When Simon proclaims his faith at Ceasarea Phillipi, Jesus responds with the famous pun on the Greek word for “rock”, petros.  In other words, the chief apostle has a new name, Peter, which could almost be translated as “Rocky”.  The Church is to flourish on the rock-like foundation of faith in Jesus as the Christ of God, the Anointed One, and the leader of the apostles gets a name to remind him of this.  Later on Saul of Tarsus is renamed Paul after his encounter with the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus, and will live with the same intense faith in the living and resurrected Jesus.  Both these apostles were founder members of the Church and were men of great courage and faith.  Both of them died martyrs deaths, being persecuted for trying to do good.  Both of them spread the Good News about the end of the fear of death and the closeness of God to humans that Jesus’ resurrection has brought about – Peter to the Jews in Jerusalem and then the people of Rome, and Paul to the Greek-speaking gentiles throughout the Roman Empire.

They did this in the face of terrible difficulties, but none of these stopped their work of setting up the Church.  And today we have the Community of the People of God still flourishing, despite all of the attacks against it – whether as an establishment, a community of love or, indeed, against individual Christians.

It has always been the case that the Church has to struggle against evil and so we should not be surprised that we are being attacked today.  The greed and secularism in the Western world with the decline of church attendance and the collapse of belief is a dire problem.  The bitterness and pain that many suffer through divorce and separation is a real wound for every one of us.  The child abuse scandals involving priests and religious strike at the whole foundation of trust on which the Church is based.  And still the Church is not overwhelmed.

No matter how tired and depressed we get from suffering the attacks on us as Church, we have Jesus’ promise that, “…the gates of the underworld can never hold out against it.”  Trust in Jesus as Saviour despite everything because he loves and cares for each one of us.  Evil has actually been defeated already by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.  The gates of the evil’s kingdom have already been broken.  What we are suffering are its death throes.  The example of Peter and Paul winning through in the face of their difficulties by trusting totally in the power and love of Jesus must surely give us courage to face down the assaults on our faith by seeing them as the last gasp of the empire of evil.