I am likening our journey of faith to a climb. It's not a climb into perfection, elitism, nor pharisaical list-checking. No, it's a climb of challenge and adventure, but it does involve exertion. In rock climbing there are many skills, an array of practiced and familiar moves that are used as needed on every climb. Like a climber, Peter shows us the key handholds we should visit and revisit, practice and refine. It isn't that we ever climb beyond using these. Rather, we use them over and over again, according to the clallenges and dangers we face. No spiritual ascent can begin without this first, most basic handhold. Peter starts with "Faith."
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I am so ticked at Alan Webb. I don’t even know him, but I’m mad at him because he could be living my dream, and he’s blowing it. I’ve invested my hopes in him, and he has squandered them. Repeatedly. So much talent, potential, and proven gifts. Such mediocre delivery. The distance between his potential and his competitive fire is measured in light years! Aaargh!!
I’m watching the Olympic Trials’ Track and Field Meet. Its culminating event is the 1500 meters race, the metric mile. Only the top three will go to the Olympics. It’s do or die. One shot. Don’t fall asleep, or get boxed in, or years of training, and the potential for sending the best to compete with the world will be lost. Alan Webb is one of the very best, and favored to win. He’s my favorite. I want him in the Olympics because he is one of the few Americans who have a remote chance of winning a medal. What a running machine! He set the High School mile record, a world-class three minutes and fifty-three seconds (3:53), eclipsing the legendary record of Jim Ryun way back in the 60’s. Since High School, he’s become the American record holder with a mile best of three minutes and forty-seven seconds (3:47). He ran the best 1500 meter time (about 100 meters shorter than a mile) in the world last year of 3:30, including one of the best times at 800 meters (the half-mile): 1:44. That’s blazing! To put his speed in perspective, just draft any eight guys you can suit up from your office, gym, locker room or church and set up a relay to race Webb over a mile distance. You each run half a lap, while Webb runs the entire mile. Your team would get toasted! He’s that fast. He’s all-world. That’s Alan Webb.
But, he’s doing it again! This is the Olympic Trials, and he’s running along in the back half of the pack at a pace at least ten seconds slower than what the Olympics will require. He looks confused, unfocussed, lost, unwillingly dragged along. But I keep hoping. I’m out of my chair by the third lap, and screaming at the screen as they enter the bell lap. Webb gives a surge and pulls into the second lane, running fifth or sixth. With two hundred meters to go, the entire field is still potentially in the race because of the dawdling pace. Webb surges again, but so does everyone else. Coming into the home stretch, I hope for that burst of blazing speed, but he is actually losing ground. Alan!! What’s the matter with you! How did you let yourself get stuck in this position, again? Bernard Lagat cruises to a win in 3:40, followed by Leo Manzano and Lopez Lamong. Alan Webb finishes fifth. Fifth, in 3:42. He could run that on a Tuesday in practice. The worst part is he was never even in the race. Never a factor. Never set the pace. Never took it out and forged even a gallant loss. Just a slothful, wasted, mediocre mid-pack finish.
No, it’s not a finish. He never got started. It’s a loss, a waste. Something got thrown away at the start and middle of that race, becoming obvious at the end. Thousands of miles of training, repeat 600’s and 800’s and 400’s during grueling workouts on the track: lost. Speed training, over-distance training, weight training, ice baths, monk-like withdrawal from social life, massages and dietary vigilance: lost, kaput! I’m sick of you, Alan Webb! You disappoint me. You threw it away! I’ve quit hoping in you, you dream-killer.
The horsepower behind my frustration is classic transference. It takes no doctorate in psychology to recognize my angry response as simply projections of myself onto Alan Webb. He arouses my anger at his under-performance because I recognize myself in him. I don’t run like him, but I am him! I, too, am the race saboteur, throwing away opportunity and wilting under challenge. My inner frustration with my slothful and wasteful self becomes a flamethrower directed toward a guy I’ve never even met. I, too, have subverted my own promise and potential, and I hate it when Alan Webb holds up that mirror, and I see myself in it. I fall so far short of my potential, my vaunted plans, and Alan Webb is living out my regrets in his Olympic Trials 1500 meter race. I disappoint myself, and vex my friends, who watch me from the bleachers, wondering where my head or my heart really is.
