Mark’s Gospel this week brings us that denouement moment when Peter says, ‘You are the Christ’! This is known as the Petrine Declaration and is a statement of great clarity, but as clear as it is, Peter remained to a degree ‘outside’ of the mystery of Christ. Yes, Peter himself whom Christ built His church!
Peter could see WHO Jesus was, and he was bold enough to declare it, and yet this did not make his understanding great enough to comprehend the mystery of suffering. After this declaration, Peter still denied knowing Jesus, and he still did not truly understand Jesus’s words, as we read in today’s Gospel.
What we see in Peter today, millennia later and now far from being an attitude to discourage us, should be a great source of strength. We, too, suffer the same lack of insight, the same inability to digest the mystery of suffering. We tend to see this as a failing on our part; we tend to think that we should overcome such lack of insight. Through the Gospel we glean a most wonderful truth, and it is this: we do not need to fully understand. Instead, we should see Jesus’s example and emulate it. As I often remind myself, if we knew all there was, we would be God and have no need for another!
Unlike the disciples, we know the Passion and Death of Christ, we reenact it each year and at every Mass, every single week as we are invited to enter that story for our own salvation. Peter did not have that knowledge and perhaps only later, when the words of Jesus came true. Yet, we are caught in our own cycles of pain and suffering, and this can be just as difficult as what Peter experienced because it effects our faith in God.
We do not know what is coming our way, around the next corner of life’s journey. But we give ourselves in love, knowing that he is with us from his Cross, lighting our way. As St John Henry Newman put it: “Let me be thy blind instrument. I ask not to see. I ask not to know. I ask simply to be used.” And, in the hymn by that same saint, we hear those comforting words: “Lead kindly light, amid the circling gloom, lead thou me on… one step enough for me.”