DAY OF TWO GIANTS

Two “pillars of the church”. Most of us tend to prefer Peter: he was more like us – impulsive, emotional, lurching from insight and courage to idiocy and cowardice. And yet it was him that Jesus picked out to take on the responsibility of the work on earth, afterwards. Of Paul, too many people nowadays remember mainly his strictures on the role of women, in marriage and in the church, which were of course perfectly in tune with Middle Eastern mores at the time. Paul was an uncompromising character, not entirely devoid of fanaticism. He had been a kind of mullah, stoning, arresting and crucifying supposed apostates, until he was hit hard on the road to Damascus – not a comfortable place, even to this day. Then he went through metanoia, a 180-degree turn, but he remained quite as uncompromising as before. In today’s reading, he tells his protégé Timothy just how tough he’s been, how he’s hung in there, run the race, stuck it out; now all he has left to do is cross the finish line and he will get the winner’s reward. Not really an attractive speech, though you can imagine it coming from a veteran’s chapped lips. A little more modesty, we might think. Yet if you look at all he did, and at all the communities he founded, maintained, blew new life into, gave hell to, you do see his point. We admire Paul; but we can’t help liking Peter, who wept at cock-crow.

Illustration: El Greco, "St Peter and St Paul", at the Hermitage, St Petersburg