Our patron St Peter
A sermon for St Petertide from Mth Cara Greenham Hancock
Of all of the disciples whose lives with Jesus are recounted for us in the New Testament, it seems undeniable that it is our Patron, Saint Peter, who has the most richly varied scope of experiences in his adventure of following the Lord. We have a rich abundance of stories upon which we could meditate today – a blessing in which to rejoice. So I pray that you will forgive me if I greedily snatch at different scenes from the accounts we have through the scriptures sketching out who Peter is.
Peter’s response to Jesus, from the moment of first meeting, is passionate and impulsive: consuming his whole being. At the time of that first encounter, Peter, fishing with his brother Andrew, is seen by a man as yet unknown to him, walking past along the shore of the Lake, who calls out to him “follow me” – and just like that, Peter goes. Utterly simple, utterly whole-hearted, utterly brave and faithful.
That same immediacy of response – what can look like an impulsiveness unmediated by reflection – manifests at other times in ways which are less immediately admirable. Peter’s story is always haunted by the frailty he displays on the night of Jesus’s arrest, when three times he denies belonging to the disciples of Jesus, repeating – in what must have been the sheer, mind-numbing impulse of fear and shock – “I do not know the man.” It is a heart-wrenching moment when the cock crows and Peter, that passionate, devoted lover of the Lord – who had sworn black and blue at the dinner table that very evening that he would never betray his beloved Jesus – realises what he has done. “He went out,” reads the gospel, “and wept bitterly.” On Friday night, as part of our patronal music festival, we gathered in the church hall to hear a performance of the Lagrime di San Pietro. These are twenty madrigals, sung poems written in the sixteenth century, imagining the spiritual and emotional torment of Peter as Jesus turns to look at him, and he realises that he has wounded the one he loves so dearly; when he discovers his own weakness and capacity for cowardice. It was an hour of beautiful singing, but an almost unbearable text to be relentlessly confronted with.
Because the story of St Peter, the prince of the apostles, cannot be viewed primarily through the lens of this one moment of failure. This dark thread is used by Jesus to open a space for even greater love, greater grace, to abound not just in the life of Peter himself, and his own relationship with Jesus, but in the life of the Church. After the Resurrection, once again on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, there is the luminous scene when Peter is restored from his disgrace, by three times being asked by Jesus “Do you love me?”, and answering: “Yes Lord, you know that I love you”. It is in this context of renewal, reunion, reconciliation, that Peter receives his commission: Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Deal gently and lovingly with the church which is put into your care, Jesus tells Peter, because you know the transformative power of being treated with mercy and kindness. This, surely, is the formation of Peter’s pastoral character which we hear in his letters – as we heard in our epistle this morning – when Peter describes Jesus thus: “When he suffered, he did not threaten, but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, having died to sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.”
The encounter that Peter has with the love of Jesus is so evidently manifest in how he writes, how he thinks, how he understands the nature of God, and therefore, in how he leads the Church.
In a way, Peter is like every saint, in that he discovers who he is in the light of the boundless and searching love which Jesus shows him. He discovers his weakness, yes, but this is a way towards discovering the trustworthiness and faithfulness of Jesus. His painful self-discovery is a step on the path deeper into the heart of God, not a distance between them, or a test he can fail. Perhaps the best image to illustrate this is that of yet another story in Peter’s life, when he sees Jesus walking on the water, and asks Jesus to command him to also perform this miracle. Jesus calls him, and Peter steps out onto the surface of the lake. As he does so, his faith falters, he starts to sink – but he knows to look towards Jesus, and it is Jesus who reaches out to him and pulls him up, leading Peter to declare, in that exuberant faith, “You are the Son of God.” To know his own weakness, even his doubts, leads Peter to hold tighter to the love and power of the Lord – what better lesson in holiness can there be?
In the passage of the Gospel which we did actually hear today, rather than the ones I’ve been greedily collecting from everywhere else, Jesus and Peter each name the other. Peter, in response to Jesus’ enquiry about what his identity is believed to be, gives the confession of faith that he is indeed the Christ: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” In reply, Jesus, too, names his friend – no longer calling him Simon, but Peter – the rock on which the church will be built.
Peter discovers who he is by discovering who Jesus is, and by standing in the gaze of the one who loves him. This discovery is what sets him free to become the rock of the church, to become the under-shepherd who will feed and tend the flock of God. One need only read the Acts of the Apostles to start to see how this manifested, how fully Peter lived out the commission given to him! This is the saintly life: the encounter with the love of God which strikes the heart in such a way that it flows out into sincere and active love for all the people of God.
We are blessed, indeed, to be under the patronage of so holy a disciple as Peter. May he pray for us, that we, too, may be brought closer and closer to the Lord, and live lives of service and holiness. Amen.