John 10)! Pray for us!