Where Does It All End?

A reader asked recently about our des­ti­na­tion. Obvi­ously it’s Rome, but ear­lier we empha­sized that get­ting to the des­ti­na­tion is not the prin­ci­pal goal of a pilgrimage—otherwise we, at least, could skip the 1000 mile slog on foot and take a plane instead. Yet with­out a des­ti­na­tion, a jour­ney has no pur­pose; it’s only a “meander.”

So then, a prac­ti­cal clar­i­fi­ca­tion first, and then a more spiritual-theological one.

Rome is indeed the final des­ti­na­tion on this jour­ney, but more specif­i­cally two loca­tions in Rome: the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul. For cen­turies now Peter has been the sym­bolic fig­ure of the Catholic church and Paul of the Lutheran (or more gen­er­ally Protes­tant) church. Vis­it­ing their bones seems like a fit­ting end to a pil­grim­age toward Catholic-Lutheran reconciliation.

The sym­bol­ism itself is worth reflect­ing on. How exactly have two long-competing churches estab­lished a claim one one apos­tle or another? On a super­fi­cial level, it’s clear enough. Peter is the one to whom Christ bestowed the “keys to the king­dom” and is the “rock” on whom Christ will build his church (Matthew 16:18–19); he’s also the first bishop of Rome and hence the first pope. Paul is the author of the New Tes­ta­ment epis­tles that focus most strongly on the doc­trine of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion (for exam­ple, Romans 3:28), the cen­tral doc­tri­nal pro­posal of Luther and the Reformation.

It has been con­ve­nient for each church to claim these respec­tive apos­tles. But it’s also mis­lead­ing, to say the least. Catholics cer­tainly rec­og­nize Paul’s let­ters as Scrip­ture equal to the rest, and Luther­ans cer­tainly rec­og­nize Peter as the chief of Jesus’ dis­ci­ples with a spe­cial role to play. The fact that we exhibit some kind of pref­er­ence betrays a polem­i­cal unwill­ing­ness to hear the whole coun­sel of God in the Scriptures.

But it’s also worth reflect­ing on the fact that Peter and Paul had a major clash over the proper rela­tion­ship between Jew­ish and Gen­tile believ­ers, and espe­cially the extent to which Jew­ish law was applic­a­ble to Gen­tile Chris­tians. And yet, for all this, they were both apos­tles of the same Christ, and both ulti­mately gave their lives as mar­tyrs in the same city of Rome.

There are many ways to inter­pret the Peter-Paul clash, but I’d like to sug­gest we reflect on this one: rather than say­ing out of hand that there was a win­ner and a loser, one right and one wrong, we should rec­og­nize that this clash was a mer­ci­ful gift of God’s. It forced out into the open some­thing that was latent and unex­am­ined. Through it greater clar­ity came to the church about what it was and what its gospel really meant.

Not all the impli­ca­tions of the min­istry, death, and res­ur­rec­tion of Christ are obvi­ous right from the start, and some take years—centuries—maybe even mil­len­nia to sort out. If one as close and as dear to Jesus as Peter him­self could make mis­takes along the way, then we should regard oth­ers (and oth­ers’ mis­takes) with mercy and our­selves with some humil­ity. And this cer­tainly applies to dif­fer­ences across con­fes­sional and denom­i­na­tional bound­aries as well.

And so that means the ecu­meni­cal move­ment itself is going to mean­der some­times, because the path for­ward is not always clear. We do know the goal, but we don’t know exactly how to get there. If you don’t know how to get where you’re going, mov­ing faster won’t actu­ally get you there sooner. So there’s a cer­tain good sense in pay­ing close atten­tion to the jour­ney while the goal remains out of sight.