It’s the same sickening desperation one gets as we watch the mishandling of opportunity by the disciple Peter. Perhaps, in some subterranean way, it’s also why we are drawn to this man. Peter, who got to breathe the same air and walk the same miles as the Son of Man is exhibit “A” for displaying that advantage does not always translate into diligence, or immediate success. Peter had raw strength, talent, and big personality. He gave a great press conference, proved to be an effective spokesman, and was prodigious in his work. But, Peter had so many moments of spectacular loopy-ness, transparent hubris, and ghastly betrayal. What an accident waiting to happen! What a team-wrecker and poster boy for disappointment; for everyone else and for himself. His early career was marked by over-promising and under-delivery. He was corrected and rebuked by Jesus, privately and publicly, more than anyone else in scripture.
Say what you will about him, but he held nothing back. He publicly pledged loyalty, he stood alone with a borrowed sword, and he alone stepped out of the boat to walk on water. Peter paid the price for his visible, sometimes brash, notoriety. He learned from the blunt force trauma of correction when bumping his head against the Lord’s own purposes. He was roundly rebuked by Jesus for his resistance to God’s will that would be expressed in the cross. He was repeatedly embarrassed and disheveled by his own outbursts of human fallibility. At times, everyone around Peter must have groaned: what are you doing? You’re squandering your opportunity! Run to the level of your potential! Get your head in the game!
All the more amazing is that in the end Jesus singled out this man for a special commission, preceded by a tender and merciful restoration. The story is well known: how Peter swore loyalty, even if it meant standing all alone in that loyalty, to Jesus. The next thing we know, he is denying any association with Jesus, swearing with oaths that he doesn’t even know him. Cowering under a simple question from a harmless servant girl. Finally, Jesus, in the breathless agony of his own suffering on the cross looks at Peter, piercing his heart, bringing crushing conviction, and causing him to weep bitterly in regret.
If we left the story there, Peter would be a biblical Alan Webb at his Olympic Trials debacle. Highly privileged; deeply flawed, and desperately disappointing. But, Peter experienced grace. Peter came to see that he was not just the sum total of his most dismal performance on his worst day. Peter was touched and changed by grace, not on the podium of victory, but in the dark corners, under the bleachers, in lonely defeat. Jesus came after him in his disgrace, embraced him when he still stunk, and called to him when he wished he could die, or hide forever in his shame. This relentless grace was the beginning of the end for the old Simon, and the birth of the new Peter.
“Precious faith” is how Peter summarized this grace in the very first verse of his letter. It was grace experienced: personalized, absorbed, and life-altering. This all-encompassing description of Peter’s gratitude begins to fill in the silent years since Jesus’ restoration of his disciple. Peter opens a window, through this intimate and tender description, to his personal journey and his spiritual transformation since that catalytic moment. He is the only writer in the New Testament to use this word “precious,” and with it he explains a relationship with his Master that contains hope for the Simon, the Alan Webb, in me.
There is some dark and inscrutable psychology in many of our heroes that seems set on subverting their own success, that tragically, even masochistically, snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. This moth-to-the-flame self-destruction is maddening, even horrifying, to witness; and very sad. It seemed to be at work in Peter from his very first encounter with Jesus. Luke (5:1-11) records how Jesus was standing on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, teaching the people. Seeing two boats and their owners nearby, Jesus asked to be launched out a ways from shore so that he could teach the people from the boat. In one of the most familiar stories of scripture, when he is done teaching, Jesus challenges Peter to “Put out into deep water, and let down your nets for a catch.” Already weary from a fruitless and fishless all-nighter, Peter resists, but then he summons minimal energy to placate the Master with compliance. Then came that storied catch so large they had to call for help to save their nets from breaking. The bounty was so huge it almost sank both boats. What a sign. What an indisputable demonstration of divine power and grace.
