I do not point a finger at any one but myself here. I love to be in Rome and drink its glories and significance at all levels in. But there is always something particular that I love to do, and that is to retrace at least a few of the steps that I know they took of St Peter and St Paul. We know that the Apostles’ remains lie at the two great Basilicas that bear their names. But where did they go before; where had they been; and what was the path that took them to that moment of ultimate closeness to the Lord on His Cross, when they must have realised the meaning of the prayer from the night before He died, that St John preserved for his gospel: “Father, may they all be one, just as you and I, Father, are one. The glory You have given me, I have given to them. May they be with me where I am, to see my glory. Sanctify them in the truth”?
The glory of Christ is, of course, the revelation of what God truly looks like in the world: the Son of Man on His Cross. And if the Church looks like anything else, it does not display His glory. In the aftermath of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the Lord’s constant refrain was to show the astonished disciples that the whole weight and course of the Scriptures came down to the Cross – that the Lord must suffer, or else it is not true, not holy, not glory.
So I love to go to the Church of San Paolo alla Regola, “St Paul’s on the Strand”, a little church near the Ponte Sisto over the Tiber. It is a Baroque church now, but a great room to its south stands over the site of the house where St Paul stayed for two years under house arrest, awaiting his appeal to Caesar as a Roman citizen to be heard. Here he taught and wrote. Here he received the Christians of Rome. Here he handed on what he had received on the Road to Damascus, the ever present vision of the Risen Christ making Himself known in the taking and breaking of the Bread and the Cup. Here he contemplated the outcome of his impending trial, and the risk that the missionary journeys were almost at an end, when the condemnation in Palestine might at last be confirmed. Here was where he wrote from his heart about death and resurrection, putting on Christ, reaching the full stature of humanity, of Christ who died and rose again now filling the universe, of Christ the life within us now. Here is where he felt his own sufferings and his growing intimacy with Christ: “no longer I that live, but Christ who lives within me”. (Galatians 2.20) Here he approached his own death and the coming resurrection, as he had told the Roman Church all along: “It may be sown a physical body, but it will be raised a spiritual body.” (I Corinthians 15.44) And as he also told the Corinthians: “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump, the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible and we shall be changed.” (I Corinthians 15.52) Yes, here is St Paul’s own Garden of Gethsemane. Here is a place of profoundest prayer with the Lord, Who asked the Father to glorify Him in the only true and holy way.
Sometimes, on the slopes of the Aventine, I like to go and visit the serene, small church of St Prisca, on the very site of the house she shared with her husband Aquila, mentioned in today’s epistle (I Corinthians 16.13-24). Paul visited them, and taught and inspired their home, along with the little group of disciples that they cautiously brought together. Here too he will have celebrated and revealed the mystery of the Eucharist of the Risen Lord through the prism of the night before He died, when He prayed that the humanity would see God’ glory, truth and holiness nowhere other than on the Cross.
Sometimes I like to go to the Abbey of Tre Fontane outside the city, where, amid the pines that still grow there, the Apostle was beheaded. Three springs of water still flow where his head rolled down to where the local Christians, doubtless including Prisca and Aquila, retrieved his remains to inter them as nobly as they could beside the Via Appia down by the Tiber, where they lie to this day.
On other visits, I like to go to the beautiful little city of Tivoli in the hills above Rome to find the ancient Church of San Pietro off the beaten track. It is believed to be on the site of another Roman family’s house, where St Peter was first sheltered before they could risk taking him down to the city. A number of other little towns and villages in the hills also have a Church of St Peter, rarely the cathedral or the most impressive, probably on the site of a house of secret local Christians, who took turns at hiding Peter for no more than a few days, and who never lost the memory of giving a safe haven to the Rock on which the Church was built by Christ.
I also like to go to the Catacomb of Priscilla on the via Salaria, at the site of another Roman family house where for centuries the famous Chair of St Peter was preserved – the seat he first sat on when he came down onto the plain and toward the city, where the Christians of Rome itself first met him, where they heard at first hand his living memory of Jesus, and received from the one who had denied Him and yet loved Him the food of which the first disciples had said, “Lord give us this bread always” (John 6.34), and which the Lord had called the “daily bread”, the bread of eternal existence.
Another time, I will go up behind the Victor Emmanuel Monument, to the all but hidden church of St Joseph. Its unadorned crypt is a second Church, of San Pietro in Carcere, St Peter in Prison. This is the Tullian Prison, the Mamertine Jail, of ancient Rome. Still further below is the pit in which high profile prisons were held with no chance of escape. Here is the single cell where it is long believed St Peter was kept in chains ahead of his execution across on the other side of the city and the river on the upward slope of the Vatican Hill, close to where his remains keep the Pope as bishop of Rome - and Peter’s successor - never to go too far away.
In the Gospel today (Matthew 21.33-42), the Lord speaks of a master who planted a vineyard that was overrun by the tenants to whom it had been entrusted. They stole all the good that came from it and wasted its fruit on themselves, leaving the master’s winepress unused, fruitless. The master sent his son, and, as the Lord said as He cried over Jerusalem facing its destruction in turn, they did not recognise the moment of God’s coming to them (Luke 19.44). The servants killed the son, and the master lost the descendant who would inherit, and take the labour of the vineyard to grow forward into the future. Except that now, at last, there was fruit that the tenants did not want. This fruit is not the wine of grapes, but the blood shed by the Son. The winepress’s moment has come. It pours out incessantly the new wine of the Kingdom: “This is my Blood shed for you, the Blood of the new covenant, for the forgiveness of sins.” Thus it is that at each celebration of the eucharist, we see not only the presence of the Lord in His Body and His Blood, but also the sacrifice that brings peace to the world and reconciliation of humanity to its Father and Lord. This is what is made known to us in the breaking of bread – that God in human form looks like a man on a cross, and the path to Him is always the way of the Cross, or it is no path to glory, no reliable journey to the truth, no approach that will ever lead to holiness. Thus it is “this we do”, like Paul and Peter before us, “in memory of Him until He comes”.
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