To whom, Lord, shall we go? You have the words of eternal life

The See of Rome, with its bishop, the pope, is the centre of the Church’s visible unity. Equally important, it is also the guarantee of the Church’s identity and its continuity with the historic community originating with the apostles, who were themselves called together by Jesus himself. The importance traditionally accorded to the See of Rome arises not from its ancient political significance as the centre of the Roman Empire, but from the fact that Rome was where both St Peter and St Paul were martyred and buried and where their remains are still revered. An ancient dictum has it that: Ubi Petrus, ibi ecclesia. ‘Where Peter is, there the Church is.’

Odd as it may sound, the papacy matters more than the pope. It is, of course, a bonus if Peter’s successor is educated, cultured and, especially in the modern world, a skilled communicator. But it is worth remembering that Peter, the first pope, was none of these things, as far as we know him from the gospels. This rough-hewn fisherman from an unimportant province in an obscure, far-flung corner of a vast empire, is described in the Acts of the Apostles, along with John, as “unlearned and ignorant”. (Acts 4:13) St Paul, on the other hand, was a highly educated and literate Greekspeaking Pharisee, hailing from a well-governed, prosperous and sophisticated city, Tarsus. He was an expert in the Jewish Law and acutely conscious of his status, both as a Pharisee and a Roman citizen. The contrast between Peter and Paul could not have been greater.

But what they had in common was, first, that they would both make the ultimate sacrifice for their Lord, and secondly, that they both, at different times and for different reasons, set their face against him: one through conviction, the other through cowardice. The Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), once remarked in his characteristically confrontational way, that there are only two possible reactions to Jesus: scandal or discipleship. Paul, uniquely, experienced both. To begin with, he was convinced that the claims made for Christ by his followers were blasphemous and offensive to pious Jewish ears. He therefore set out to do all in his power to extirpate this impious, heretical movement. Until, that is, God made the scales to fall from his eyes, reversing the direction of all Paul’s extraordinary, single-minded energy.

Peter, on the other hand, turned from his Lord out of cowardice, a failing of which he was himself only too aware. There’s no more poignant moment in the whole of the New Testament than when Peter, after denying not only friendship with but knowledge of Jesus, meets his gaze across the room; and when, on hearing the cock crow, he breaks down in bitter tears of abject sorrow and shame. But that was only the worst of Peter’s lapses. The gospels are littered with his weaknesses: he was prone to jealousy, he was impetuous and hasty in action, slow to understand, tactless, and all-too-easily downcast. But this display of raw humanity is unfailingly moving. The late Sebastian Moore, a monk of Downside, once called it, “pope-training, Jesus-style”, because it was precisely this weak and vacillating human being who, at crucial moments in the gospel narrative, even and especially when everything they were doing was being called into question, unreservedly asserted undying love for his Lord. It’s he alone, for instance, who impulsively clambers out of the boat on the Sea of Galilee to reach Jesus, only to find himself sinking when he realises his situation. And in today’s gospel, it’s he who represents the faith of all the other apostles, and indeed the faith of all of us, when he says: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Again, it’s to him alone that Jesus addresses three times the most direct and challenging question anyone can be asked: “Peter, do you love me?” The first two times Jesus uses the word agapein, the Christian coined word for love, as in charity to all. But in the last, most insistent question, he uses the word philein, the love of friendship between individuals. (John 21:14-17) Alongside Peter, the apostle Paul might seem almost Olympian, but he, too, was well-acquainted with weakness. In an intimate admission, he speaks of an abiding temptation, a “thorn in my flesh”, a weakness impossible to dispel, something that plagued him and over which he prayed constantly. God’s reply, he tells us, was unequivocal: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” “So”, Paul proclaims, “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” (2 Cor 12:9)

Again, Paul speaks with uncomfortable candour about the difficulty he experienced – as we all do – of getting himself to do what he knew he should do and avoiding what he knew shouldn’t. He speaks of how there seemed in him, as in all of us, a war in his limbs. “For I do not do the good I want, but rather the evil I do not want to do”, he says. (Romans 7:9) So, from one point of view, Peter and Paul are two very different human beings, and yet both are all-too-human. For all their differences, they had in common two defining and superficially inconsistent characteristics: both were personally familiar with the weakness and frailty of our fallen human nature; both were possessed by a passionate and single-minded love for Christ.

The co-existence of these characteristics in each of them is instructive. It teaches us that sanctity is not necessarily the same as being without blemish. It is not about having managed unfailingly to have always chosen the good. It is not about being ‘good’, in any conventional, moralistic sense. The chief characteristic of sanctity is not any attribute or quality which an individual possesses. If anything, real sanctity deflects attention away from the individual and their personal qualities. Rather, a saint is someone who does not so much possess but is possessed by an utterly unwavering conviction of God’s unchanging, unconditional acceptance of and love for them.

A saint is liberated by the knowledge that God’s love for us is entirely independent of either our merits or our failings. A saint, you might say, is someone who is overwhelmed by the “deep but dazzling darkness” which is God, to use Henry Vaughan’s phrase. What follows and what comes to define their lives is ultimate trust, not in anything of their own, not, indeed, in anything created, but in the inexpressible and ineffable goodness which is God; so that no matter what evil we encounter in this world, no matter what suffering and weakness we have to endure personally, the light cast over every detail of our lives and over the whole of creation by this all-encompassing truth, remains dazzlingly undimmed. The ultimate truth around which a saint’s life is lived, is expressed most powerfully in words uttered respectively by both Peter and Paul. Paul tells us: that “Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ”. And when Peter is asked by Jesus, “Will you also leave me?” he replies, on behalf of us all: “To whom, Lord, shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”