To outward appearance, Peter’s character may be read on the surface. He is a plain, blunt man that speaks the language of the common day and breathes the desires of the passing hour. He is more like an open book than is any other figure in the Gallery. He is one of those men who at a superficial glance promises to offer a very easy subject for study.
And yet the promise is a delusion. There has been probably more disagreement about the character of Simon Peter than about any other New Testament character. It very often happens that those we meet in this world who seem most open and above-board are precisely those who prove the most difficult to read.
Peter is one of these. He not only seems, he is, above-board. There is nothing sinister, nothing underhand; his words and deeds convey exactly the meaning he intends. Yet we find ourselves entangled in what appears to be a web of inconsistencies from which there is no hope of extrication.
We seem to be confronted by a life of opposing qualities: sometimes touching the heavens, at others coming perilously near the nether world; now in the heights of ecstasy, soon in the depths of despair; today winning our admiration, tomorrow exciting a feeling akin to repulsion. The life, in fact, alternates between cowardice and bravery. These are the poles between which he wavers. Every great thing he does comes from a moment of bravery; every mean act to which he stoops comes from a moment of cowardice.
The symbol of his whole life is the sea-walking. That is in miniature the picture of his entire character. We see him for an instant on top of the wave, daring a deed which none of his compeers would have dared. The next he is shrieking with abject terror, “Lord, save me!” And the picture gives no outward cause for this. We see no increase of the storm; the sea does not look more scowling than when he planted his foot on its bosom. It is a struggle pure and simple between bravery in his own breast and cowardice in his own breast.
He makes professions of loyalty to Jesus far beyond those of his brethren; in an hour of real danger he shows courage to maintain them, drawing a sword in the garden against heavy odds. Yet within a few hours he quails before the question of a servant-girl, denying the Lord whom he loves! I see no adequate cause for the change; it came from a tremor in his own soul.
Again, he was one of the first to recognize the claims of the Gentiles. Bravely he stood as the champion of Gentile freedom at a time when the thought was stirring deep animosities. For ventilating that thought, Stephen paid the penalty with his life, and Paul had been forced to retire to temporary exile. It was at such a moment that Peter’s voice was raised in courageous vindication of a universal gospel. Yet this same man goes down to Antioch, and–in the face of far less danger–keeps aloof from the Gentile converts! Again I fail to recognize an adequate outward cause for the change. The cause, whatever it is, is within the man, his soul a battlefield between bravery and cowardice.
We can understand a mixture of doubt and faith; we can imagine a union of weakness and strength; we can comprehend the existence of a natural placidness side by side with the possibility of flashing fire; but the co-existence of bravery and cowardice, the union of the hero and the faint-heart–that is something which challenges the philosopher and calls for explanation.
Let me give the popular explanation: Peter is an example of the principle, “Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” He is a monument to the fact that men are liable to fail in their strongest qualities unless periodically renewed by divine grace. Peter was by nature a brave man. He possessed a soul of fire which made him forget his own limitations, which drove him instantaneously into work beyond his power. He lived by confidence in his own strength, and he overrated it. If checked in the assault, he would sink suddenly, ignominiously. All his courage would desert him–conveying the moral that the highest human gift needs to be supported from above.
Now without disputing the truth of the moral, this is not my view of the character of Simon Peter. The Gospel Gallery is a record of transformations in which each man passes from a lower into a higher self. But the view here adduced would make Peter’s higher self the original element and his later self the decline.
The whole picture, as I take it, is based on an opposite concept. Instead of being by nature the courageous man we portray, Peter is introduced to us as a man of extreme timidity. We shall go wrong, in my opinion, if we do not start from this basis. I admit that we are dealing with an inconsistent character; but let us not mistake the nature of the inconsistency. The inconsistency of Peter lies in his strength and not in his weakness. The inconsistency lies not in the fact that a brave man periodically becomes a coward, but that a cowardly man periodically becomes brave.
Christ took men into His kingdom with their old garments on; the ring and the robe were an after-consideration. He let them come with all the elements of their imperfection clinging round them. In His presence they still revealed remains of a former day.
There are incidents in Peter’s life which are commonly attributed to bold presumption, but which, to my mind, suggest only the survival of this primitive spirit of timidity. Take that memorable occasion on which the Master broke to His disciples the news of His approaching death and when Peter exclaimed with hot repudiation, “Be it far from Thee, Lord!” It is commonly set down to his impertinent forwardness; I think it was the voice of shrinking fear. No doubt devotion to Jesus counted for something; but they were all devoted as well as Peter. We have to find a reason why Peter was the spokesman. And I think that reason lay, not in his being the most impertinent, but in his being the most timid. He shrank from the thought of danger.
Will it be said that the sternness of Christ’s reproof, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” is at variance with such a view? But to whom was that reproof administered? To Peter? No–to Satan, the tempter of the wilderness. We are told that after the temptation, Satan left Him “for a season.” This implies that he was to come back. He had come back now, and with the old temptation–to reject the cross for the crown, to choose the purple instead of poverty, to sway by law in place of stooping by love. It was not to Peter that Christ administered the rebuke; it was the tempter once more.
But, all this time, there was growing in Peter a new and higher life. The second stage of his spiritual history is one of struggle between the original timidity and a new principle which stimulated to courage. From where did this element of bravery come? It was born of love. There is no mystery about it; you may see the same thing every day. One who all through life had shrunk from the slightest hint of danger I have known to rush into a burning house to save her infant from the flames. And yet it does not follow that at this moment the constitutional timidity was dead.
There had come to Peter one great love. And in his devotion to Jesus he had moments of a new experience–courage. Although at first he wavered between cowardice and overcoming, there came to Simon Peter such a time of absolute victory. The final stage of his spiritual experience is that of unbroken courage. Timidity vanishes, and in its room there comes a calm and habitual fearlessness–not the spasmodic burst of confidence which marked his early days.
How do we know that this was the final stage for Peter? Because we have in our possession a letter written in his mature life which embodies precisely this spirit. What is the great characteristic of Peter’s epistles? Courage! More than any document of the New Testament this letter is the Epistle of Courage. In every cadence, we find the Peter on the top of the wave looking down on the Peter sinking in the depths and crying, “You were wrong!”
The very first key struck is one of reversal, “Blessed be God, who has begotten us unto a lively hope”–a hope pervading the life–not coming periodically in fits and starts, but taking up its abode with the soul. Listen again! “We are redeemed by the precious blood of Christ as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.” Where is now the rebuke, “Be it far from Thee, Lord!” The thing from which he recoiled has become “precious.” Again, “The God of all grace, after ye have suffered awhile, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you.” What a comment on his own experience! To be no longer spasmodic, fitful, but “stablished,” “settled”–it was the realization of all his wants, and therefore it seemed to him the crown of all perfection.
What a note of autobiography is here! It is the “trial of faith” which he declares to be “more precious than gold.” The evening, not the morning is Peter’s golden hour. The morning was leaden and grey; the evening is light and glorious. The morning saw his spirit crouch in a coward’s lair; the evening leads him forth to dwell in the path of danger. The motto of his maturity is this: “Forasmuch as Christ has suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind.”