PETER’S REAL ASSENT
We may
wonder why, after signing off at the end of chapter 20, John - or someone in
his circle – decided to add another chapter. The usual answer is that, after a
high point at the end of chapter 6, Peter comes out rather badly in the latter
part of the gospel, denying Jesus three times and then being sceptical about
the empty tomb. He needed rehabilitation.
Besides, the churches associated with John seemed on the verge of going
off on their own – ‘you do not need anyone to teach you’ (1 John 2:27). So we have these three commissions to Peter
cancelling, as it were, his three denials and reaffirming him as leader of the
community.
The scene
can be a good illustration of what we mean by coming to real conviction. In an age when enthusiasm for the claims of
reason was unsettling the faith of many Christians John Henry Newman wrote what
he called a ‘Grammar of Assent’. In this book he set out to show,
how ordinary people can arrive at certainty about things that
are true, even if they may be hard put to demonstrate the validity of their
reasoning. The ways in which we reason
about things, and try to evaluate and verify, are teased out in the book – and
shown to be authentic and real, very personal, and far removed from the dry
deductions of logical thought.[1]
Newman says
the process of coming to faith is the same for learned people as well as
‘Birmingham factory girls.’
One might
object this was far from the case of Peter.
He was given proof: there was Jesus standing on the shore. He did not have to ‘reason it out’. It was overwhelmingly obvious he had failed
and that now the relationship was restored. True. Yet still the process is the same. Peter came to a
conviction, a ‘real assent’, through thinking but also through his own personal
sense or feeling, about what was happening.
Everything came together for him so that the picture of him we have in
the Acts of the Apostles is of a man full of courage and confidence – a far cry
from the coward in the courtyard of the High Priest.
Easter is
all about coming to conviction, to ‘real’ assent. It is one thing to sing ‘Alleluia’. It is quite another to draw down into my
personal life the conviction that give courage and confidence to engage in the
struggle for justice that stares at us today.
5 May 2019 Easter Sunday 3 C
Acts 5:27-32, 40-41 Revelations 5:11-14 John 21:1-19
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