I Failed Where Everyone Could See

Before we go one step further, I need to tell you how to read this half of the book, because if you read it wrong it’ll do you more harm than good.

There are twelve men coming. Each of the next chapters hands you one of them, and each one carries a specific thing you might be carrying.

Do not try to figure out which one you are.

That’s the mistake, and it’s the natural thing to do, and I’d do it myself. You’ll get four chapters in and start deciding you’re the Thomas of the group and the rest doesn’t apply.

You’re all of them. Most weeks you’re three or four of them before Wednesday. You wake up doubting, spend the morning ashamed of something from 2011, get angry at lunch about a thing from thirty years ago, and by dinner you’re convinced none of it ever took in you at all.

That’s not instability. That’s a Tuesday for a person who’s been out here as long as you have. So take them as they come, and let the ones that aren’t yours today wait for a day when they are.

Now. Peter.

Everybody knows he denied Christ three times. Almost nobody knows what happened before that, and the before is where this chapter actually lives.

Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift all of you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.

Read that again slowly, because there are three things in it and every one of them lands on you.

One. Jesus knew. He tells Peter what’s coming before Peter has any idea he’s capable of it. The failure was not a surprise to anybody but Peter.

Two. He had already prayed about it. Past tense. I have prayed for you. The praying was done before the falling started. Whatever was happening in that courtyard, it was not happening outside of somebody’s attention.

Three, and this is the one. When you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.

When. Not if.

He hands Peter an assignment on the other side of a failure Peter hasn’t committed yet and doesn’t believe he’s capable of. The job is already assigned. The fall is already accounted for. The plan for Peter’s life on the far side of the worst night of it is already made, and it’s a bigger job than the one he had before.

Sit with that a minute if you’ve spent twenty years assuming that what you did took you off the list.

And Peter, God bless him, argues.

Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.

He means it. That’s the thing. He’s not posturing. He’s a man who genuinely believes he is a certain kind of person, and he is about to find out he is not, and there is nothing anyone can say to him beforehand that will make it land.

You know that man. You were that man. Most of us find out what we’re made of about four hours after we’ve told somebody what we’re made of.

Then the courtyard.

He follows at a distance. That detail always gets me. He didn’t run. He followed, but not close, which is the exact posture of a man whose courage is real and insufficient at the same time.

There’s a fire in that courtyard. John tells us it was a charcoal fire, and he uses an unusual word for it, and you should hold onto that because it comes back.

A servant girl looks at him. Not a soldier. Not a priest. A girl working the door.

I don’t know him.

Twice more, in other words. And then, Luke says, while he was still speaking, the rooster crowed. The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter.

He was in the room. Peter didn’t deny him behind his back. He did it close enough to be seen doing it, and then he was seen doing it.

And he went outside and wept bitterly.

Here’s what I want you to notice about that failure, because it’s the specific thing that makes Peter yours and not somebody else’s.

It was public, it was verbal, and it was witnessed by people who were nobody.

He didn’t fail in a great test in front of the Sanhedrin. He failed in front of a servant girl and some men warming their hands. The audience for the worst moment of his life was a handful of people whose names we don’t have.

That’s how it goes. Nobody’s collapse happens in front of the people they’d have chosen. It happens in front of a girl at a door, a receptionist, a kid at the counter, your daughter’s friend’s mother in a grocery store. Small witnesses to a large failure, and somehow that makes it worse, not better.

Now the repair, and this is the whole reason Peter goes first in this half of the book.

Start here. When the women get to the tomb, the message they’re given is go, tell his disciples and Peter.

And Peter.

He gets his name pulled out of the group. Not because he’s the leader. Because he is at that moment the one man in that city who would have assumed the message was not for him.

Then, later, the shore. Breakfast. And John, who is careful with words, tells us there was a charcoal fire waiting.

That’s the same unusual word he used for the fire in the courtyard. It appears twice in the entire New Testament, both times in John, and those are the two places.

Jesus rebuilt the room.

Same kind of fire, same smell, same early-morning cold. He put Peter back in the sensory conditions of the worst night of his life, and then he asked him three questions. People have counted those three against the three denials for about as long as anybody has read the passage. John does not draw the line himself. He just puts the number there and lets you find it.

Do you love me?

Three times, until Peter is hurt by the third one, because Peter finally understands the counting.

Two things about that breakfast, and then I’ll let you go.

First: the repair matched the wound. Public failure, public restoration. Three denials, three questions. A fire, then a fire. He didn’t settle it privately and leave it there. He did it on a beach in front of the other men, in the open, using the same materials.

I think that’s mercy, though it wouldn’t feel like it at the time. A private forgiveness would have left Peter forgiven and still known as the man who denied him. The other men were there for the fall. They needed to be there for the other part.

Second, and bigger: the restoration came with a job. Feed my sheep.

Not you can stay. Not I forgive you, sit down. He gets handed responsibility for people, which is the exact thing you’d assume a man like that would be permanently disqualified from.

And look at it next to what he was handed before he fell. Strengthen your brothers, then feed my sheep. Two gospels, two different words, and if anything the second one is bigger than the first.

Here’s your move.

Say the actual thing you did, out loud, one time, in specific words.

Not the general version. Not I made a lot of mistakes back then and not I wasn’t the man I should have been. Those are fog, and fog is comfortable, and I told you in chapter one that a general condition has no repair because there’s nothing specific enough to fix.

Name it the way Peter’s got named. Three times, a courtyard, a girl at a door. That level of detail.

You don’t have to say it to a person yet. Say it to God, in the truck, same as last time. One sentence, specific, out loud.

And then, because this is the part people skip, sit still afterward and consider the possibility that the assignment on the other side of it was made before you fell, and that nobody has withdrawn it, and that the reason you can’t see it is that you’ve been looking at the courtyard for twenty years instead of the beach.

Peter’s fire was going to be rebuilt whether or not he believed it.

He didn’t believe it. He’d gone back to fishing.

That’s where they found him.