ST. PETER HAD IT ALL GOING FOR HIM…EVEN AFTER HE STARTED SINKING

5/15/20

In the course of my daily bible readings today, I came today to one of my favorite, and certainly, for me, the most self-descriptive verses in the bible, i.e., Matthew 14, 22-33.   In shorthand, this one of the three Gospel depictions of Jesus’s walking on the water, but this one is unique in that it describes Peter’s joining Jesus in His aquatic stroll.

Summarizing the passage…

After the disciples, huddled together in a storm-tossed boat, realize, to their amazement, that Jesus is walking on the water in their direction, Peter, in his usual impetuous style (See THE APOSTLES:   HOW COULD THIS PACK OF REJECTS AND SCRUBS BECOME GOD’S ALL-STAR TEAM?, 11/25/18), tells, not asks, Jesus to call him onto the water.   Jesus says something like “Okay; have at it.”   Peter gets out and, lo and behold, he, too, is walking on the water.  Peter thinks this is pretty nifty until he looks around and says something to the effect “Wait a second; it’s as stormy as hell out here and I’m walking on water!”  (Yours truly’s words, not necessarily Peter’s or Matthew’s)  He then panics and begins to sink.  Jesus reaches out and catches him and follows with

“O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”

That passage describes much of my life and probably much of many of yours.   There are those days, or even weeks or months, when we can’t do any wrong, when everything is going right.   We are hitting the cover off the ball, literally or figuratively, succeeding in everything we try.  We can’t miss.   Then we stop and tell ourselves something like “Wait.   This can’t be me.  I can’t be doing all this.  I’m not good enough.”   And then we, figuratively, sink, and go back to our more typical, perhaps mediocre, or at least not out of the ordinary experience.  We lose faith.

The passage, like just about any passage in the bible, works on many levels and addresses many things.   The passage, on its face, speaks of faith in God and uses Peter, as do many passages in the New Testament, as an archetype of us.   He is forever seizing the bull by the horns without first stopping to think that he is dealing with a 2,000 pound animal.   He just goes out and does it, brimming with enthusiasm and bravado.  And it works.   He can do anything he sets out to do, including walking on water.  Then, like us, he realizes that he is a mere mortal and therefore shouldn’t be doing these things.   He is, and we are, right; we are mere mortals and walking on water is not something that the laws of physics and the like allow us to do.   We can do all things with God if we have faith even the size of a mustard seed, as Jesus tells us in another passage, and we might believe that.  But, c’mon…walking on water?    That’s lunatic stuff.   The point of the passage, in this interpretation, is not that God empowers and wants us to do comparative circus tricks like walking on water and casting mountains into the sea, even though we could if we had enough faith.  It is that He empowers and wants us to do at least equally astounding things in His service and, by extension, in service to others.  We tap into this power through faith in Him.

That, however, is only one interpretation of Peter’s stroll on the lake.  Another involves faith in ourselves and is not limited to those of a religious or spiritual, bent.   All of us have our better days, as described above, when we do everything right and simply can’t miss.   Sometimes these are more than days, but, almost invariably, they end.   We start to miss things.   We flub numbers.    We strike out.  We drop the ball. We say things we don’t mean to say.   We anger people needlessly.   We get down on those around us and ourselves.   We do this because we lose faith…in ourselves.   I can’t be having this great a day; I’m not “normally” this good at whatever it is I am being good at today.  And that is normal; realizing that we are not superhuman is one of the realizations that make us fully human.

Peter’s in some ways ill-fated stroll on the sea is a story of many things, but mostly about the weakness of our faith in God and in ourselves.  The two are far from mutually exclusive.   God wants us to have faith in both Him and in ourselves, and the second derives from the former.   God has given all of us the tools we need to do great, yet different, things.  To the extent we realize where these tools came from is the extent to which we will succeed in their application for their intended purpose.  

Faith in one’s self is not at all incompatible with faith in God.  Yes, God wants us to be humble and to trust in, and rely on, Him.  However, humility does not lie in not trusting ourselves but, rather, humility lies in trusting in ourselves and in God, and in the premise that we have more to learn.   That last point is grist for another mill.