Your Mistake Is Not the Last Word on You

Before I preached this narrative sermon to my classmates, I read aloud from John 21:1-19 (NRSV), projected the image below, and lit one candle to bring into the chapel the faint but unmistakable scent of fire.

Your name is Peter.  You remember that night—the night that Jesus was arrested.  It was the night that you did that thing you said you would never do, became what you said you would never be.  How could you forget that?  You never will.

Over and over again the people asked, “Are you not Jesus’ disciple?” and over and over again you said, “I am not.”  Three times.  Three times, just like he said it would be.  And you didn’t just deny Jesus or that you knew who he was.  You denied who he said you were and what he called you to do.

Are you not Jesus’ disciple?

No. No, I am not.

When it happened, you were warming yourself by a charcoal fire.  The air is still thick with the smell of it, even when you aren’t by a fire, because you will never forget that scent.  It’s always been unmistakable, but now it’s the smell of the most humiliating moment of your life.  Every time you warm your hands you relive that shame a little bit more.

And where do you find yourself now but right here at another charcoal fire?  It’s the first time Jesus is sitting with you by a fire since the night you wrapped yourself in the protection of lies.

But that’s not what Jesus talks about.  “Come and have breakfast,” he says, and as he cooks the fish you breathe in the smell of sustenance and wonder if things between you will ever be what they once were, what they should have been.

Here you are sitting down to a feast like nothing has even changed between you.  You became what you swore you would never be and you two have never even talked about it and this silence is actually starting to weigh on you as much as the shame ever has and God—Are you ever going to talk about it?

Jesus breaks bread and gives it to you, and as you reach out to take it, you can still see the wounds in his wrists where they nailed him to the wood.  But the fish are hot and the bread is fresh and you are hungry.  So you let the whole meal go by in friendly conversation, and you don’t ask Jesus about the awful thing burned into your memory to this day.

But he knows, doesn’t he?

And after you’ve eaten together, he speaks.

Your name is Peter.  At least, it is to Jesus.  Isn’t it?

“Simon, Son of John,” he says.  It’s a little like when your mother used to scold you for teasing Andrew when you were kids.  Except there’s a look on Jesus’ face now, and even though all you can think about is the burning coals and the heat of shame, there’s this look on his face and you can’t describe it, but whatever it is means you’re not in trouble.

“Simon, Son of John,” he says, “do you love me more than these?”

You do.  You cherish him.  He tells you to feed his lambs.

Maybe some time passes. You can’t be sure how much, because all that matters is that Jesus turns to you again.

“Do you love me?” he says.

You do.  You cherish him.  He tells you to tend his sheep.

The next time he says it like he knows what hearing a question three times will mean to you.  He says, “Do you love me?”

Someday the story of this conversation is going to be written down in Greek, and many well-meaning preachers are going to focus on the use of different words for love—agape love, phileo love—and what they think those words mean.  Some will preach how this goes to show that, even now, you can’t get where Jesus is or where he wants you to be.

Poor Simon Peter, they’ll say, because they too will never forget the night you denied Jesus and everything you were supposed to be for him.  It will be easy for them to interpret the words to reflect what they already know about you: That you fall short and Jesus needs to meet you in your weakness.  They will shame you even in your redemption.

Maybe they wouldn’t preach it like that if they could hear what you hear.

You and Jesus don’t speak Greek.  You speak Aramaic, and what you hear is the very same question spoken three times.  What you hear is three opportunities to affirm your love and three instructions to cherish Jesus’ people the way you cherish him.  What you hear is Jesus calling you to be the disciple you were always meant to be.  What you hear is the emotion in his voice when his third question both breaks you open and restores you.  What you hear is the voice drowning out the crackle of fire.  What you hear is love.

Jesus calls you Simon, but you both know that you are and forever will be Peter.  You are the rock on which your beloved Jesus will build his church.  You are the one who will shepherd his flock.  You are the one who will speak to the Jews and the Gentiles.  You are the one who will die for them all—for Jesus, for his people.  You are the one who cherishes your friend no matter how ashamed you feel of your failure.

Peter, someday a Christian named C.S. Lewis will write about this kind of love between people who know each other the way you and Jesus do—that between friends, the question Do you love me? means, Do you see the same truth?  Do you care about the same truth?  Lewis won’t mention you or this conversation with your Lord, but if you could know what he would write, you might say, “Yes!  That’s what Jesus is asking of me.  Do we see the same truth?  Am I ready to care for his people as much as I care for him?  Am I ready to lay down my life?  Am I able to bear the name Disciple, to be the person Jesus made me and do what he called me to do?”