It is at this point that Peter displays something at once incisively prophetic and sadly pathetic. He shows what so many of us know of ourselves: devotion and dysfunction, all wrapped in an amorphous wad of neediness. He fell at Jesus’ feet in an act of unrehearsed and unself-conscious worship. Peter was instantly humbled, intensely grateful, and smitten. In pure transparency he cries: “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man.”
Peter’s first response when he found himself at ground level with divine power and holiness was exactly right. He was laid bare, undefended, and indefensible. He was instantly stripped of all self-confidence, and grasped that he could not live in the white-hot intensity of Jesus’ holiness and majesty. He knew at once the might, purity and overpowering-ness of the Lord’s awesome authority. He had fallen into the hands of the living God, utterly condemnable in his sin. With reflexive, terrified urgency he just wanted to get away to safety, to dodge the laser beam aimed at his iniquity.
At just that moment, when Peter is completely undone, lost, abjectly repentant, and flailing, Jesus speaks. “Don’t be afraid.” And, in a brief sentence that follows, Jesus shows Peter the future, his redemption, and his own assignment in that future: “from now on you will catch men.” From complete spiritual asphyxiation Peter’s lungs are instantly filled with life-giving grace. He is made, miraculously and undeservedly, alive again. He is reborn. Immediately, Peter displays what becomes his signature: wholehearted, unreserved, instantaneous action. He left everything and followed Jesus. From that instant the fisherman became a leader, an initiator, a spokesman. The muscle used for pulling morphed into magnetism for leadership. His grip for working the rigging transformed into singular loyalty to his rabbi. His eagerness and transparency were everything a teacher could want in a disciple. They were also, too frequently, the bane of his mentor. Peter is a handful, a complex personality, a high-maintenance disciple. Along with his incredible courage, his unvarnished love and loyalty, Peter displayed more than his allotted quotient of foolishness. He was impetuous and boastful. At several critical moments he was asleep, literally. This raw follower was an inscrutable amalgam of competitiveness, impetuosity, and infamous disloyalty at the very crux of Jesus’ agony.
This is the man who writes his full name as the signature at the top of his letter, a name full of irony, paradox, and hope. “Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ.” (2 Peter 1:1) Now, perhaps thirty years later, this man had learned some things about following Jesus and about himself as his follower. It seems more than incidental that he signs in with both his given, family name, and the name which Jesus gave to him. Simon, the raw fisherman is also Peter, his new identity. Over these thirty years he has learned the difference. These two names signal the complex alloy that was the man. Train wreck and talent. Success and scandal. Courage and cowardice. Warrior and wimp. Simon is Alan Webb. Simon is me. Peter is the rock of a man Jesus smelted from lumpy, raw material called Simon.
Peter is now writing as an experienced veteran in this climb of obedience and faith. He is sending a letter to fledgling churches, outposts on the Roman frontier in northern Asia. They, like him, have been called to follow Jesus. But, it is hard slogging. They face opposition from the culture, sabotage from within their own ranks, and from within themselves. So, this experienced veteran of grace and faith is now coaching them, drawing lessons from his journey of faith, and his experience of his living Lord. Like a climbing instructor teaching pupils whose lives will depend upon their mastery of basic skills, Peter is laying out a series of reliable, repeatable, and ever-adaptable handholds. These will aid them, not only for survival, but toward maturity and mastery, as they progress in their discipleship. He will show, name, and encourage the use of eight handholds. He lists them in a sequence that can be read in seconds. (2 Peter 1:5-8) The more we know of Peter’s own journey, however, the more we recognize that these handholds have been his anchors over many years of gritty faithfulness since he first received his commission from Jesus.
How illuminating that the first handhold he shows them is “faith.”
