God the Son

And then one day Peter met Jesus by the Lake of Galilee.  Jesus asked Peter if he might use his boat to teach the people from, so that he could be heard by the great crowd which lined the beach.  When he had finished speaking to them, Jesus told Peter to pull out into deeper water and put his nets overboard.  “Master”, said Peter, “we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.  Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets” (NRSV, Luke 5:5).  And they did so and caught so many fish that their nets started breaking.

Peter follows Jesus

And as Peter stood there next to Jesus, he realised that his sins made him completely unfit to be in the same boat with so holy a person as Jesus, and he fell on his knees and said, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”  And Jesus said, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people” (NRSV, Luke 5:8,10).  When they had brought their boats to the beach, Peter, with James and John, left everything and followed Jesus.

So for the next three years Peter lived in Jesus’ company.  The teaching of Jesus captured him completely.  As the Temple guards said later, “Never has anyone spoken like this!” (NRSV, John 7:46).  Jesus drew out the full meaning of the Ten Commandments and summed them up by saying, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (NRSV, Matthew 5:48).

The perfection and power of Jesus

But Peter soon found out something which was quite amazing: he found out that Jesus was completely perfect himself.  As Peter put it in a letter years after, “He committed no sin…” (NRSV, 1 Peter 2:22).  Indeed, he did what only God himself could do, he forgave other people’s sins.  It was absolutely plain to Peter that Jesus was different from anyone he had ever heard about, in fact, different from anyone who had ever lived.  He had power to put a sudden stop to a raging storm on the Lake of Galilee by just saying, “Peace! Be still!” (NRSV, Mark 4:39).  He had power over diseases; he even had power over death itself.  You remember how he brought Lazarus back to life again after he had been dead and buried for four days (John 11).

Jesus: true God and true Man

Besides all this, Jesus spoke as though he were God himself.  He said that he had existed for ever (John 8:58), and that at the end of the world all humankind, millions and millions and millions of people would be judged by him.  Indeed, people said that he was mad and had a devil in him (John 10:20).  If Jesus had been just a man and no more, they would have been right.  Only a man who is either mad or bad talks as though he were God.  But Peter knew that Jesus was neither mad nor bad.  He was completely holy and true.

It was the Resurrection of Jesus which finally showed the disciples who he really was, and on Low Sunday Thomas put it into words, saying, “My Lord and my God!” (NRSV, John 20:28).

Saviour

But they learnt more than that.  On Maundy Thursday evening, a few hours before his Crucifixion, Jesus had said at the Last Supper, “…this is my blood of the new covenant (testament), which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (NRSV, Matthew 26:28).  And Peter knew that Jesus, by his death on the Cross, had won forgiveness for him and had taken away his sins.  As he put it, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness…(NRSV, 1 Peter 2:24).