So today is the Apostle and First Pope Peter’s day to be celebrated.
What I want to focus on is how vitally important it was for the early Church to mold the story of Peter in order to turn him into who it wanted him to be rather than who he was. Butler writes of Peter:
[T]he primitive writers of the Church . . . call him the head, the president, the prolocutor, the chief, the foreman of the apostles, with several other titles of distinction.
What other titles are left? Well, “pope”–but he gets that one eventually as well!
Even more than this, biblical episodes where, if read plainly, Peter is shown for having weakness of faith or character are completely revised to show him as utterly saintly! The story where Jesus is walking on the Sea of Galilee during a storm and Peter thinks him a ghost–Peter challenges Jesus, who in turn tells Peter to walk to him on the water and Peter starts out, only to sink (for a lack of faith, no less). Remember that one? Well, here’s how Butler describes the incident: “Out of love, [Peter] . . . cast himself into the sea to meet Jesus, for his heart melted at his sight, and he had not patience to wait until the boat came up to the shore.”
Then there’s that time that Jesus had been taken away for what would result in his crucifixion, and THREE TIMES Peter denied even knowing or being associated with Jesus. St. Augustine wrote of Peter’s betrayal of friendship and mission, “though he had a lie in his mouth, his heart was faithful.” Butler piles it on by saying that even though Peter’s sin at that time was, admittedly, heinous, “his repentance was speedy, perfect, and constant; and it bore a proportion to the heinousness of his crime.” So, even at his worst, Peter was still at his best.
With our Superheroes, we have a tendency to spin narratives that end up setting them outside the continuum of humanity. Peter was “loving” and “faithful”–even when unquestionably faithless and disloyal! Why can’t someone flawed still make important, lasting, and meaningful contributions?
How does this play out today? Some people (few, admittedly) state that these sexual harassment charges against Bill Cosby are bad because they destroy an important legacy. Others (many more) act as though there now is nothing worthwhile about anything Bill Cosby did because of his alleged heinous actions. If he can’t be saint then he has to be irredeemable capital-S Sinner. Someone not fully human.
Consider President Trump. There is a serious (and armed) cadre of Americans who take every word he says and fit it into a Peter-like narrative demonstrating Trump’s utter perfection and wisdom, even in what objectively appear as his worst moments. Consider this meme:
What? How? Huh? We know this: There are many who proclaim that President Trump’s every action is indeed Christ-directed and God-ordained (see my blog post regarding Jeff Session’s use of Scripture to justify carrying out the President’s Executive Order to separate children from their caregivers at our southern border).
Now: Suppose that somehow President Trump brings about the peaceful and happy total denuclearization, demilitarization, and even reunification of the Korean peninsula. Would those who are repulsed by him take such a monumental event and twist the narrative into something disgusting and unmitigatedly negative because Trump was involved? This is simply the other side of morphing any human being into something outside of, beyond, or transcending the human spectrum.
It’s not helpful and it is in fact dangerous to twist stories to make any human being so good or so evil that they become aberrations in our minds. This is precisely the main thrust of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt drives home the point that Eichmann was not some sub- or superhuman monster, but, rather, a blob of a civil servant, ambitious to perform well in his job and rationalizing his actions all along the way. Arendt went so far as to suggest that the real danger lies not in specific Evil Monsters but in our not recognizing that the same qualities that animated Eichmann are utterly human and, as such, also reside in every human breast, even our own.
Quite simply, we gain utterly nothing and risk losing so very, very much by spinning narratives that cast fellow human beings as aberrations (by design or by neglect, as Super Saints or Super Sinners).
If Peter, when betraying Jesus, was actually being quite faithful in his heart–then this has naught to do with me. Similarly, if I believe that Nazism was the result of inhuman depravity rather than humans doing very human things, often without thinking about the larger picture, often just to get along, sometimes with an eye toward advancement, sometimes out of fear of their lives becoming more complicated, sometimes because they enjoyed blaming and hurting others–then I don’t have to look at myself in connection with the advancement of any evil agendas.
If I can sanctify Peter enough, then I can admire reverentially without changing anything about myself, inasmuch as I could never attain his heights of goodness. And if I can demonize Trump enough, then I can avoid seeing anything Trump-like within myself. Both paths make my life easier for sure. Neither path makes my–or this world’s–life better, however.
To end this post on a lighter note (pun intended), here’s another, musical way of posing these same issues: