But Peter said vehemently, “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you”  (NRSV, Mark 14:31)

Simon Peter was among those who had known Our Lord the longest.  It was through St John Baptist, whose follower he had been, that Peter first met Our Lord.  Later he was called by him to be a disciple, and then was chosen to be one of the Twelve Apostles, a personal representative of Our Lord himself.

In those early days Peter displayed those qualities of weakness and strength which are typical of self-confident and optimistic characters.  He was a man who was always sure of his own mind and had complete confidence in his own judgement.  His pride gave him an exaggerated opinion of his own capabilities and made him averse to taking advice from other people.  His natural enthusiasm produced in him that impulsiveness which was his most noticeable and endearing quality, so that in any moment of crisis or decision, you could always count on Peter to be the first to speak or the first to act.

Those features which make him the most interesting personality among the Apostles carried with them their own weaknesses.  He used to plunge into action without looking ahead to see what it might involve, and as a result he would find when it was too late to turn back, that he had taken on more than he could cope with and all his strength was expended on the first impulse.  An early example of how his impulsive pride led him to overreach himself was his abortive attempt to walk on the water to meet Our Lord on the Lake.

Yet Our Lord recognised in Peter the natural leader of the Apostles with his resourcefulness, his buoyant vigour, his enthusiasm, and his remarkable powers of recovery after a fall.  Our Lord, with his penetrating insight into people’s characters, saw that once Peter had learnt humility and accepted his limitations, then he would be as unshakeable as a rock, a firm and sure foundation for the Christian Church.

So we read that Our Lord, when he first met St Peter and long before his character was strong enough to deserve the title, looked fixedly on him – as he was to do again in very different circumstances – and said, “So you are Simon, the son of John?  You shall be called Cephas – Peter – a Rock” (John 1:42).

It was thus appropriately enough that Peter justified his leadership of the Apostles by being the first to declare that Our Lord was the Messiah, the long awaited King and Deliverer.  But it was also typical of the Apostle that, puffed up by the praise with which Our Lord rewarded him for that great declaration, he lost no time in reprimanding his Master for saying that as the Messiah he must suffer and die.

For some while to come Peter was to go on thinking that he knew better than anyone, better even than Jesus himself.  Nowhere, however, was Peter’s instability more clearly demonstrated than during the closing hours of Our Lord’s earthly life.

Priding himself on his resourcefulness he was well satisfied that he would be more than a match for any trouble there might be in store.  Hence, when Our Lord foretold his desertion by the Twelve, Peter at once exclaimed, “Even though all become deserters, I will not” (NRSV, Mark 14:29).  When Our Lord thereupon warned Peter that before cockcrow he would have denied three times that he even knew his Master, the Apostle flatly contradicted him and by his example he also led the rest to protest their unfailing loyalty (Luke 22:34; Mark 14:31).

Suspecting trouble ahead, Peter had taken the precaution of arming himself with a sword before leaving for Gethsemane.  The weapon gave him an added sense of confidence and security, and he now felt that he could disregard not only Our Lord’s warning of his denial, but also his urgent and repeated requests in Gethsemane to keep awake and pray.  It is noteworthy that at this point in St Mark’s Gospel, Our Lord in rousing the sleeping Apostle addressed him as Simon for the first time since the selection of the Twelve.  He is now, not Peter the Rock, but Simon the man.  The arrival of Judas and the mob found him ill-prepared.  One quick cut with his sword at the first man to lay hands on his Master and he fled through the trees.

Even now he was not humbled, but in spite of his desertion in Gethsemane, he trusted in his shaken courage to face the unknown hazards of the courtyard of the high priest’s palace.  So far, however, from atoning for his conduct in the Garden, it now needed only a word from a maid servant to make the chief Apostle deny all connection with the Master to whom he had so recently pledged his loyalty even at the cost of life itself.

When the ill-favoured company, in which he now so unwillingly found himself, gathered round him, he gave way completely and, as St Mark tells us, he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear on oath, “I do not know this man you are talking about” (NRSV, 14:71).  And at that moment the crowing of the cock, which heralded the dawn of Good Friday, was carried to him on the breeze (Matthew 26:74), and for the second time Jesus looked fixedly at Peter.  And Peter, his pride now humbled at last, went out and burst into tears (Luke 22:61, 62).  It was thus that he came to the moment of truth.

And it was that Peter who was the Rock on which the Church was built, not Peter the proud, so sure of his own judgement and ability, but Peter the humble who had learnt to know himself as he really was.

Over the entrance to the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi there were inscribed these words, “Know yourself”, and until we do know ourselves we can make no progress in our life and relationship with God.  It is extraordinarily easy to go through life with an entirely false opinion of oneself, being blinded by pride to one’s true state; shutting one’s eyes to what one is; and believing only what one wants to believe.

True self-knowledge, however, is to see ourselves not as others see us but as our Maker sees us; and the first essential step towards that is the practice of self-examination undertaken with a sincerity that is determined to look for and to discover the cold, unpalatable truth.  But to take a realistic view by seeing ourselves as we really are in the sight of the all-holy God, to whom all our heart is open, all our desires are known, and from whom none of our secrets is hidden – to do that is an undertaking which our pride and self-esteem find most offensive.

And yet, when individuals see how little of their heart and mind is given to God; and how often they commit the sins of anger, envy, ill-will, an unforgiving spirit and such like; when they scrutinise their innermost thoughts, their words and their actions and acknowledge with shame all that is wrong – then they give up pretending.  Then they admit that they are what the Prayer Book rightly calls “a miserable sinner”, that is, a sinner who needs the mercy and forgiveness of God.

Those who have never made a detailed and systematic examination of all the sins they can remember having committed since their earliest years; and have written them out, without any conscious omissions, on a sheet of paper, and brought them in penitence to Christ and laid them at the foot of his Cross – those who have never done that can see themselves only as reflected in a polished surface dimly and not face to face.  And if they happen to think that they can get on well enough without worrying about their sins or seeking the forgiveness of God, they thereby unwittingly expose their ignorance both of what they are and of what they ought to be.

But those who this Lent make for the first time in their life a searching and honest written self-examination like that, will be well on their way to a new life with God.  For that will be their moment of truth.