Saturday, 4 May 2019

PETER’S REAL ASSENT


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


[1] Dermot Mansfield, Heart Speaks to Heart, The Story of Blessed John Henry Newman, p 160

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