When I was little, our neighbors had a big walnut tree in their back yard that hung over our fence. It was a beautiful tree, and gave nice shade in the summer; a welcome gift on a hot day in the heart of Sacramento. Yet beautiful as the shade was, in the fall, when the nuts fell, it was a mess, and a little dangerous. A walnut falling from 40 feet up smarts when it hits you, and the nuts were encased in a nasty, sticky black husk that stained your hands. I know, because it was my job to pick them up before the lawn mower turned them into ballistic missiles. An old Italian lady I knew said that her mother used to boil the walnut husks to make what she called “Signora Clairol”—rudimentary hair dye. Yet inside the gooey husk, inside the hard shell, is a perfectly formed, delicious walnut that looks like the lobes of your brain when you crack it just so.
Imagine for a moment, a piñata; a gaudy little crepe-paper decorated burro, or star, or even Sponge Bob Square Pants. Then give little kids a blindfold and a stick, and stand back. Pretty soon candy if flying all over the place. Or consider if you will the oyster; hard, sharp edged, worth your fingers to pry it open. Yet inside, the most delicate delicious soft sweet salty-tasting thing; and if you’re really lucky, inside there’s a grain of sand that has turned into a pearl….
Today we celebrate the feast of Saints Peter and Paul; Paul the walnut, Peter the piñata, each of them an oyster containing a pearl of great price.
Let’s start with Paul, the walnut. Paul was a doctor of the Jewish law, the hair-splitting Pharisee who participated in the persecution of the early Christians. The Acts of the Apostles tells us he witnessed, was an accomplice in the death of the Church’s first martyr, the deacon St. Stephen. This same persecutor was surrounded, enveloped in divine light on the road to Damascus, and the black tarry husk of his former life began to fall away. Eventually the word of Jesus cracked through the hard shell that encased his mind and heart, and he became the great teacher and preacher of the message to the Gentile world of his time; many call him the Church’s first theologian. He remained to the day of his martyrdom in Rome in the year 67 a hard nut; argumentative, crusty on the outside, even cantankerous sometimes; supremely confident in his calling, willing to take on and correct anyone—including the original apostles of Jesus—whom he thought had improperly understood the teaching, the meaning of the life and death of Jesus. Yet his heart was generous, and his love for his communities utterly sincere. Not the most loveable of men, perhaps, but the greatest of teachers.
On the other hand, Peter the apostle is perhaps the most loveable of all the saints. Peter, the burly man of action, the big fisherman; Peter who saw the reality before him and made great, clear professions of faith—“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”—is the same Peter who denied Jesus three times on the night before he died; the same Peter whom Jesus forgave at the lake shore after the resurrection, the same Peter to whom Jesus entrusted his flock: “feed my lambs, feed my sheep.” We love Peter because he is so much like us; so eager of heart, yet sometimes weak and unfaithful; deeply flawed, yet called by Jesus nonetheless, to profess the truth and to live the life of grace and to be a witness to the wonderful works of God. Peter was a piñata; broken, taped back together, broken again, yet still holding the treasure inside, the treasure of the knowledge and love of God in Christ.
We celebrate this feast because it reminds us that the surpassing power belongs to God, not to us. Neither Paul nor Peter was a perfect person. And neither are we perfect people. And neither do we need to be perfect people. Peter and Paul remind us that it is not the package that matters; it is what the package contains. They were, as we are, earthen vessels; fragile, imperfect, not particularly beautiful in themselves; earthen vessels, or oyster shells, that contain and carry God’s light and joy and hope and sweetness into our broken world. That’s the pearl of great price.
Thomas M. Lucas S.J.