To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours. (2 Peter 1:2)
Peter, the manly man, is the only New Testament writer to use the word
“precious.” He uses it twice, once in each of his letters. (1 Peter 1:19; 2 Peter 1:2) Here he uses it to describe the faith he has received. It is faith in the Person who sought him out, trained him up, and washed him clean. This faith is precious because it isn’t invented, conjured, jury-rigged or fantasized by human longings. Peter wasn’t looking for Jesus, but Jesus came looking, and calling, for him. Jesus drew Peter into faith, based on his demonstrations raw power, incisive knowledge, and personal holiness. This faith is grounded in the Man, the Son of Man, the man of all men: Jesus, his Savior whom he knows and follows. This faith is a treasury of shared history, witnessed miracle, and personal transformation.
This is a faith Peter holds onto with a fisherman’s calloused grip. Faith in Jesus has produced a life-sustaining relationship he has treasured through thick and thin, a morsel he savors continuously. Peter knows his faith is anchored in God, and in His incarnate Son. It is objective faith in experienced fact, not subjective longing for things imagined. He has received this faith through the righteous life, atoning death, and propitiatory peace with God purchased on the Cross by his Savior. This is a faith that is completely unrelated to feel-good, mystical experiences with harmonic convergence in Sedona, or sleeping under crystals, or some vague desire for goodness in the human soul. No. Jesus found Peter and called him. It was God’s initiative, the Savior’s voice, and Peter’s simple, stumbling responses of trust that he now describes as this “precious faith” after all these years.
This man knows, as only a desperate recipient can know, that “grace and peace” can be ours “in abundance.” He is a living laboratory of grace at work, a transparent example of a man sustained by a faith that has become precious. This faith in Jesus was the very first handhold Peter ever had on things spiritual. But, Peter recognizes that even prior to this so-called starting point, there was a purpose and plan of God. Peter’s faith was not muscled up in an exasperated groping for meaning in life, nor by some nebulous longing for connection with the supernatural. Instead, Peter was a recipient of this faith through the righteous obedience of Jesus Christ (v.1), foreordained by God, and demonstrated on the cross. Jesus found Peter, and called Peter. By faith Peter finally, and fully, received Him. Peter found stability, not by looking, but by receiving. His faith was anchored in God, not in the attributes of his own fickle heart.
Many people testify, after surviving a flood, accident, or tornado, when the microphone is thrust into their face: “My faith got me through.” This answer always needs a follow-up question: “Your faith in what…in whom?” Peter is not hanging his faith on the skyhooks of emotion, or the cobwebs of nostalgia. His faith is anchored in the eye-witnessed miracles, life-defining teaching, and sin-covering atonement of Jesus the Christ.
So, let’s return to the walking paradox: the new man Peter, inhabiting the body of Simon. We can trace in this name, Simon Peter, two defining New Testament doctrines: justification and sanctification. Peter is the name which signifies the man who has been given, and receives, everything. He is the recipient of grace, through faith. The instantaneous, once-for-all, trusting of the Son’s finished work on the cross is the substance and ground of Peter’s saving faith. He is forever re-positioned in God’s sight. He has crossed over from death to life, from darkness to light, from enemy to friend (John 5:24 etc.) His sin is covered, paid in full. Peter’s faith is anchored in the objective accomplishment of Father and Son to kill death and remove its pall of fear over humankind. Once an alien and enemy because of an unpayable debt of sin, Peter is now justified by the mercies of God in the substitutionary sacrifice which paid all sin debt. His position is entirely, and irreversibly, changed.
That’s the Peter we see in his humility, recognizing his bankrupt unholiness, and crying out “Go away from me, Lord: I am a sinful man.” It is the only solution Peter, or any person, can find when white-hot holiness convicts the conscience. Get me away from the knowledge of my own failure and sin! But, of course, the physician of souls has a cure Peter never could have imagined. He knows Peter at his worst, and does the opposite of what is expected. Instead of abandoning the wretched, he comes to heal and restore. Such unfathomable grace, displayed in purpose and power, is what changed Peter. Peter cast his empty-handed faith onto God’s accomplished plan. He was saved. (appendix: Steps to Peace with God, http://www.lifesbigquestions.com/ )
But Simon still lingered. Simon the selfish. Simon the competitor. Simon the fearful and flaky. Simon the course and crude. Simon the braggart and traitor. Simon was not sin-free, or even sin-averse, as snapshots of him in the New Testament clearly display. Simon is the grim and surly shadow trailing the free and forgiven Peter. Simon is the old-natured fool sabotaging the new-natured apostle. Perhaps to many of us it appears, as miraculous as is the justification of the condemnable sinner named Peter, even more stupendous is the sanctification of the train wreck named Simon. But, this, too, is what the doubly-named Simon Peter packed into this word “precious.”
