Saint Peter

The first fire burned in the courtyard of the high priest’s house, on a bitterly cold night at Passover. He stood there, warming his calloused hands over the glowing coals, and three times swore up and down that he had never known a man called Jesus.

The second fire burned on the shore of the Lake of Tiberias, early one misty morning. This time the very One he had denied sat there, grilling fish for him with his own hands, and asked him whether he loved him.

Between those two fires lies a whole lifetime: tears, betrayal, and a love that never gave up even when it was denied. Anyone who wants to understand why a man who fell so badly was given the keys of the Kingdom has to walk that same rough road with him; there is no shortcut.

He had a home and a wife: the Gospel tells of Jesus stopping in to heal his mother-in-law of a high fever right in his own house in Capernaum. Archaeologists later uncovered an ancient house right next to the town’s synagogue, venerated by generations of early Christians as Peter’s own house. Very early on they scratched prayers all over its walls, a sign that the place was treated as holy almost within living memory of him. His wife’s name, his age when he began to follow the Lord — the Gospel records none of these details.

The one who first brought him to Jesus was his younger brother Andrew. At their very first meeting, Jesus looked straight at him and gave him an entirely different name: Kepha — Aramaic for Rock, which Greek speakers later rendered as Peter. A fisherman whose hands still smelled of nets and fish was suddenly called by the name of a solid foundation, though he could not yet imagine what lay ahead, nor understand why he had been chosen.

At Caesarea Philippi, when Jesus asked his disciples who people said he was, Peter blurted out before all the others:

“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus called him blessed, named him Rock, the foundation on which he would build his Church — and promised to give him the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, with the power to bind and to loose.

But right after those beautiful words, when the Master began to speak of having to suffer and die in Jerusalem, Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” Jesus turned and said sharply, sparing him nothing:

“Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me, for you are thinking not as God thinks, but as human beings do.”

Within a few short minutes, he was praised as the foundation rock and then called Satan to his face. Faith does not ripen in a single flash of insight. It has to be worked over again and again, sometimes by praise, sometimes by a blow to one’s pride.

He declared before all his companions that even if everyone else ran away and abandoned the Master, he alone would follow him to prison and to death. Jesus only looked at him with sad eyes:

“Truly I tell you, this very night, before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times.”

That night, when soldiers burst into the Garden of Olives to arrest the Master, Peter rashly drew his sword and cut off the ear of one of the high priest’s servants. Jesus made him put the sword back in its sheath at once, allowing no violence of any kind.

He trailed behind the crowd leading his Master away, keeping just enough distance not to be recognized, then slipped in to warm himself by the fire in the high priest’s courtyard with the servants. A servant girl stared at him in the flickering firelight: “This man was with Jesus too.” He denied it flatly: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A little later someone else pointed at him, certain. Then a third, hearing his unmistakable Galilean accent, insisted he was surely one of them. All three times he swore an oath and denied it, each time more fiercely.

Just as the rooster crowed the second time, the Lord, who was being led across that same courtyard, turned and looked straight at Peter. Only Saint Luke records this detail, and it leaves the reader very still.

Then there was another morning, on the shore of the Lake of Tiberias, after a night of casting nets and catching nothing, just like the night long ago when he first met the Master. A stranger standing on the shore called out to ask whether they had caught anything, then told them to cast the net on the right side of the boat. The net came up so heavy, so full of fish, that they could not haul it out of the water. John was the first to recognize him and cried out:

“It is the Lord!”

Peter did not wait for the boat to reach land; he leapt straight into the water and swam for the shore, leaving the others to struggle with the heavy net.

On the shore a charcoal fire was already burning, fish grilling on it with a wonderful smell, and bread laid out. After that warm breakfast, Jesus turned to him and asked, without beating around the bush:

“Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?”

The shepherd chosen to tend the whole flock was not someone who had never fallen. He was someone who had fallen very hard, had wept a great deal, and had been forgiven completely, and so he could understand and have compassion on the other sheep who would one day stumble just as he had.

He healed a man lame from birth right at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, was arrested and threatened in every way, yet answered bluntly before a whole council of religious authorities:

“We must obey God rather than human beings.”

He went on traveling everywhere — Samaria, Lydda, Joppa — healing, comforting, building up small communities just taking their first steps.

A great turning point came when he was invited into the very home of a Roman officer named Cornelius, a Gentile who was uncircumcised and did not keep the Law of Moses. Under the strict Jewish custom of the time, a devout Jew was not supposed to set foot in a Gentile’s house, for fear of becoming unclean. But Peter, after a vision that made him rethink everything he had believed to be right, went in. And when he saw the Holy Spirit pour down on the very people listening intently to him, he baptized them on the spot, without waiting for any other formality. From that moment, the door of the Gospel was opened even to those not born of Jewish blood. The decision caused fierce controversy in the community, and he afterwards had to explain it in every detail.

At the Council of Jerusalem around the year 49, he defended the view that salvation comes from free grace, not from keeping the whole of the old Jewish law. And yet Paul himself, in his letter to the Galatians, frankly tells how he once had to oppose Peter publicly in Antioch, because Peter had hesitated and withdrawn from eating with the Gentile believers, simply for fear of displeasing some conservative Jews newly arrived from Jerusalem. The Church does not hide that even its own leader sometimes wavered and was inconsistent.