Today, as we celebrate the feast of the holy chief apostles Peter and Paul, we recall the many ways in which their respective ministries, and their holy writings, have laid the foundation of the holy Church. In the third chapter of his second catholic epistle, the holy apostle Peter writes concerning his fellow chief apostle: “In [the epistles of my dear brother Paul] there are some things hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” The Christian faith rests on the foundation of the apostolic teaching taken as a whole and interpreted in the Church by the successors to the apostles, the holy episcopate.
All of us are called to study the scriptures—a time-tested rule of the holy fathers suggests two chapters of the Apostle (Epistles) and one chapter of the Gospel daily—but we do so, not to arrive at novel interpretations, but so that we can constantly be renewed in our Christian struggle by our encounter with the living word of God. As the prophet Jeremiah says, the mercies of the Lord “never come to an end; they are new every morning.” The apostolic teaching is an unshaken foundation, but we must make it real in each of our lives; daily reading of the scripture, including the writings of the holy chief apostles Peter and Paul, serves to refresh us in our efforts to live out the Orthodox Christian faith. God is unchanging, the same yesterday, today, and forever, and though heaven and earth pass away, his word will not pass away. But we change, and so we need to hear the Gospel again and again. Even if we know the words of the scriptures by heart, says St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, still we should read them daily.