And Jesus thinks you are.  At Passover, you told him you wanted to follow him wherever he was going, but back then you weren’t ready.  Now, Jesus says, “Follow me.”  And you will.  The last word on you in this story is not your mistake.

And you don’t know this yet, Peter, but someday millions of Jesus’ people will put the ashes of burnt palms on their foreheads. Those sooty dark smudges will remind them that they are mortal and that they have fallen short of what Jesus has called them to be.  But there but for the grace of God, those ashes will mean so much more.  Through the ashes, anointed on each forehead in the form of a cross, Jesus will speak to their hearts: “My friend, do you love me?”

And if they can hear those words above the crackle of fire, and each and every reminder of fall and failure, then like you, Peter, the people you nourish and lead and all of their spiritual descendants—they too will know who they are and what they are meant to do . . .

If only they will hear love over the persistent whisper of shame.

Roman Catholic: The Entertainment Factor

by C.M. Schott, contributor

Whenever something more-than-natural is afoot in film and TV—and often even when it isn’t—the protagonists turn Catholic. I had this realization brought home to me recently when, during an episode of Heroes, of all things, Peter Patrelli found himself in St. Patrick’s Cathedral trying (not quite in vain) to strike a bargain with Jesus.

This scene led me to think of so many situations in film, TV, literature, and music when the “je ne sais quoi” of Roman Catholicism seemed irresistible to artists: there are fallen-away Catholic characters like Sydney in The Pretender (remember that series?) and Grissom in CSI; sci-fi is rife with religious metaphor—even the “Gridlock” episode of Doctor Who features heavily Christological (if not Catholic) themes; and the explanation for all things Supernatural and Buffy always comes around to some (usually distorted) echo of Catholic dogma. And for that matter, can we forget the Jewish-born, irreligious Paul Simon with his “crayon rosary” and the poet’s crooked rhyme reading, “Holy holy is his sacrament”?

I think, before we pronounce a knee-jerk condemnation of the travesty that mainstream art usually makes of Catholic doctrine, it’s worth asking what exactly attracts even atheists to the Church when they deal with things greater than man—to the Church specifically, not just to theism or even to Christianity in general. The answers, I think, are not just positive but even hopeful, despite all appearances.

The obvious answer, which leads us into the more meaningful one, is that Catholics still do creepy.

Exhibit A: exorcism.



Exhibit B: well, do we really need an exhibit B? Let’s face it: Catholicism is second only to Voodoo when it comes to believing in things that go bump in the night. And despite whatever bad feelings remain toward Catholics from our brother Protestants or from mainstream entertainment at large, Catholicism is just more socially acceptable than Voodoo. More than that, it is somehow at once eerily foreign and deeply familiar, as a little of Catholicism runs in the veins of every social element with roots in the Middle Ages and beyond. The Catholic faith is an open playing field for entertaining situations that butt man up against anything that is bigger than himself.

Of course, sometimes that “bigger-than-man” opponent is nothing more than a corrupt hierarchy. We do have to admit that the Church plays no second fiddle when it comes to being a long-lived institution that has, at times, suffered legendary bouts with corruption, greed, and all the most human institutional failings. It provides a rather broad target for iconoclastic artists. See in this category: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kingdom of Heaven (or for that matter practically any crusade movie), and perhaps most of all The Da Vinci Code.

This use of the Church I feel to be (if saddening) a generally pedestrian anti-institutionalism, often having less to do with the Church itself than with the modern individualist taste for conspiracy theory. It must serve as a reminder to us, as members of the Church, to be always on our guard against corruption and the corrosive influence of power and human greed; it reminds us that we must present more than just our personal incarnations of Christianity to the world but rather we must represent the whole Church in our lives; but I don’t find much in this anti-institutionalism that has to do with the souls of its advocates.

What interests me is when the “bigger-than-man” opponent is indeed supernatural. We could go back further than Dracula, no doubt, to find instances of the ritual and beliefs of Catholicism being brought to bear as weapons against preternatural evil, but why bother? Here we have it in spades: Dracula, the menace-cum-seducer, is powerless before the Eucharist. In the same way, the demons in TV’s Supernatural are subject to the ritual of exorcism, and in that old Schwarzenegger movie End of Days, where he is of course single-handedly responsible for staving off the apocalypse, the scene they showed in all the previews was our hero on his knees in a Catholic church (to be interrupted by a dragon-Satan bursting through the floor, but more on that later).