It’s the Simon in me that I’m yelling at when I see Alan Webb losing. He is me, blowing the opportunity and underperforming in the heat of competition. This Simon is the man in me that reneges from challenge, shrinks in fear, and dissembles under pressure. Simon is the puny man, the caricature within. I live with Simon, but I want to be Peter. I long to unite the bifurcated person within, to become as fruitful and faithful as Simon Peter, to see the transformative power of Jesus be more than theological theory. I want to be whole, as Simon Peter became whole, a fully integrated person bearing the descriptors “servant” and “apostle” comfortably and unself-consciously. The simple phrase “precious faith” written by the unified man, Simon Peter, gives me hope.
The scent of sanctification wafts through these introductory words, and this is where Peter turns into a coach. Whereas justification is anchored in what God has accomplished for us, sanctification is experienced by allowing God to work in and through us. We can’t add anything to our position. We are justified solely by God’s grace, plus nothing. But Peter insists that, having been “given everything we need for life and godliness” (1:3) we now need to “make every effort” (1:5) to participate in our calling and obedience. This is practical, daily obedience to a process theologians call “progressive sanctification.” Simon Peter did not arrive at maturity by some magical and esoteric transmigration. He learned his way into maturity by practicing his daily grip on handholds of practical spirituality.
This, too, began with Jesus, and not in some kind of self-help makeover strategy. John records Peter’s being summoned, challenged, and restored by Jesus. (John 21:15-19) Jesus calls for him specifically, calling him from the squalor of his ghastly performance and his pungent shame. Countless scholars and teachers have analyzed this story, and drawn many lessons from is form, its grammar, and its tenderness. What surprises and encourages me is that Jesus specifically and repetitively speaks to “Simon,” not Peter. Simon, not the Rock. Simon, the denier and oath-spitter. Simon the turncoat. Simon the true, but dysfunctional worshiper. Jesus calls to him, and asks him essentially the same question three times: “Simon, do you truly love me?” I find it significant that Jesus uses his pre-faith name, his pre-Rock identity with which to address him. It is Simon the failure he calls, forgives, and restores. It is in the old person Simon that grace will show its transforming power. Simon is redeployed. Simon is shown his future with its sobering challenges. Simon is again called: “follow me.” Simon has a new life.
Remember the unpolished Simon’s first response to Jesus? It contained sparkling clarity about his guilt: “I am a sinful man.” This is conviction of the Holy Spirit. This is exactly, surgically correct. Only justification by grace at Christ’s expense, received through faith, could save him. But, did Peter make the same mistake, at first, that I have made? He embraced his new position, but accepted his old definition and condition as fixed. Peter is the changed person, but Simon—well, he’s unchangeably, and irrevocably Simon. Did his reply become a self-fulfilling subscript, a subverting message that went something like this: “I am nothing more, and will never be, anything more than a sinful man?” Could it be that Simon’s experience mirrors my own? Though I have found freedom, forgiveness, and joy in salvation that Jesus freely offers, it isn’t yet “precious.” It’s only for a part of me, the future, positional, and theological Peter. But, the original Simon-in-the-flesh part of me is untouchably substandard. I’m still the old, unredeemable, pathetic Simon. I am a sinful man. I’m a box of worthless flesh and unworthiness, but I have a UPS label that will one day deliver me to my home in heaven once my sad transit through this world is done. I “have a new name written down in glory” but on earth I’m just a sinner saved by grace.
