Thus did the will of God triumph over the will and power of King Herod, and Peter’s life was saved.  But saved for what?  For 20 years of strenuous and dangerous missionary and pastoral work, which reached its culmination in the first persecution of the Church by the Emperor Nero.  You know the legend, how St Peter had escaped from the city of Rome and again was on his way to safety.  He met Our Lord on the road.  “Quo vardis, Domine?” he asked – “Where are you going?”  And the Lord answered, “I am going to Rome, to be crucified a second time”.  And Peter knew then that the time of his martyrdom had come, and the saying of his Risen Master by the Lake of Galilee, all those years before, was now about to be fulfilled, ”…when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go” (NRSV, John 21:18).  So St Peter was crucified, traditionally on the same day that his fellow Apostle St Paul was beheaded.