Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Saint Peter’s denial of Jesus (about which we read today in our Office Gospel) is a remarkable event in the life of the church. Certainly it’s a remarkable event in the life of Saint Peter—it’s a defining event, a hinge-point in his life. It’s the one thing he thought he would never do, of which he thought he was never capable; the embarrassingly shameful personal failure he imagined himself too successful or virtuous or loyal or loving or good to ever stumble into. But here he is, stumbling into it...and he has no idea what he’s doing until he’s done it; he has no idea the sort of person he truly is until the cold light of morning and a rooster's indifferent cry reveals it to him. He is what he was sure he could never be, what, perhaps, he was most afraid of being: the sort of person who would betray a friend, who would betray himself, who would deny the one person whom he knew for a fact was good, whom he suspected was the Good incarnate…and not even know he was doing it. Peter is much like us in this regard, I think—blind to ourselves, blind to the patterns of sin and death at work in our own lives that lead us to deny the good and never know what we were doing until something, a ray of dawn-light, a ray of grace or revelation, shows us to ourselves.

Of course, the denial is not the end of Peter’s story. John tells us that Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him, as if to make up for the three denials—but the point of the story isn’t that Jesus is giving Peter a way to prove himself or work his way back into Jesus’ good graces, but that Jesus is giving Peter a new understanding of himself...and it takes Peter being offered this new understanding three times before he gets it, before he actually receives it. And the understanding that Peter is being offered is: that he’s forgiven; that he’s beloved; that his shames and his denials and his sins, whatever they were, are not the end of his story; that there is One who knows his story, who tells his story beautifully and gracefully and lovingly, and that One is Jesus Christ. In Jesus, Peter will discover himself anew as the sort of person capable of following in Jesus’ footsteps, of helping to lead a movement of love that would transform the world, of giving his life for that love, the transforming power of which he knew personally and deeply. In this, Peter is also much like us: blind to ourselves and to the wondrous things of which we might be capable until God reveals us to ourselves as forgiven and beloved.

All of that makes this event of the denial remarkable in both Peter’s life and in the life of the church. But one of the most remarkable things about it is something we might easily overlook: the details of the story are all personal, including a little detail of Peter remembering Jesus’ words, an interiority we would not be able to glimpse unless it had been opened to us by the one whose interiority is revealed. Which is to say: we probably wouldn’t know this story if Peter himself hadn’t told it, hadn’t insisted on telling it. We wouldn’t know this story if Peter didn’t have a vision—an understanding—of the church as a community of vulnerability and of healing, of woundedness and remedy. I believe Peter himself told this story so that we could have a better understanding of God’s gracious mercy, of God’s gracious understanding of us as beloved. It’s a remarkable event in the life of the church because it crystallizes who we are as church: the sort of community in which such stories can not only be told, but received and gently held by the transformative power of love; the sort of community that is indeed a hospital for sinners, in which we and our stories are all being reformed and remade and retold by grace, changed even now by glory into glory.

Friend, how has Jesus changed your story? How might you, as part of the church, receive another’s story with gentleness and transformative love?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+