by CCW | 5 July 2026 10:00
Today’s Gospel illustrates wonderfully the Epistle reading from 1st Peter. Both readings complement rather providentially the significance of this Sunday as falling within The Octave of the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul. They are the twin pillars and princes of the Apostolic Church and Faith grounded upon the living word of God which defines their life and ministry. The Gospel for the Feast is ‘the confession of Peter’ that Jesus is “the Christ the Son of the living God.” Jesus acknowledges this as something revealed to him not invented by him. That strong sense of commitment to the revealed word of God is what unites two very different personalities, that of Peter and Paul. As Augustine notes,”they are as one.”
They are as one in their attention to the living word revealed in Christ Jesus despite their very different backgrounds and biographies, the one a poor fisherman, we might say, as seen in this morning’s fishing story gospel, the other, a proud scholar who is blinded into sight by the vision and words of Jesus that transforms him from the persecutor, Saul, into the Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul. In the Gospel for The Feast of St. Peter and Paul, Simon son of John, sometimes identified as Simon Peter, Jesus plays upon the name Peter: “thou art Peter,” πετρος, meaning rock or stone, “and upon this rock I will build my Church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” He then invests the apostolic ministry with ‘the power of the keys,’ the grace of Christ’s forgiveness on the Cross for our sins conveyed through the sacrament of priestly absolution. (It is worth noting that Lancelot Andrewes recognized the principle of forgiveness as inherent in the sacrament of the altar, the body broken and the blood outpoured “for [us] and for many for the remission of sins”).
The Feast of St. Peter and consequently Petertide is one of the oldest Christian festivals looking back to at least the early 3rd century. Yet from the earliest times the Feast of Peter was also associated and accompanied by the commemoration of St. Paul. The two are inseparably linked as witnessed by the sermons of Augustine and Leo, for instance. Much later in the 17th century, Bishop John Cosin, attempted to restore the title “St. Peter’s, and St. Paul’s Day” in the Prayer Book. In other words, throughout the churches both East and West, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, to use later terms, Peter and Paul have been commemorated together.
[The idea of the Petrine primacy – “upon this rock I will build my Church” – was understood to be the property of the apostolic ministry shared equally among all five of the great metropolitan sees: Jerusalem, Antioch Alexandria, Constantinople, and Rome. Only later, owing to the accidents of history, did it become associated with Rome and, after the Reformation, to Roman Catholicism. The imperial seat of the Roman empire had been moved to Constantinople in the early 4th century, ultimately becoming the seat of Byzantium. But in the shift from Rome to Constantinople and in the decline of the Roman empire, the city of Rome was bereft of leadership until Gregory the Great in the late 6th century stepped in to order affairs both temporal and spiritual; hence, the rise of the papacy, albeit with many ups and downs and controversies about the extent of its power and its relation to Kings and Princes in the realms of temporal power throughout the medieval period and into early modernity. This is the legacy of ‘the investiture controversy.’ In terms of ecclesiastical or spiritual power there were the conflicts between popes and councils; papalism versus conciliarism. All this belongs to the break-up of the medieval world and the beginnings of what became the nation states of Europe along with the emergence of the vernacular languages of modernity. A rather brief historical overview!]
More to our purpose this morning is this intriguing Gospel story. It reveals the depths of meaning found in the living word of God through the work of the apostolic ministry of the Church. First, there is Luke’s opening observation that “the people pressed upon [Jesus] to hear the word of God,” secondly, Jesus uses a fishing boat as his pulpit, “teaching the people out of the ship,” and, thirdly, he bids Simon, to “launch out into the deep,” which is the setting for what follows in the exchange between Simon Peter and Jesus. It concludes with the call of Peter, James, and John to the apostolic ministry. “From henceforth thou shalt catch men … and they forsook all, and followed him.”
This Gospel story counters the shallowness, the emptiness, and sense of futility of the culture of nihilism in our times. “Master,” Simon Peter says, “we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing,” Nada in Spanish. Ernest Hemingway in a remarkable short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” plays with that word to express the sense of emptiness and meaninglessness, on the one hand, while yet implying a desire for light and meaning, on the other hand. In that story, two waiters comment on an old man lingering over his drink in a bar, the one impatient for the man to leave, the other more reflective about his situation. Hemingway imagines a parody of the Lord’s Prayer, where the word nada, nothing, is substituted throughout. “Our nada who art in heaven, nada be thy name, thy nada be done, on earth as in heaven, etc.” And yet the light illumines the darkness and the nothingness of human experience that at the very least points to something more.
