The charge to Peter
1991 (Year C) 10 May / Easter 4
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
A story. Some of you will be familiar with it. Don Camillo is an imaginary priest in Italy. He talks to the image of the crucified Christ hanging above the altar in his little village church. That may sound strange enough but what’s even stranger is that in the stories the Lord talks back! Don Camillo is constantly feuding with the local communists and one of them, Biondo, killed somebody. He can’t get the killing out of his mind and he keeps seeing visions. He determines to go to confession, get absolved and so make the dreadful visions disappear. He demands absolution and threatens to blow Don Camillo’s head off with a gun if he doesn’t co-operate.
Biondo set his teeth, ‘Don Camillo, give me absolution or I fire!’ ‘No’
Biondo pulled the trigger and the trigger yielded, but there was no explosion.
And then Don Camillo struck, and his blow did not miss the mark, because Don Camillo’s punches never misfired.
Then he flung himself up the steps of the tower and rang the bells furiously for twenty minutes. And all the countryside declared that Don Camillo had gone mad, with the exception of the Lord above the altar who shook his head and smiled. Biondo, who tearing across the fields like a lunatic, had reached the bank of the river and was about to throw himself into its dark waters. Then he heard the bells.
So Biondo turned back because he had heard a Voice he had never known. And that was the real miracle, because a pistol that misfires is a material event, but a priest who begins to ring joy bells at eleven o’clock at night is quite another matter.
And so the call came to Biondo in the bells. The call came quite differently to Peter, although just as insistently. ‘Peter do you love me. Peter do you love me? ... Peter do you love me?’ Now it may not have been as insistent with each of us, but everyone here has been called by name, by God. We wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t. Maybe when it came, it was only half heard, maybe we wish in truth, it had never come. Nevertheless it has come.
Each of us has had a call. And the call is this. To be with God. To walk with God. To be at one with God. It’s as simple as that. Nothing complicated at all. No exams to pass or special things to say. To be with God, in essence it is to be Holy. The image of this relationship in the Old Testament reading was also tremendously simple; it was of a married couple living together as opposed to a couple living apart – in exile. As close as that.
Of course that’s not the end of it. Would that it were. The call brings with it tasks and responsibilities - the church calls it a charge. And that charge will be different for each one of us. It will be unique. Peter was told as much when he started to worry about the charge to the disciple whom Jesus loved, ‘Lord what about this man?’ Don’t worry about him he was told, you just ‘Follow me!’
Each of us has our own charge, our own unique allotted task. It’s not just the clergy who’ve been specially charged. Steadman has one so does Lynn, Winnie has one so does Edward although he doesn’t know it yet. We have all been called and given a task, it may be of course that precisely what the task is, isn’t clear yet, perhaps we’re still resisting it. But God will continue to call just as Jesus did to Peter and the bells did to Biondo. He will call us to be Holy. He will charge us to bring life.
Weary Christians have often enough forgotten this critical and liberating power given by God at Easter. Our faith has degenerated into the confident belief in certain facts, and a poverty stricken hope for the next world. We behave as if death were nothing but a fate we meet at the end of life. But death is an evil power now, in life’s very midst. It is the economic death of a person we leave to starve; the political death of people who are oppressed; the social death of the handicapped; the noisy death that strikes through the bombs and torture in hundreds of places in our world; the soundless death of the apathetic soul.
What does all this mean in reality for us? It means that we are invited to join God in the work of salvation. We are invited to bring life out of death. Is all this too theoretical, too woolly? Very well. We are invited to look again and again at each and every one of our actions to ensure that they create rather than destroy, empower rather than diminish. No aspect of our lives is exempt. Our relationships with other people, the way we live in society, our closer community, even the way we live with ourselves. All must proclaim the gift of the resurrection.
One man says we must ‘infect people with life and hope’, and when we do, we will find ourselves with God and that there is rejoicing in heaven. AMEN