Why do they act so differently?

Were you and I to fly Rome, I would gladly take you to one of the three museums situated on Capitoline Hill, the center and summit of the ancient Roman Forum. Within the museum, we would find a bronze statue of two infants sucking at the breast of a she wolf, the two infants representing Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of the city. For first-century Romans – the century in which Peter and Paul lived – Romulus and Remus were believed to be the children of Mars, the god of war, and Rhea Silvia, a local woman of royal birth. Thus, the ancient Romans claimed a divine origin – from a god and a virgin. And thus, as Rome became an expanding imperial power in the ancient world, the Romans claimed a divine mission to bring their way of life to other nations, a mission supported, nonetheless, by superior and deadly military force.

If one looks carefully at the mythic story of this world empire, a dark side begins to appear rather quickly. Mars, for instance, raped Rhea Silvia. Her twin infants were left to die along the banks of the Tiber, exposed to the elements. Suckled by a wolf, they lived and, once grown into young manhood, followed their father’s lead by raping women for their pleasure. When the king of the Sabines, whose daughters the twins had kidnapped and abused, sought them out, they quickly killed him. And, then, as they began to plan a new city, the two brothers fell into a fierce argument over where it would be founded. Angry words ensued, then blows, and then death as Romulus, in a fit of rage, killed his brother. Thus, the “greatest” empire of the ancient world was born from the god of war, of war, its founding story marked by rape, infanticide, more rape, murder, rage, and fratricide. Perhaps, then, it’s not difficult to imagine how easy it was for such a truly violent culture to adopt crucifixion as its preferred method of silencing those who offered another vision, another vision, of life on this earth.

It was into this culture, whose “normalcy” was aggressive domination and legalized violence, that Peter and Paul were born: Peter, a poor, rural, and illiterate fisherman, and Paul, an urban, educated expert in the Scriptures; Peter who denied Jesus and Paul who persecuted his followers – an unlikely pair, if ever there was one, who suffered martyrdom in Rome: Peter crucified and Paul beheaded, says ancient tradition. One wonders, then, why an imperial power, suffused with overwhelming economic, military, and political force, would spend even three seconds looking at, much less executing, a harmless fisherman and a Bible teacher who counted for little if anything in a world where well-connected and wealthy Romans, where the emperor and his army, called virtually all the shots.

That is, unless Peter and Paul and their companions posed some recognizable threat to what most people considered a “normal” way of living in the world. That is, unless Peter and Paul offered a real, a tangible way of living together so different than the larger culture. That is, unless their experience of and commitment to Jesus was already shaping the attitudes and behaviors of their friends and relatives, their life together becoming noticeable because they treated each other so differently than what was expected in the larger culture where women were viewed as property, infants and children as expendable burdens, poverty as the norm, violence against persons and nations as wholly acceptable, controlling economic resources for the few as legitimate, and demanding absolute allegiance to an emperor whose divine mission was to maintain domination and violence as a way of life.

In that cultural context – which, if truth be told, bears some resemblance to our own – would not the words we heard in today’s first reading indicate a different way of experiencing the divine and thus living with each other?

“Thus says the LORD God, I will feed the hungry with rich food, I will seek the lost, I will bring back the strayed, I will bind up the injured, I will strengthen the weak, I will feed [the people] with justice” (Ezek. 34: 14, 16).

In a culture marked by aggressive domination and legalized violence, would not these words, fully embodied in the life of Jesus – and enlivening the imaginations of his followers, Peter and Paul among them – would not these words about feeding, seeking the lost, healing, strengthening, and pursuing justice sound incredibly odd, out of step, if not threatening? To a people steeped in domination and violence, would not such words indicate an odd if not perhaps annoying alternative to or a down-right critique of “the way things are” in the world, what everyone has been raised to think is “normal”? And if such words actually seeped into the imaginations and then into the behaviors of those who longed for them, accepted them, and tried to live them, wouldn’t someone, at last, take notice and ask: Why do they act so differently than what is expected of them?

I mean, is it any wonder that our patron, St. Paul, begins his every letter with these words, “grace and peace to you,” not “harshness and violence be yours,” but “grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”? Would not living a life marked by grace and peace rather than domination and violence actually become noticeable in a culture where the latter was considered “normal” behavior?

Dear brothers and sisters, you may think I am pointing to the first century, to the Christian “twins” – Peter and Paul – but I am not. I am asking us to consider the ways in which we are exposed to and may expose others to aggressive domination (“I always need to win”) and acceptable levels of violence (“I’ll get you in court or in the takeover or with the cold shoulder”).

I am asking us to consider the ways in which we are culturally formed, from the moment of birth, to accept winning at any cost and legal as well as illegal violence as a “normal” way of relating to other humans and other-than-human creatures.
I am asking us to consider the ways in which we may unthinkingly expose ourselves and our children, our children, to words and images of violence and domination, and then rationalize such exposure with the notion that it’s “simply entertainment” or that we are somehow strengthening ourselves and preparing them for a “tough” world in which only the “competitive-who- must-crush-the-other” survive, a world – nonetheless – which simply mimics the normalcy of an ancient, unjust, and violent civilization.

And so I wonder, and I ask you to wonder with me, about the tension, the real tension, between a life marked by an often rationalized need to dominate and defeat and a life marked by “grace and peace.” We cannot fully escape the former. And yet we can, we can live into the latter as grace and peace grow within us, our children, and our many other relationships. Is that something we want: to live lives marked by grace and peace, a living which will inevitably make us look different if not distinctive in a culture which has little time to nourish such virtues?

We will soon gather at this table, this altar, in order to receive the Body and Blood of the One who gives himself to us as our grace and peace, the One who calls us to feed the hungry with rich food, seek the lost, bind up the injured, strengthen the weak, and pursue God’s holy justice in a world marked by too little of it.

Holy Peter, Holy Paul, we your descendants in this Emerald City call on you:
Give us your strength, bless us with your conviction, and inspire us with your love for the Lord Jesus that our eating and drinking this day may not, may not be in vain.

Back to Sermons