The far stronger counter to the nihilism of contemporary life is captured in what Simon Peter says next: “nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.” As Luke tells us, “the people pressed upon Jesus to hear the word of God.” Simon Peter yields to the word of Jesus in the face of futility. There is a strong desire to hear and learn and a willingness to act upon the word. We seek to find and in finding seek all the more. We are not nothing. Our lives find their meaning and truth in the living word of God.
There are two forms of nihilism with their attendant aspects of ressentiment and envy that lead to division and destruction. There is the passive nihilism which throws up its arms in despair at the chaos and confusion of a world that seems wildly out of control and retreats into the gated communities of bourgeois comfort and the closed doors of the mind. And there is the active nihilism which lashes out in violence against self and others and the systems and structures viewed as the source of discontent. This is the world of Jihadis and terrorists and the whole raft of deconstructionist thinking that offers a selective and partial view of institutions and human thought. It is paradoxical since it assumes the ideology of progress against which it reacts while utterly dependent without it, especially in its technocratic expression. But it is utterly unmoored from the ethical.
I want to call attention to the desire to know and to act upon the word of God revealed in the Scriptures because it recalls us to the deeper truth of our humanity. It belongs to the Christian story of the redemption of our humanity from the paths of destruction and despair that gathers us into the net of divine love. That doesn’t mean that we fully understand it from the outset, if ever. Rather we continue to grow into it through our engagement and encounter with the Word audible and visible, the Word proclaimed and celebrated in the sacraments, seeking to discover the will and purpose of God for our humanity. In some sense, this story connects to the passionate desire or eros to know, as Plato terms it, or Aristotle’s insight that “all people desire by nature to know,” albeit in different ways. That struggle to hear and act upon the living word of God is the purpose of the Church in its life and mission.
The Book of the Acts of the Apostles might be styled the Book of the Acts of Peter and Paul. It is almost evenly divided between the experiences of Peter and Paul. Divisions of opinion about circumcision and the dietary laws are worked out for both, even through contention and debate between them. Peter comes to see that the Law of God given through Moses cannot be restricted or limited to the People of Israel, the Jews, but is given through Israel for the whole of our humanity. This is Luke’s point in the Nunc Dimittis. “Lord now latest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy Word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation … a light to lighten the Gentiles and the Glory of thy people Israel.” Both/and, not either/or.
Peter in a vision comes to understand that the Spirit is given both to the Gentiles and to the Jews, and that circumcision is to be understood inwardly as already shown many times in the Hebrew Scriptures, and that the work of distinguishing one thing from another in terms of creation in order to say what anything is, remains primary despite the overturning of the distinction between things clean and unclean. In other words, the Christian Scriptures do not simply supersede the Jewish Scriptures. Supercessionism is really a form of the ideology or idolatry of progress and plays into the conflicts between religions in competing claims to universality and dominance rather than seeing them as forms of a kind of complementary universality.
Paul in Acts tells us three times about his breakthrough moment of the understanding which allows him to transcend the divide between the Pharisaic form of the Jewish religion and the followers of the Way whom he persecuted. More profoundly, his so-called conversion, really a coming to a deeper understanding, is about seeing the glory of the Messiah in the sufferings of Christ.
Both Peter and Paul in Acts are seen as important preachers whose preaching contributes to the growth and development of the Christian Church. Acts tells the story of Paul preaching in Troas. He preached for a rather long time and a young man named Eutychus fell asleep on the window ledge, and fell down from the third story but survived. Of course, Peter and James and John would also fall asleep while Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. This acknowledges the weakness and limitations of our humanity to hear and act upon what we hear; in short, to inhabit the living Word of God. But it doesn’t negate the truth and power of that Word.
This is what is meant by Peter’s confession about himself as “a sinful man” in the face of a great draught of fishes after a night of catching nothing. Our lives are lived entirely “at thy word,” we might say, as confessed here by Peter, and elsewhere by Paul, by Simeon, by Mary, and, of course, in the Lord’s Prayer. It means the constant struggle against our selves in our preoccupations and failings to take a hold of the truth that is before us. It is an essential part of the pilgrimage of sanctification without which “the world is too much with us, late and soon,” as Wordsworth says, and we are too much with ourselves; “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” In other words, Nada. The only antidote is to press upon Jesus to hear the word of God. Like Peter and Paul, then and only then, may we find that we are “of one mind” by “sanctifying Christ as Lord in our hearts.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity V (in the Octave of SS. Peter & Paul)
July 5th, 2026
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