Jesus called all of Simon Peter: By powerful three-fold process, which echoes the Old Testament standard on incontrovertible witness, Jesus pulls Simon over an unforgettable threshold (John 21:15-19): “Do you love me?” Jesus asks three times. “Yes, Lord you know I love you,” Simon answers, three times. “Feed my lambs, take care of my sheep, feed my sheep”, is Jesus’ triple repetition and call. And then, finally, Jesus simply says what he did at the lakeside, calling to the husky fisherman, so eager and raw: “Follow me.” Jesus wants Simon, yes Simon, to hear this reiterated call into service and usefulness, after all he has squandered. Simon, you are not a loser, a sinful man as your core identity. You are nothing less than a follower of the King of Kings. Begin to live like it, no matter what life brings to you, no matter how often you slip, and no matter how dark your interior.
There are many erudite expositions of this restoration story, with insightful nuancing, of this exchange. But, let’s not miss the calling of the whole man, Simon Peter, at a place and time when he was split, severed from active discipleship, and already adjusting to a benchwarmer’s complacency. Jesus called Simon to join with Peter, to become the conjoint man, who not only trusts Jesus with his sin theologically, but trusts Jesus with himself daily. His self-definition was half true, but fully dangerous. God, through Christ,. came to make a new man, progressively and faithfully more and more conformed to the image of His Son.
Simon was already back doing what people automatically do: when trouble or defeat, or failure hits, go back to what is safe, predictable and risk-free. Stop looking at the summit. Cease climbing. Play it safe. So, Simon went back to fishing. His dysfunctional theme song having again been proven correct, he runs back to Galilee to fish harder, work longer, keep safe, and forget the riskiness of following his Master. Tragically, many of us make the same decisions because of a choice we make. This is described in the following choice:
“Eventually, we each find ourselves arriving at a pivotal place on our journey with God. We stand before two roads diverging in the woods, and our choice will make all the difference…It’s the most important ongoing decision any of us will make as Christians. As we’re walking down life’s road, we arrive at a tall pole with sigs pointing in two different directions. The marker leading to the left simply says Pleasing God. The one leading to the right reads Trusting God. It hard to choose one over the other, because both roads have a good feel to them…Pleasing God and Trusting God are both admirable, but since I can have only one primary motive, I ask myself, ‘Which of these motives best reflects the relationship I want to have with God?’”
(TrueFaced: Trusting God and others with who you really are. Bill Thrall, Bruce McNicol, John Lynch. NavPress p.37-48)
Simon, like me, wants desperately to Please God. It sounds so godly, dedicated and humble. The motive is good, but slightly askew. It morphs into a nearly ineradicable vow that drums on the conscience and will: “I am determined to please God so that He will be happy with me.” He failed. We fail. So, we buy a bigger, faster fishing boat and knuckle down to pay off our failure with good, solid behavior. We are oblivious to the fact that Jesus doesn’t need more fish. He wants the man. We wear the mask of chipper buoyancy, but we hide our toxic memories and secrets in our dutiful, safe, busyness.
But now, thirty callused years later, Peter’s faith is ruggedly vibrant and alive. When Jesus called him the second time, he took the other road, the road that says Trusting God. Gun-shy, hesitant, sobered with his frailty, Peter made the simplest, humblest choice. He began to live out a new decision: “I will trust you with myself, my true self.” There he was washed in grace, and gained the most important toehold in discipleship—trusting God with the next move, the next right thing-- daily. Simon Peter began to trust God with himself: the whole rat’s nest of twisted motives and convoluted pathologies he brought to the table. He trusted Jesus Christ for forgiveness, objectively purchased on the cross. He also began to live in transparent trust as he daily confessed his fresh sin, and immersed himself in waves of purifying, cleansing grace. Simon Peter became whole. The man of frailty and failure became the apostle of faithfulness.
What hope this gives to every one of us. Simon Peter is a fellow struggler. His name displays his journey. It is the race, and the climb, that every one of us can choose.
