LIVES OF THE SAINTS
You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.
Matthew 16:16
St. Peter
Chief of the Apostles
Simon Peter was a fisherman from Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee, working the nets with his brother Andrew, when Christ called the two of them to follow Him. He is the apostle the Gospels show us most fully, in his strength and in his weakness alike. He walked on the water and began to sink for doubting. He confessed, at Caesarea Philippi, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and Christ answered by giving him a new name, Peter, which means rock; the rock on which the Church is built, as the Fathers understood it, being the very confession Peter had just made. On the night of the arrest, that same Peter denied three times that he knew Him.
What the Church remembers is not the fall but the restoration. After the Resurrection, on the shore of Galilee, the risen Christ asked Peter three times whether he loved Him, once for each denial, and three times gave him back his charge: feed My sheep. For this the Church honors him as an apostle of repentance, a sign that failure need not be the end of the story for one who turns back.
After Pentecost he preached the first Christian sermon and led the young Church in Jerusalem, then carried the Gospel to Antioch and through Asia Minor before coming at last to Rome. Tradition holds that he was crucified there under Nero, and that he asked to be hung head downward, counting himself unworthy to die in the very posture of his Lord. Two of his letters are kept in the New Testament, and their voice is pastoral, shaped by all that he had suffered and been forgiven.
The Church commemorates Peter together with the Apostle Paul on June 29, the two chief apostles who came to Christ by such different roads, the fisherman and the persecutor, and gave their lives for Him in the same city. Their feast falls the day before our own, the Synaxis of the Twelve on June 30. In the icon Peter is shown holding a scroll, his hand raised in blessing. He is remembered as a man who loved Christ enough to weep bitterly when he failed Him, and to follow Him in the end all the way to a cross.
Feast Day of
St. Peter
June 29
Apolytikion of
St. Peter
Tone 4
First in prominence among the Apostles and teachers of the universe, intercede to the Master of all for peace in the world and for our souls great mercy.
Kontakion of
St. Peter
Tone 2