When the evil moving about is not manmade but is an arm of the devil himself, the storehouse for solutions is inevitably the Catholic Church. And I believe it’s not just because of the ancient, mysterious ritual that surrounds Church proceedings, but rather, I think it is because Catholicism still admits to something many “religious people” have sidelined in favor of more appeasing and pragmatic approaches to spirituality: we still believe in ultimates. Ultimate truth and ultimate falsehood, ultimate evil (whence the interest from cinema), but most importantly, ultimate good. All these, working actively in today’s world just as they did in the days of the Bible. We may believe in possession, but we also believe in miracles. Grappling with the devil we have the angels.

That’s what entertainment so often lacks: why its demons, ghosts, and monsters leave us always a little dissatisfied, a little unconvinced, a little sheepish at how cheesy it all is. When our salvation rests on the success of a human being—whether unlikely hero or dashing heartthrob, whether played by Keanu Reeves or Sarah Michelle Geller—salvation always seems to fall short. At the very least, it’s temporary, at best lasting until the next sequel. Without the real ultimate good—let’s go ahead and say aloud the word “God”—the ultimate evil will never ring true, and victory will always feel incomplete. There’s just something woefully inadequate (or, worse, comically ridiculous) about arming the Governator with a grenade-launcher and thinking he could conceivably win out over the powers of darkness. Without God, the devil is a dragon to be charged at, or a cheat snatching at models and action figures; without heaven, hell is just an uncomfortable place to lodge somebody for the duration of a two-part episode. The sham is exciting enough, but it always leaves us wanting more than it could give.

Yet, that is exactly why I see such hope in art today. People seem to find it easier to believe in evil than in good, yet isn’t the draw of a compelling demon or vampire at least in part the secret desire for its salvation? If the good-versus-evil shadowplay of media leaves its consumers dissatisfied, might it not lead them to question what it is they really wanted in the first place? And what they really want (as much as even Christians would often like to deny it these days) is Christ. And he may be more politically correct in a church where “Jesus is your friend,” but he is all we could ever want when he is not only a friend but a lord, flanked by his angels and riding the clouds of heaven to harrow hell. When the world abandoned the hierarchy it lost something of the hero as well.

Popular movies and books and music appeal to the romantic in us, even if it is only to try and quash romance with cynicism. It is the romantic that wants happy endings without corniness and wants evil punished without gray areas. That’s why I think Catholicism always shows up in these movies: it is a romantic religion in which there are weapons to fight against what goes bump in the night (the things children recognize naturally and are only convinced don’t exist by a self-confident and jaded adult culture). It is a faith which promises a dawn without shadow. And at the same time it is a religion hard-as-nails (nine-inch nails, in fact) in which there are no excuses for not at least trying to be a hero. All roads can lead to God, and that is why when I look at entertainment these days I take more pleasure—even joy—than I take offense.

Unfortunately, of course, even if all roads can lead to God, it doesn’t mean they do. When Schwarzenegger’s kneeling plea for help is answered by the thunderous entrance of a monster, when the promise of the first seasons of Supernatural falls flat because it turns out that God is on vacation, all that potential I feel building in the set-up disappears in a puff of cynical cinema-smoke. I don’t know if there is room in the film world for a dogmatically correct Dracula, or in the TV world for a theologically sound Buffy or True Blood. I half doubt it (for what would those shows be if everybody kept their clothes on?).

But there is room for ultimate good alongside ultimate evil—Lewis and Tolkien (and their immensely successful recent film renditions) have proven that. And perhaps there is a role for entertainment in salvation, even if it serves aesthetics ahead of religion: if what people see reminds them that they really do want someone to save them—if it touches that deep-seeded desire for something that is both more real and more epic than CGI demons and their grubby gladiatorial opponents—then people of faith must declare the name of the savior. Art is already pointing its consumers upward, however inadvertently: let us stand along the roadside to open the gate, direct them toward heaven, and—pardon the expression—evangelize the hell out of them.


C.M. Schott likes blockbusters probably more than she should, and likes serious cinema “less than half as well as it deserves.” She is a student of literature but moonlights as a movie fan, music enthusiast, and (as of this post) a freelance blogger.


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