The Making of an Apostle

by R. J. Campbell

Simon Acknowledges Jesus to be the Christ.

So far our Lord seems to have said little or nothing to His disciples in regard to His own personality. He must have had certain reasons for this course, the principal one being, no doubt, that He shrank from arousing mistaken expectations in the minds of His followers. They looked for a hero Messiah, a great liberator, a secular prince. Jesus knew from experience how extremely difficult it is to change any man's point of view, or to dislodge a prepossession from his mind, hence He preferred to allow His character to produce its own impression, and from this new standing ground to raise men's ideas of the functions of Messiah. His ministry would have been seriously maimed by any premature insistence upon His supernatural claims, indeed, the danger was on certain occasions only narrowly averted. At one time the people would have taken Him by force to make Him a king, at another time they welcomed Him to Jerusalem with hosannas. He was often addressed as the Son of David, a description applicable only to the Christ, as the ready reply of the Pharisees to His own question on a critical occasion clearly shows. "What think ye of Christ? Whose son is He?" They answered without hesitation, "The Son of David." Jesus had no wish to conceal His pretensions, but on the other hand He was careful not to arouse misconception as to His real character by declaring them. This reticence puzzled the religious leaders a good deal, as is evident from their somewhat peremptory demand, "How long dost Thou make us to doubt? If Thou art the Christ, tell us plainly."

With the disciples themselves Jesus pursued the same course, for they were liable to the same danger, the danger of misapprehending the real nature of Messiahship. How long He refrained from speaking plainly on the subject we cannot determine; but some time after the return of the Apostles from the preaching mission He thought the time had come to elicit from them a theory of His Person. One day, on His way through the villages of Cæsarea Philippi, He suddenly put to His followers the question, "Who do men say that I am?" and they answered, "Some say John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others one of the prophets." Jesus continued His interrogation by the further inquiry: "But whom say ye that I am?" Matthew, Mark and Luke[[1]] are all agreed that Peter furnished the desired response, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Matthew's account is the most circumstantial and conveys most distinctly the impression that Jesus was pleased with the answer. His words of commendation to Simon on this occasion are a remarkable extension of the prophecy contained in His first greeting to him as set forth in John i. 42. Matthew's version is "Blessed art thou Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven. And I also say unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

From this point Simon the fisherman becomes merged in Peter the Apostle. His training had now reached a point when his spiritual perceptions were sharpened and his faith in Jesus had led to the ejaculation which is the fundamental article of the creed of Christendom. Jesus's reference to Simon on this occasion has advanced somewhat in fulness since the day of their first meeting. Then He had stated, "Thou shall be called a rock," now He avers, "Blessed art thou. Thou hast been taught of God; thou art a rock, and on this rock will I build My Church." Here was a high distinction for the first apostle; a trust was committed to him, the guardianship of the newly-formed Church, and how much was involved in that he himself at this particular moment could not by any means foresee. Much discipline is yet needed ere he becomes fit to undertake the grand responsibility. Probably he does not shrink from the task, for he knows not its magnitude, neither is he modest in regard to his own qualifications for it, as will presently appear. He is to be taught by failure and humiliation that to follow Jesus is a way of the cross, that power for the duty is resident, not in Peter the Apostle but in Christ who gave the commission and in the Father who revealed to him the truth about the Son of God.

The period upon the consideration of which we have now entered was a time of spiritual ups and downs for the Apostle Peter. He seems to have been too easily elated, though as easily abased. He now began to feel his importance, and was doubtless somewhat exalted in spirit by our Lord's emphatic commendation of him in the presence of the Twelve. He had declared Jesus to be the Christ, but a Christ who learned obedience through sufferings was as yet unthinkable to him. This crude perception is the explanation of the mistake into which he immediately fell. No sooner had Jesus elicited the declaration that He Himself was the Christ than, after charging the disciples to say nothing to any man in regard to it, He began to teach them the true nature of Messiahship. In their several accounts of what follows the Synoptists differ a little. Matthew (xvii. 21) implies that some time may have elapsed ere Jesus began to systematically instruct His disciples concerning His vocation and death. Luke (ix. 22) states that He continued at once in the same interview to prepare them for His coming humiliation, shame, and death. Luke—who, as Dr. Bruce remarks always spares the Twelve—says nothing about any further interference of Peter in the conversation.

It is to Mark that we must turn this time for the clearest account of what took place. Peter, at any rate, never spares himself in his narrations. In chapter viii. 31, Mark tells us that after Peter's avowal, "Thou art the Christ," Jesus began to teach them that "The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again." It is noteworthy that in this Gospel Peter says not a word about the extraordinary blessing and promise bestowed upon himself in consequence of his acknowledgment of the Messiahship of Jesus. He does, however, faithfully and humbly tell us of the severe rebuff he received for his presumption. He was very sorry to hear Jesus predict His own sufferings and death. Such a fate did not at all accord with Peter's idea of the destiny of the Christ. He could not understand it, and we may suppose he loved Jesus too much to be willing that He should suffer anything at all, either of humiliation, rejection or failure. He was not prepared, either, to believe that his own new primacy over the Apostles was to result in nothing better than tragedy and defeat. He clung, as we shall observe, for a long time to the notion of worldly honour and advancement. Such rewards he conceived to be in the natural order of things; they were the result of his preconception of the functions of the Christ of God.

