Today is a day for pondering the ministries of the three most significant authorities in the earliest days of the church. Today is named after two of them – Peter and Paul – but in our second reading a third figure slips into focus – the Beloved Disciple, often identified with St John. How are these three figures related to one another in that early church? And the answer to that is, not easily. It is ironic that we celebrate Peter and Paul on the same day when the earliest evidence we have of their relationship is of a huge falling out. The setting is Antioch Peter is happily eating a meal with Paul and some gentile members of his little church. Visitors arrive from the church in Jerusalem where the shadowy figure of James, the Lord’s brother, is the leader. They are shocked to find Peter in such a setting because, we assume, the meal hasn’t been prepared according to Jewish law. Peter and several others hastily get up from the table and are just about to leave when Paul delivers a furious lecture about Christians not being justified by works of the law but through faith in Christ. How things subsequently work out we are not told; Acts presents us with an eirenic view of the life of the early church in which such controversies are smoothed over.
The relationship between Peter and John is rather more obscure. What we read in the final chapter of John’s gospel has a strong element of pathos in it because it hints at the different fate of these two dominant figures. The readers of this gospel presumably know that Peter has suffered a martyr’s death – the supreme way of glorifying God and witnessing to faith in Christ. Peter had found himself as helpless as an old man in the face of those who put him to death. For the Beloved disciple, however, discipleship has worked out very differently; his followers believed that he would live to see the return of Jesus; we assume he lived to a great age but this last chapter of John’s gospel is being written in the aftershock of John’s death when the assumptions of the community have had to be re-written, because their leader has ended his life as literally a helpless old man.
We sense in Peter’s curiosity about the beloved Disciple’s future a kind of rivalry – which Jesus answers firmly – ‘What is that to you – you must follow me.” If we look back through John’s gospel we find other such hints at a kind of one-up-man-ship. John reaches the tomb of Jesus before Peter and believes without going in, whereas Peter goes in and comes out still wondering; John lies closest to Jesus at the last supper and is the first to recognise the risen Jesus at the lake side; Mary is entrusted to John at the cross, where Peter is conspicuously absent. This is not meant to imply that the Gospel is somehow anti-Petrine; it simply makes clear that Peter did not understand Jesus as profoundly as did the beloved Disciple; the dialogue between Jesus and Peter goes out of its way to stress Peter’s pastoral role – ‘Feed my sheep’ – but the basis of that role is his love of Jesus, not as in Matthew’s gospel his recognition of Jesus’ Messiahship. John’s gospel clearly has a lot more to say about Jesus than that he is the Messiah or Christ. The Johannine church seems to have had both more complex beliefs and a different kind of structure to the Petrine church. The community of the beloved disciple was more adventurous in its theology even than Paul, and it gave much greater authority to spirit inspired teaching than to designated church officials, like Peter.
We needn’t push this exploration any further – it’s purpose is simply to show something of the complexity of the life of the early church, and compare it with the complexity of the church in our own time. Preachers are sometimes asked, ‘Why do you make it all so complicated?’ And sometimes that question is justified because we’ve complicated things simply through muddled thinking. But it’s also true that life is just complicated. Map makers can’t be blamed because their contours and coastlines are all too squiggly, that’s just the way the surface of the earth is. Preachers can’t be blamed because our human contours are equally if not more squiggly. Human relationships and actions and organizations are inevitably complex and it is a spiritual and moral failing not to recognize that brute fact or brute squiggle.
If we do fall into the trap of desiring greater simplicity, the outcome can take many forms and all of them damaging. Sometimes we want to force things to conform to a pattern of our own devising and that is simply an exercise of power which can result in intolerance and tyranny. Sometimes we try to take refuge in the supposed simplicities of the past, and of tradition, but as we have seen in the case of the earliest apostles, such a refuge is illusory. Sometimes in the face of complex reality, we retreat into a spiritual world, where love or community, or meditation becomes the answer to everything. Or finally the quest for simplicity focuses on an unquestionable authority, a book or a prophet, a Pope or an executive institution. And to such we ascribe the authority of God vested in this book, this person, this institution. And yet we only need to look at the statement in St John’s gospel that the Spirit will lead us into all truth to see how theologically diminished such a position is. John does not say this book will lead you into all truth, he points to the fact that all truth wherever we find it is God’s truth, because our whole world is sustained by the divine spirit. The challenge to us is to find ways of discerning the work of the spirit and that is where things get complicated. How are we to discern and receive the truth God wills to show us? How do we discern the means whereby truth is gifted to us?
We can only begin to answer that question by looking at the way in which the truth of Jesus emerges in his life. How did Jesus know what to do, how did the power and authority of God work through his life? We might compare his life with the temptations to simplicity I outlined earlier. Clearly he didn’t seek refuge in tradition – his attitude to his Jewish inheritance, both in tradition and in text was a complex one – his opponents were never able to pin him down. He refused to identify with the zealots and their desire to liberate Israel though the power of violence yet he seems to have had a zealot among his disciples. He did not take refuge in a private spirituality – as we might say the Dead Sea community seems to have done. He was a part of the political and religious complexity of everyday Jewish life and in the end it killed him because he refused to exercise power and authority in a way that anyone could recognise or in a way that his followers wanted him to. He risked failure and in the eyes of the world he failed. And if we rewrite that career in terms of a success because of the resurrection, then we are doing very odd things to the meaning of success.
It was not of course that he simply and passively succumbed to failure. The gospels give us a paradoxical picture of someone freely choosing the path before him but resigning control over that path. So if we attribute authority to Jesus as we must, it is an authority which does not provide us with an easy way out of the complexity of human living. The authority of Jesus does not prevent Peter and Paul and John seeing things differently and following different and sometimes contradictory paths that at times clash with one another.
And that perhaps shows a path to the Bishops of the Lambeth conference. There is no way in which they can resolve their differences by an exercise of power and authority because none of them possesses such authority however much he or she would like to exercise it. Authority is a gift of God and the gift is given to those who are willing to spend much time together in prayer and honest and searching discussion looking fully in the face the personal, cultural and political complexity not just of their corner of the globe but of the whole globe. Peter was told by Jesus that in his youth he chose his path freely but that a time would come where he would be taken where he did not want to go. In accepting that he would be glorifying God. Only if the bishops of the Anglican communion are open to being taken where they do not want to go – will there be a chance of their finding a place that is new to all of them in which God’s glory might yet be revealed. Amen.