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It feels right that the Feast of the Confession of Peter is being celebrated today. It comes between our reading last Sunday where we heard John’s account of Jesus proclaiming Simon’s new name as Cephas, or Peter. This coming Sunday, we will hear Matthew’s account of Peter getting up to follow Jesus. Today we hear Matthew’s account of Jesus declaring Peter as the rock on which the church will be built, a true living into the name “Peter” or “rock”.
We have a plethora of accounts of Peter. Some of them, like what we hear today, are marvelous. Some, like the passage immediately following the one we read, shows Peter at his lowest as Jesus cries out “Get behind me Satan” for daring to suggest Jesus shrink away from His Crucifixion.
Even after the Resurrection, Peter’s actions are… mixed. On one hand, he listens to vision God gives him and helps open up the church to Gentile believers. On the other hand, Paul ends up chastising Peter for not always eating together with Gentiles, depending on who else was in the room.
Yet I think there’s some hope in what we see in Peter. Here is someone who is clearly human, in all the best and all the worst ways possible. Still, it is this person who is the first to proclaim Jesus as “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
If Peter can recognize who Jesus is, with all the good and bad in him, then maybe we can too. It doesn’t matter whatever else we can say about Peter, that is enough to give us hope.