Ever since I was a teenager, the Apostle Peter is the disciple I have related to the most out of Jesus’s original twelve. He might even be the character I relate to most in the entirety of Scripture. He is bold, except for when he is not. He is rash, except for when he is shy. And, as his contemporary/rival John demonstrates time and time again in his Gospel, Peter tends to bite off far more than he can actually chew.
No episode illustrates this better than his conversation with the Lord Jesus towards the end of John 13. The conversation takes place on the night of the Last Supper (also known as Maundy Thursday) mere moments after Jesus has washed every single disciple’s feet. In response to Jesus’s statement that “Where I am going, you cannot come” (v.34), Peter asks Him where it is that He is even going. Jesus answers him by clarifying that “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward” (v.36b). Peter is not satisfied. He protests: “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.” (v.37). Jesus then drops the following bomb:
Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly, I tell you, before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times.
Sure enough, as pretty well everybody knows, Jesus’s prediction winds up coming true. Peter does indeed deny Him three times - not to mention that he does so within less than 24 hours of Maundy Thursday. Luke’s telling of the same story contains a particularly heartbreaking detail. Peter hears the cock crow after his third denial and proceeds to weep “bitterly” (Luke 22:62).
It is a tragic story. And quite a relatable one at that. I, for one, have certainly felt the type of deep disappointment in my own pathetic inadequacy that Peter would have felt as he “wept bitterly” and quietly resigned himself from his place in Jesus’s ministry.
Despite a mysterious one-on-one we are told Peter enjoyed with the risen Lord (see Luke 24:34 & 1 Corinthians 15:5) prior to His appearance to the rest of the eleven (twelve minus Judas), one can plausibly argue that by the time Jesus cooks him breakfast in John 21, Peter has all but traded in his divine call to be a fisher of men for the regular kind of fishing he had made his living from prior to meeting Jesus.
He has, in other words, concluded that he is unworthy. We hear echoes of his plea to Jesus in Luke 5 when they first met: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (v.8). Perhaps his mysterious private meeting with the risen Jesus has served to reassure him that God still loves him, but surely that cannot mean business as usual. Surely that cannot mean that he is now free to resume his leadership role within the early Church.
This is precisely the lie that Jesus comes to dismantle when He shows up at the Sea of Tiberias to cook breakfast in John 21. But first, He helps the seven disciples present at the scene to turn a disastrous fishing expedition into a wildly successful one (from zero fish caught to 153) - just like He had done in Luke 5 when He first introduced Himself to Peter.
By the time the group has finished eating their bread and fish, Jesus proceeds to address Peter directly. He asks Peter three separate times if Peter loves Him, to which Peter responds each time in the affirmative. Notably, however, Jesus also charges Peter after each question to feed/tend to His flock. Thus, Jesus intentionally mirrors Peter’s threefold denial a week or two prior by extending to Peter a threefold invitation to rejoin the work of God in the earth.
All of a sudden, Peter’s month has taken on a dramatic turn for the better. But this is not even where his redemption arc ends. After Jesus’s final invitation to “feed my sheep” (v.17b), He proceeds to tell Peter exactly how he will die:
Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.
By stating that Peter will one day “stretch out [his] hands,” Jesus foreshadows Peter’s own eventual crucifixion. What is more, He then immediately tells Peter the very words he had longed to hear on Maundy Thursday: “Follow me” (v.19b).
Jesus had told Peter then that Peter could not yet follow him, but that he would be able to afterward (John 13:36). Clearly, Peter had to learn something before Jesus could grant him what his heart had desired all along. He was not ready to endure the suffering that came with truly following Jesus when he asked to do so on Maundy Thursday but he was now. What changed?
Could it be that Jesus needed him to come face to face with the limitations of his own zeal before inviting him further along? Could it be that Peter needed an experience of complete and utter failure before God to humble him and to show him that he was cooked if he thought he could do this thing on his own? And, finally, could it be that the generous and restorative grace of God which met him on the other side of his sin was a force he needed to properly encounter before Jesus could allow him to feed and tend to the very first Christians?
I believe that the answer to all these questions is a resounding yes. Peter was indeed the type of guy to bite off more than he could chew. But Jesus, in His grace, let him do it and lovingly watched him as he fell on his face. Peter was delusional about how far his faith could take him. But Jesus was not. Jesus knew Peter’s limitations better than Peter himself did and instead of just telling him about them, He let Peter experience them for himself and come out on the other side wiser, humbler and more sober-minded than he had previously been.
Ultimately, Jesus man-managed Peter into the kind of guy who lovingly urged his wife to “remember the Lord” when she faced execution for her faith in first-century Rome and who then took his own crucifixion like a champ when it came time for Jesus’s prophecy to be fulfilled. And how did He do it? By simply allowing Peter to experience the Gospel for himself.