The Wranglings Of Peter & Paul
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Wednesday, October 01, 2008 9:15 PM
A trick of the wind made it look like the Holy Father was hiding from someone during this morning’s audience.
We can imagine the first Holy Father sometimes feeling that way about St. Paul—and that is the topic of the Pope’s text today.
Three things struck me.
First, the Pope’s overall theme this morning was the interior liberty of a Christian—for which St. Paul is a supreme model. His love for Christ and obedience to Peter didn’t shrink him into a toady; on the contrary, precisely because of the purity and sincerity of his love, St. Paul was free from the vice of human respect—from worrying what others would think of him.
Secondly, I found the discussion of St. Paul’s establishment of the tradition of the collection for the poor fascinating.
Perhaps we are not yet able to fully understand the meaning Paul and his communities gave to the collection for the poor of Jerusalem. It was a totally new initiative in the panorama of religious activities. It was not obligatory, but free and spontaneous. All of the Churches founded by Paul in the West participated. The collection expressed the debt of these communities to the mother Church of Palestine, from which they had received the ineffable gift of the Gospel. The value that Paul attributes to this gesture of participation is so great that he rarely calls it a “collection”: It is rather “service,” “blessing,” “love,” “grace,” even “liturgy” (2 Corinthians 9).
This last term, in particular, is surprising; it confers on the collection of money a value even of veneration: On one hand, it is a liturgical gesture or “service,” offered by each community to God, and on the other, it is an action of love carried out in favor of the people. Love for the poor and divine liturgy go together; love for the poor is liturgy.
Almsgiving as community prayer. Isn’t that interesting?
Finally, Benedict has a particularly interesting take on the disagreement Paul has with Peter in Antioch over continuing to keep the kosher laws. All the apostles knew it wasn’t necessary to do so, but Peter—to avoid scandalizing Jews he was evangelizing—returned to eating kosher. Paul thought that was selling-out, and to the extent we think of it at all, I suspect we all think Paul had the better of the argument. But the Holy Father suggests there was no real difference, except in perspective:
Very probably the perspectives of Peter and Paul were different: for the first, not losing the Jews who had embraced the Gospel, for the second, not diminishing the salvific value of the death of Christ for all believers.
And he also notices that later Paul actually adopts Peter’s view. Not that he ought to eat kosher, but that he should be careful not to scandalize people:
writing to the Christians of Rome a few years later, (around the middle of the decade of the 50s), Paul will find himself before a similar situation and he will ask the strong that they not eat impure food so as not to lose the weak or cause scandal for them. “It is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that causes your brother to stumble” (Romans 14:21).
The lesson for us, according the the Holy Father, is less who was right and more that where disputes arise, the way forward is always through mutual openness to the light of the gospel and honest and sincere discussion. It’s ultimately discipleship that discovers the right path.
If you’d like to catch up on this whole “class,” you’re not far behind. Here are links to the other sessions.
Session 1
Session 2
Session 3
Session 4
Session 5
Session 6
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