Good Friday: We Are Peter

Jesus isn’t the only main character in the Gospel of Matthew. The other one is us.

It’s so easy to write off the Bible, to write off the Gospels, and the whole Jesus thing, and there’s no shortage of mostly legitimate arguments for doing so — but don’t. Don’t. Nobody’s going to make you swallow it all — I sure don’t. But there’s so much there, and it’s all for all of us.

I received a profound rush of freedom in my late teens as I shook off the shackles of Christianity, but I’ve received a second, even more profound wave of liberty in the last several years when I discovered myself able to return to it, to explore it without bondage or baggage. I recognize and firmly believe it’s not available to everyone, but the path exists. The first part, the rejection and walking away, is necessary. You have to do that first. But If you go through it instead of just reacting to it, there’s another side you can get to.

Like anything else.

For Lent this year, I decided to reread the first gospel, the Book of Matthew. I’ve developed a special attachment to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and probably the second best Jesus movie of all time is The Gospel According to St. Matthew, so it seemed fitting.

As I got to the end of the story — an objectively powerful, epic, sweeping story — the part about the apostle Peter’s denial of Christ hit me in the face, like an actual blow. I’ve read the story hundreds of times in my life, but never did I connect with it, never did I feel so much like Peter, than I do at this moment.

When you’re a kid and they tell you this story, it’s simply a cautionary tale. Don’t be like Peter. Don’t ever pretend like you aren’t down with Jesus just to seem cool among your sinner friends. In fact, that’s usually the message even when you’re an adult.

This misses the whole point: we’re all Peter. Especially when we don’t want to be. Especially when we don’t believe we could ever stoop to Peter’s level. Peter didn’t want to be. Peter didn’t believe he’d ever stoop to that level.

When you read the Book of Matthew — when you just read it like a story — it’s quite obvious that the only other main character besides Jesus is Peter. We know all the names of all the disciples, but our author almost never associates specific words or actions to any of them by name. It’s always “the disciples said” this or “the disciples went over there” or (quite often) “the disciples were confused as all hell”.

Except for Peter. There can be (and are) many arguments and interpretations regarding the fact that Peter specifically gets singled out, but from a storytelling perspective, it’s obvious that somebody had to. We need a stand-in for ourselves. We can’t relate to Jesus. He’s Jesus, man, the Son of God. We aren’t him.

We’re Peter. Peter is us.

That’s not to say there isn’t a tremendous amount of pathos in Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus. We are given a palpable sense of what he’s feeling and going through, even if we aren’t meant to put ourselves in his shoes the way we might a typical protagonist. In fact, perhaps the most compelling thing to me about this Gospel is the complex, nuanced, dare I say human portrayal of the Messiah. He’s mercurial. Moody. Sometimes (forgive me, but) he’s a little contradictory. He gets mad — at one point he even yells a curse at a tree for not having a snack ready for him — and gets frustrated a lot.

Hilariously — seriously, it’s often quite funny — the people he gets most frustrated with are his own disciples. Over and over again. They’re a little bumbling in Matthew. They rarely make the right decisions, they don’t have any faith, and they never see to have the faintest idea of what Jesus is talking about.

When our stand-in, Peter, gets called out by name, it’s usually because he did or said something stupid. In his best moments, he shows flashes of brilliance and promise, before immediately screwing it all up.

I mean.

One of those moments is when the disciples are chillin’ out on a boat at night on the big lake a long way from shore. Apparently they’d been ready to call it a day, but Jesus, the savior they’d all thrown away their lives to follow, wasn’t ready yet, so they took off without him. Doesn’t seem like a cool move to me, but it was no sweat off Jesus’ back. When he was done with whatever he was doing, he simply strolled across the water to the boat.

The disciples see him coming and freak out, all except Peter. He wants to try this. “Come on in,” says Jesus. “Do it.”

So he does it, for like five seconds. He shows this tremendous faith and is rewarded by standing on the water. Then, like a Loony Tunes character who runs straight out off of a cliff and only begins to fall after looking down, he remembers the wind and the waves and sinks.

So close.

A little later, he’s the only one out of all of them able to call Jesus out for the Messiah that he really is, suggesting he knows what’s up and where all this is going. A couple minutes after that, he demonstrates that he doesn’t get any of it at all, asking why they can’t just skip the whole crucifixion thing.

His scene-stealing moment comes last. Jesus is in a gloomy mood at the Last Supper, and he’s telling all of them about how they’re all about to deny that they even knew him. “No way, man,” Peter says. “I’ll never do that. Not me. I’m solid.”

“You’ll not only do it, you’ll do it three times before morning,” Jesus claps back.

Sure enough, a couple hours later, Jesus gets arrested. Peter — us — follows a safe distance behind, probably feeling pretty proud of himself and for demonstrating such courage and loyalty in refusing to flee outright. Until people start to recognize him. This changes things for Peter.

The mood isn’t friendly. One after another after another, there it is, he is emphatic that they got the wrong guy, that he’s got nothing to do with this blasphemous criminal. And then the rooster crows and he knows his own guilt. He knows his own failure.

He’d been there, doing the thing, right by Jesus’ side, for years. He’d done so at the expense of everything he had and had been doing before. As much as any of the bumbling disciples can be said to have been privy to divine truth, he could say so. He knew what was right, not just generally but even specifically. They’d talked through this exact scenario. He’d known what was right, vowed not to do what was wrong. But there he was. He’d done exactly that wrong thing.

He’d been disloyal to his friend and teacher, acting out of shame and fear, but as far as actual betrayals of Jesus go, this was a minor one. That’s why Jesus was talking about it in the first place . Even as he lamented his followers’ frailty, he also understood it, took it for granted. The reason this moment is devastating for Peter isn’t because he’s afraid of Jesus holding it against him. It’s devastating because he’s betrayed himself. He’s failed his own test of faith, a faith central to his life and identity. He’d failed to be the whole very thing he’d set out to be in the first place.

At the earliest and lightest sign of real difficulty, he’d folded. Now he would have to confront the fact that he wasn’t yet what he believed himself to be. He, main character among the disciples, was no more able to live up to his own spiritual development than we typically are.

I’ve struggled a great deal throughout this locked down Lenten period. I’ve also believed, on many occasions, that I’ve finally turned a corner, that I recognize my interconnectivity with so many others, so many loving souls, that I understand difficult truths about what is demanded from me in times such as this one. I’ve written these things down. I’ve felt triumphant and confident about them.

And then when I go on, when I then continue in deep struggle, continue again and again falling short of what I know to be true and right, then I am Peter. In the moment when it actually counts, the moment, when I then still get stuck in anxiety and depression and loathing of my fellow people, I am Peter. When I feel crushed under the burden of this moment in time, unequal to even basic responsibilities, never mind the exceptional things required now, I am Peter.

Peter goes on to be the leader of the church in Rome, and we know him now as the first pope. His story, like ours, doesn’t end with the failure, even if the failure happens at the absolute worst of moments.

It’s not a cautionary tale. It’s not a situation to be avoided through determination or, like, “better faith” or something. It’s an illustration of a spiritual place in which we all find ourselves sooner or later, not just the place where we fall short, but the place where we get slapped with the shock of humility upon discovering we’re weak in spite of ourselves, where we realize the work we’ve got to do.

And, as with Peter, I would argue that we can.