He was a broken man. Was this what
all hope, all confidence came down to in the end? Where did faith finish and
falsehood begin? How could it have come to this? How does a man rebuild his
life when he is not who he thought he was?
He had always seen himself in the
front rank. He was the leader, perhaps not the cleverest but certainly the one
most willing to step out. He was the first to take action, the first to speak,
and the others, less sure of themselves, often waited for him to go first. He
had been the first to name Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, and
that had been the moment when Jesus had said, “upon this Rock I will build my
church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.” That must mean
something, surely? He had been one of the three on the mountain, and seen some
of the glory of Jesus. He had seen Moses and Elijah with his very own eyes!
Didn’t that make him special? He had gone into the room where the little girl
was raised from the dead, and he had stored in his heart three precious years
of teaching and learning, three precious years in the company of one whom he
thought he had come to love more than his own life (except that it seemed he
didn’t after all). And he was the only one of them all to have actually stepped
out of the boat and, for those unforgettable moments, actually walked on water!
Didn’t that make him special?
And now it had all fallen apart. On
that dreadful, dreadful night he had discovered the truth: he, Simon Peter, the
big guy, catcher of fish and fisher of men, right hand man to the Messiah (or
so he had secretly called himself) was nothing but a coward. He had been
willing to deny Jesus, and not even (as he had tried to convince himself) for
the sake of preserving his own skin, but simply to be spared a few jeering
remarks from strangers. Had he been fooling himself all the time that he loved
the Master?
He would never forget the terrible
time that followed, and hoped never to walk through such darkness again. That
Jesus had gone to His death knowing that Peter had let Him down hurt almost as
much as the loss of his Lord – or more , or less, or something else altogether
– in that measureless night there was no meaning in weighing out the components
of his grief. Still, it was another sword thrust into his pride to know that
even the women had been braver than he.
In the glory-light of the resurrection
it all looked different now, but did Jesus still want him? He had trembled at
the edges of things, borne up, as they all were, by the mighty tide of wonder,
but now, as he splashed ashore from the fishing boat, he saw himself as another
broken creature, caught inexorably in the net of God and waiting for its fate:
“Do you love me?”
“Do you love me?”
“Do you love me?”
He was pierced, he was broken, he was
shamed beyond all measure or understanding, but nothing mattered now except to
raise his shame-cast eyes and speak what he now saw was his deepest truth:
“Lord, you know all things, you know that I love you.” And that was truly
enough
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