Today the Church celebrates Peter and Paul—two towering apostles—on the same day. One was impulsive, broken, restored; the other was brilliant, relentless, converted. One denied, the other persecuted. Both became martyrs. Both laid down their lives for love.
Two pillars of the Church.
But what if we imagined their mission not in the comforting glow of stained glass but in the harsh fluorescent lights of a place like Squid Games?
As for those who are not aware of Squid Games, a popular series on Netflix, it follows desperate individuals who enter a deadly competition of childhood games for a massive cash prize. Beneath the surface, it’s a dark critique of capitalism, survival, and human dignity. The players are forced to choose between betrayal and compassion in a system rigged for blood.
At first glance, it seems outrageous. How could the violent world of Netflix’s Squid Game—a dystopian death-match fuelled by debt, greed, and manipulation—have anything to do with the apostles of Christ? But that’s the point. It is precisely in places like this—places of despair, abandonment, and inhumanity—that the Gospel is most needed, and where Peter and Paul, in their day, dared to go.
Like Squid Game’s Gi-hun, Peter knew failure intimately. He denied the One he loved, crumbled under fear, and wept bitterly. But Jesus met him not with condemnation, but with a burning question: “Do you love me?” The resurrected Christ didn’t discard Peter’s weakness; He transformed it into a mission. Feed my sheep. Suffer for them. Die for them.
Paul, the zealous persecutor turned “fool for Christ,” saw through the games of status and religion. In the arenas of empire, where power played like a game of thrones, Paul preached a crucified Messiah—a message as absurd then as it is now. He proclaimed a Gospel where the last are first, the weak are strong, and love always wins… even when it looks like loss.
Now imagine them—Peter and Paul—walking into the Squid Games.
Not to win.
But to lose… intentionally.
To offer themselves in the place of the trembling and exploited. To tie a jacket of dignity around a humiliated player. To share their last marble, not with calculation but compassion. To shatter the system not with violence, but with witness.
Spreading the Gospel, the good news of the Kingdom of God is not a spectator sport. It is not spiritual entertainment. It is the costly descent into the arena of suffering. It is Christ crucified in the alleyways of our broken economies, in refugee camps, in corporate boardrooms where human dignity is weighed in currency.
Peter and Paul knew this.
They were not the Church triumphant. They were the Church bleeding. One crucified upside down. The other beheaded on a Roman road. Fools by the world’s standards. Heroes of a kingdom that is not built on winners, but on love.
Squid Game isn’t just a critique of capitalism. It’s a parable—a grotesque mirror—showing how we devalue each other when we believe survival matters more than solidarity. But Peter and Paul give us a different story: not survival, but surrender; not dominance, but self-gift.
In the third season of Squid Game, Gi-hun makes the ultimate sacrifice—not for money, not for redemption, but for the life of a child caught in a cruel system not of her making. In a world that sees people as disposable, he offers himself so that a baby might live and be free. It’s not strategy. It’s not survival. It’s love—costly, foolish, Christlike love. Gi-hun does things all throughout that doesn't make sense to the world. But that's what matters, taking the narrow path for a transformation to happen.
That is the Church’s wager too.
Peter and Paul staked their lives on the hope that love would win, even when it looked foolish. In a world of squid games, may we do the same.
In a world where life is often a game of survival, what would it look like for you to lose for someone else’s sake?
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