Perhaps, too, Peter felt somewhat elated and self-important on account of the words which Jesus had just applied to him, and pluming himself upon his exceptional privilege he undertook the duty of reproving his Master. For, Mark tells us, "Peter took Him and began to rebuke Him." A severe reprimand followed. "Jesus turned about, and, seeing His disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, Get thee behind Me, Satan, for thou mindest not the things of God but the things of men." Matthew adds that Jesus also said, "Thou art a stumbling-block unto Me." Luke kindly omits all reference to the painful moment. Thus, in the course of a few moments, Peter achieved a great spiritual success and was guilty of an unspiritual blunder—he was exalted and humiliated, commended and reproved. In after days he remembered with peculiar distinctness his lack of the true spirit at this hour, and by Mark's agency, therefore, faithfully reproduced for the Church of Christ the record of his well-deserved abasement. All three Synoptists conclude their account of this scene by repeating the great saying of Jesus: "If any man would come after Me let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whosoever would save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the Gospel's shall save it. For what doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For what should a man give in exchange for his life?" Most of us find this lesson as difficult to learn as apparently Peter did.

The singular eminence of the religion of Jesus depends upon a right apprehension of the principle just illustrated. The Christian life is and must be a Via Crucis, yet at the same time is the way that leadeth unto life. The principle of dying to live as enunciated by Christ differs from that of even the greatest of His predecessors in the recognition that true gladness is conditioned by self-crucifixion. Human nature has been slow to learn the lesson. The great renunciation of Gautama Buddha, for example, consisted in the repression of individuality and the destruction of the natural desires. The effect of his system was negative; the higher life was to be one of self-suppression, a very different thing, surely, from self-crucifixion. Gautama placed the ideal in ceasing to live; Christ, on the other hand, taught His followers to live more deeply, truly and grandly than before. To follow Jesus, now as always, means to feel more and not less, to add to the sum of our interests, and not to take from them, to raise the standard of our hopes, not to depress it. Like Gautama, He calls for a renunciation, but that renunciation is the gateway into larger life. The solemn gladness of Christian experience finds its parallel in no other teaching that the world has ever received. How can we be surprised that ascetics and hedonists within the bosom of the Christian Church itself have so frequently and lamentably mistaken the spirit of their Master's teaching? The ideal of Thomas à Kempis, in spite of its beauty, is no more that of Jesus than was the ideal of Gautama. How slowly men come to learn that peace and tribulation, joy and suffering, gladness and the Cross, are not incompatible, but the very conditions of each other!

Before we visit Peter with our censures because of his unmistakable reluctance to accept Christ's vision of the cross let us give heed to ourselves. The same mistakes may take very different form. With many of us the ideal of human felicity which we call Christian is essentially Pagan. Our very thanksgivings show it. We are grateful to God for troubles averted, happiness preserved, fortune assured; we tacitly assume that the opposite of these things would have been an evil. We praise the goodness of God in shielding us from the untoward and calamitous, and though it may seem hardly worth while to say it, some naturally amiable characters with a bias toward holy things have lost their faith and lost their sweetness at one and the same time with the arrival of sorrow. Far be it from me to insist that men should cease to thank God for the sweetness and the joy of life, but if we lay the stress here and refuse to take the cross when it is presented to us we have shut ourselves off from the attainment of that highest good, which is to know the fellowship of the sufferings of Christ. "Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." If the clear truth of the necessary connection between the assumption of the cross and the attainment of true blessedness were to be grasped by those who seek to follow Christ, there would be fewer of the sad failures so frequently apparent amongst those who are disappointed with the result of their faith in God.

I do believe, what you call trust
Was self-delusion at the best: for, see!
So long as God would kindly pioneer
A path for you, and screen you from the world,
Procure you full exemption from man's lot,
Man's common hopes and fears, on the mere pretext
Of your engagement in His service—yield you
A limitless licence, make you God, in fact,
And turn your slave—you were content to say
Most courtly praises! What is it, at last,
But selfishness without example? None
Could trace God's will so plain as you, while yours
Remained implied in it; but now you fail,
And we, who prate about that Will, are fools!
In short, God's service is established here
As He determines fit, and not your way,
And this you cannot brook.[[2]]

Peter's remonstrance here is but an example of a very common human feeling in regard to the things of Christ. It exhibited a certain immaturity of character and crudeness of perception such as, in spite of his genuine affection for his Master, disqualified him at this stage from understanding Him.

[[1]] Matt. xvi. 16, Mark viii. 29, Luke ix. 20.

[[2]] Browning, "Paracelsus."