April 10, 2009 - Good Friday
The Rt. Rev. Barry Beisner
I’m Peter. Saint Peter, these days.
There are lots of churches named after me. Lots and lots of churches: big and small, some quite beautiful and others…well-intended. There is a church in Jerusalem named St. Peter in Gallicantu. It is built at the place where it is actually supposed to have taken happened. Hard to say if that’s exactly right—the city’s changed so much. But it was never that big a city, really—certainly by your standards, so chances are it’s close. In any case, as is always the case, it isn’t whether or not some molecule of me might happen to be lying around that makes the place important; it is what happens in such places to the many people who come to hear the Story, to enter the Story—which, by the way, makes this church this day—where you have come to enter the Story--as important as any church on earth.
What most people find remarkable about that church in Jerusalem is the presence of three large icons, each one featuring me. You know how an icon is more than just a painting; it is a glimpse into a heavenly truth, a window into spiritual reality. It doesn’t merely show us something about the subject; it shows us something about ourselves, as we really are. As we are in relation to God.
These three icons certainly show what it was like for me.
The first one shows me denying Jesus. The story that gets told every time his Story gets told. My famous denial.
He knew me so well. Far better than I knew myself. He told me it would happen. And I could not believe that it was possible. How could it be? I loved him so much, I was so certain in my commitment, I really was ready to fight for him, to die for him—he only had to ask. But he didn’t ask. It wasn’t what he wanted from me, not in that way, not from that place of my ignorance. I thought I knew him, but I didn’t really. I had—and this is what drew me into his orbit in the first place--a powerful perception of an intensity of life and clarity of vision and purity of love in him. That was undeniably real. But it was so mixed up with all my own stuff--with the residue of old categories and expectations—yes, and even prejudice, and pride. Who was he? What did he want from me? I thought I knew. I really meant it when I said it didn’t matter what others said or did, that I would go to prison with him, I would die for him, that there was nothing he would ever have to face that I would not willingly face with him. I said I would never abandon him; he listened, then he told me that in fact, that was exactly what I was going to do before that very night was through. That was a splash of cold water. In the Garden, I drew the sword and struck with confidence—a blow for God! Down with his enemies! See how I am with you Jesus!--and he told me to put the sword away. When they took him, I didn’t run away, like the others. I followed from a distance. I didn’t let him out of sight. I didn’t want to fail him, I wanted to be there for him--but when the moment came, it was all so uncertain and murky. I really meant to take a stand, but the ground just went soft under my feet.
Then the questions came.
“Weren’t you one of them?” Them? My fellow disciples? The same ones who had all run away, who had abandoned not just him, but me? One of them? Not by my choice. Don’t mix me up with that crowd.
“Didn’t I see you…?” That one caught me by surprise—doing what? Saying what? Something he would disapprove of, like the sword? Something he did or said that I didn’t understand and so could never explain? Not to those people. Not then. All I could do was stammer. I made no sense. Then I lied. Then I swore. I wasn’t a coward—I was the one (the only one, remember?)—who was prepared to fight it out that night. It wasn’t the fear of a fight that got to me. What shook my confidence to the core was the easy way it all unfolded--something clearly so wrong just flowed along so easily. That life, that light, that love—we’d been living with him on the edges of the grasp of the Chief Priests and Herod and Pilate and all the rest for so long, and yet with Jesus we always felt that it would be OK, even if it came to a big showdown. I never guessed it would be anything like it turned out to be. In the dark. Defenseless. Alone. Very much not OK. And it was so easy, so astonishingly easy, just to turn away.
That’s what I did, of course. That’s what we did, you and I. Then he looked us in the eye. He knew us. And the cock crowed.
So then there’s the second icon. In it I am sitting alone, outside the city, in the mouth of a black, empty cave. Head hanging. Desolate. All my courage, all my desire for good, all my promises, all my sacrifices, all my strength, all my intelligence, all my love—and all the dreams that they were fused with—all for nothing. I had nothing. I was nothing. It was all stripped away, and my life was as empty as that cave. And yet—and this is the only real difference between me sitting there and Judas who at that moment had gone off to find a rope—in Jesus I really had encountered a life and light and love that were real, even if my apprehension of them was all messed up. Even if I was all messed up, those were real, he was real, and I still wanted that reality in my life. Sitting there, in the ashes of my messed up life, free of every possible sense of entitlement, I still wanted the most outrageous thing possible. I wanted to be forgiven.
The third icon is one you really need to remember, if you are going to make sense of the first two—or anything else, for that matter. It shows the moment when I saw him again later, on the beach in Galilee. I had hardly recognized him, at first. But he knew me. He knew my failures—my broken promises, my denial, all the wrong and stupid things I had said and done. He knew how close I had come to giving up completely. And he looked me in the eye once again and said, “Do you love me?” “You know me better than I know myself,” I said. He truly did. He didn’t have to ask. He knew I loved him, and how imperfect that love was, and how I needed his help to love better, and to live what that love was teaching me. But he wanted to hear me say it, wanted the same lips and tongue and voice that had said he was a God-damned worthless stranger to me, to say the healing truth: “Yes, Lord. You know everything. You know that I love you.” Then he said, “Feed my lambs.” Me. After all that. Like all that ever really mattered to him was that the life and the light and the love and the forgiveness that he brought into my life--in spite of me--get brought to everyone, everywhere in the world, in spite of what this world is, because of what this world is, in the heart of God.
I did what I could, after that, with God’s help. I wish I could say that I never again denied him, but I surely did. Never so completely. Never so publically. But there were plenty of moments when I didn’t let the life and the light and the love be known. There was always enough of Old Peter to get in the way. There were times when I didn’t forgive as I had been forgiven. Times when I gave place to anxiety. Times when I hardened my heart. I followed him all the rest of my days, and there were times when I stumbled and fell behind and even fell down. But my brothers and sisters were there to help me up again, and turn my gaze—that was something new. And I learned both never to try to live without his help, and never to despair of his mercy. Of course, everywhere the Story got told, the story of my failures got told along with it. That was never much fun for Old Peter. But it was only ever a part of the Story. A necessary part, but only a part. There are, after all, in that Jerusalem church, three icons. And, of course, they are not just about me.