Hearing the call to be Jesus

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 21: 15-17), taken from the optional memorial of St Thomas Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford, in the diocese where your blogger lives, shows us the scene where Jesus gives to the head of the apostolic college what we would come to call the Petrine mission. Three times Jesus asks Peter if he loves Him. Three times Peter replies that he does, showing on the third occasion just a scintilla of frustration or annoyance. What did the Lord mean by asking him three times? Peter surely understood what the repetition implied and what it was a mirror of. Then came the final command: Feed my sheep. Things could not have been made simpler for Peter, really.

Yet what underlies the Lord’s treatment of Peter in this scene, and what does it suggest about His way of dealing with each of us?

In the first place, the thrice-asked question evoked for Peter, as it does for us, another scene in the gospel when, on the night of Jesus’ arrest, his disciple denied three times that he knew his Master. Jesus had foretold it at the Last Supper. And Peter, denying the possibility all the while, walked right into a situation for which he was still not prepared, not for lack of foresight but for lack of insight. Peter, so often the victim of his own impulsiveness, became in that moment a traitor to the cause. He was the first pope to do so, and of course he was not the last. Put not your trust in princes, says the Psalm. Caiphas was High Priest. Solomon fell from grace. God writes straight with crooked lines, but it is in God we trust, not man.

Still, this is not the only mystery bound up in this scene. There is in the repeated questioning of Peter by Jesus some sign and signal of how God approaches all of us to instruct and guide us along the way. We are not machines; we learn and we sometimes forget. Repetition is the mother of education, but education is what is left over when we have forgotten all the information we have acquired. In asking Peter three times this simple question, the Lord was not merely reminding Peter of his moment of betrayal – warning him and reminding him of his fragility, even while he professed his love; he was also helping Peter purify his memory of that awful night. The reminder was not a further chastisement; rather, it was like the intervention of a doctor, taking a scalpel to the poisoned wound. We all suffer from such wounds. Our sins are forgiven, and yet we have not quite squared everything away. Our passions remain attached to the sin, or our hearts remain invested in our waywardness, even as we resolve not to sin again (how often, o Lord, how often must we do so?). But Jesus, who heals the mind of error and the heart of malice, also gradually seeks to evangelise us even in the depths of our past which is ever before Him in the eternal moment. Our poor choices have left a mess within and here comes the Lord to restore order in Peter’s aching heart, his gut still twisted as he recalls his cowardice; not only to forgive but to heal the twisted complexities of his wandering heart. The Lord does the same for us also. The mystery of iniquity which we carry within us is thus exposed to the sunlight of the divine presence, a restorative surge of mercy that exposes us to the call of love, where our broken selves might choose complacent or purblind self-protection.

Beside the two mysteries we have already considered, we come now at last to the most profound: that Jesus commits to a frail human the mission to be his hands and voice and presence in the world. Feed my lambs, feed my sheep, He tells Peter. In other words, be my vicar in the pastoral mission confided to me by my Father. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep, Jesus says elsewhere. This is precisely what He had done at Easter. And now, His language to Peter places the responsibility of incarnating Jesus’ mission on earth on the shoulders of the former fisherman.

Feed my sheep. Here is the Lord at His most bewildering, confiding His mission into the hands of a man who barely two months before swore he never knew Him, a man who was intemperate enough to slice an enemy’s ear off, a man who sank into Lake Galilee because of his weak faith. Discounting his beloved disciple, ignoring the future apostle He would make of Paul, Jesus called Peter in this moment. And yet, while it is a moment personal to Peter, it is applicable to us all. Jesus might easily have said in simple terms to us all: be me. Be my hands and feet; be my voice and my touch; be to others a sign of the One who has sent you.

In COLW, we evoke often the path of incarnation, i.e. to realise in our own lives the vocation to which the Good Lord has called us and thus grow to resemble more and more our adopted brother Christ. Indeed, we regularly ask after Holy Communion for the grace that others might recognise in us the Word made flesh in Mary. This is a reality that is contained in seed in every call and command Jesus issues in the gospel: be me. But it reaches its ecclesial significance when we see it happen to Peter. He, even he, has a path he must follow: a call to leave behind his sin, a call to follow a path which will lead him three decades after this moment to the centre of the Empire and the site of his execution and from where he must feed the Lord’s sheep still through the hands of his successors who receive the same call.

But in the end, this call was special to Peter, and yet it reflected the call the Lord gives to us all: simply to be where our Master is, for wherever the Master finds himself, there must the disciple follow.