Bishop David M. O’Connell, C.M., dedicated his 2020 Lenten reflection on the story of Peter’s role in Christ’s Passion. Excerpts follow: Except for Jesus, no figure receives more attention in the Passion narratives than Peter. The evangelists differ in recounting many significant details about Jesus’ final days – what he said at the Last Supper, who was present at his crucifixion, what words he spoke from the Cross – but the four Gospels agree in relating that Peter denied Jesus three times. Nowhere else in the Passion narratives do all the Gospels so specifically converge.
. . . Peter’s story is meant to encourage Christians who were already suffering persecution by the time the Gospels were written. His death as a martyr, somewhere around the year 64 A.D., stood as a clear witness that, having failed initially, he eventually took up his cross with courage and followed Jesus. Surely, in difficult times, many early Christians, like Peter, experienced their own weaknesses and failed, as we do. But the evangelists assured them that there is hope: change, growth, conversion are always possible. Can great weakness, grave failures and repentant love coexist within the same person? Peter’s story says yes.
. . . The challenge posed to us as we begin this holy season of Lent: “watch and pray.” Peter figures so prominently in the Passion narratives that he becomes a symbol of and a model for our own relationship with Christ . . . Permit me to close with a prayer in the words of the second letter attributed to Peter in the New Testament: I ask the crucified and risen Lord to strengthen all of us in these days, so that we might keep our eyes fixed on him constantly as “on a lamp shining in a dark place until the first streaks of dawn appear and the morning star rises in your hearts” (2 Pt 1:19).
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