The Tradition We Hold True
Sermon preached by Dn. James Wilcox on the Feast of Sts. Peter & Paul on Sunday, June 29, 2025
2nd Cor. 11:21-23, 12:1-9
Matt 16:13-19
Blessed feast of apostles Peter & Paul!
Today we gather to commemorate the Apostles Peter & Paul, whom we celebrate as foremost among the Apostles, and from whom the The Gospel of Jesus Christ was first delivered. In today’s Gospel reading we heard about Peter’s initial confession of faith after Christ asks him, “Who do you say I am?” "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Peter responds. And hereafter Jesus refers to him as petra (πέτρᾳ), or the rock, upon whom the Church will be built up. For this reason, Peter is honored as foremost among the Apostles for the authority that has been bestowed upon him.
Similarly, the Apostle Paul had an encounter with Jesus Christ on his travels to Damascus, and though this episode transpired in a different way when compared to Peter’s confession of faith, this encounter leads Paul to revere Christ as Lord and to recognize Him as “the Son of God” for the first time. And like Peter before him, Paul was called to work for the good in the establishment of the Christian Church, with the intent of building it up. Today’s Epistle reading recounts the many labors and sufferings Paul withstood to make the Gospel known in as many regions of the Roman empire as possible. And for this reason, Paul is known as foremost among the Apostles for his apostolic labors.
St Irenaeus writes that:
“We have learned from no others the plan of our salvation than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us… while Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome, and laying the foundations for the Church… Mark the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him… these have all declared to us that there is one God, Creator of heaven and earth, announced by the Law and the Prophets, and one Christ, the Son of God.”
And so it is through Peter and Paul that the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and foundations of the Church were established. And this leaves us, as members of Christ’s Church today, to preserve what has been passed down to us by our holy tradition and to keep it intact.
Having said that, with respect to our Orthodox tradition, I believe it is important for us to understand what tradition IS, and what tradition is not. For “Not everything received from the past is of equal value,” writes Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of blessed memory. “Many traditions which the past has handed down,” he writes are, “human and accidental — pious opinion (or worse), but not a true part of the one Tradition, the fundamental Christian message.”
And the one fundamental Christian message Met. Kallistos speaks of IS, in fact, the Gospel of Jesus Christ which was foretold by the prophets of old and announced by the Apostles of our faith. The Apostle Paul describes this process of tradition in his first letter to the Corinthians in near literal fashion: “For I handed on to you (or ‘I traditioned [παρέδωκα] to you’ as the Greek reads) as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.”
Tradition, therefore, is not simply an act of remaining loyal to our past inasmuch as it is about making known the TRUTH which was handed to us FROM the past. St Cyprian of Carthage says that, “tradition without truth is but the antiquity of error.” If we become too attached to the past for the sake of the past, it leaves room to ignore, dismiss, or even interpret the Gospel outside of the guidelines given to us by the Apostles of our holy tradition.
And here’s where we can return to Peter & Paul as an example. As mentioned earlier, both are foremost among the Apostles for passing down — or traditioning — the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But there were moments early on when they believed understood the mission of the coming Messiah but were actually dead wrong. After Peter confesses Christ as Messiah in today’s Gospel, Jesus tells him that it is necessary for the Messiah to go to Jerusalem, to suffer, to die and to be raised again. Peter has no idea what this means because his own tradition has told him that the Messiah will be a conquering king. How then could He go on to die? Naturally, Peter interjects saying, “‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’” And for this error he is rebuked in no subtle terms: “Get behind me Satan!” Jesus says. “You are a hinderance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but on the side of men!” So in a matter 3 verses, the one whom Christ heralds as the foundation and rock of the Church, is also the one who is called “Satan” only moments later. And this is because Peter is operating in the framework of the only tradition he knows, which — as Christ reveals — is not a correct tradition.
The same here is true of the Apostle Paul. Paul, then known as Saul, grew up knowing the Jewish scriptures backwards and forwards. He studied the sacred Law of Judaism under the most respected rabbis and joined the rank of the Pharisees becoming one of the most learned Jewish authorities in all of Israel. And, yet, this knowledge of the Jewish faith passed down through his tradition did not lead him to recognize Jesus as Messiah. It lead him, rather, to kill for the sake of it. And as we should all know by now, if your religion is asking you to harm or kill another human being because it disagrees your interpretation of it, you really need to rethink what it is you believe, And so, neither Peter nor Paul would come to be the messengers of Christ's Gospel that we celebrate today, until one specific moment.
Neither would truly come to know who the Messiah was until each had their own encounter with the crucified and RISEN Christ! Which is what each of us is gathered here to do today. This same Christ — the Crucified and Risen one — who is present with us today, revealed himself to the disciples in the sharing of a meal, as spoken of in resurrectional account of Luke 24. Through an act of breaking bread Christ was suddenly made known to them and in this moment they came to recognize the Lord as He is — as the one foretold in Old Testament Scriptures. Not a conquering king as Peter and Paul once imagined, but as one who suffers on behalf of humankind for the sake of their restoration.
It is in these two ways — the opening of the Scriptures and the breaking of the bread — that the Apostles Paul & Peter came to their first understanding of the Christian faith. And for us today, this is the tradition we’ve been entrusted with and it is this tradition that allows us to proclaim Christ as Savior, who restores us from our fallen state. The Gospel has been read and we are about to encounter Christ in the breaking of the bread. May each of us hold true to this tradition passed down to us, and may we never waiver from the of this saving Gospel of Jesus Christ.