‘What did Jesus say to Peter after He rose from the dead? Tend to my sheep’

BEING A SINNER

In this extract, the Pope explains that all popes are sinners, including Peter – and wonders about the contents of the conversation between Peter and Jesus after His resurrection, considering Peter’s very public denials. I read that one of Pope Paul VI’s secretaries confided that he said: ‘For me it has always been a great mystery of God, to be in wretchedness and to be in the presence of the mercy of God. I am nothing, I am wretched. God the Father loves me, he wants to save me, he wants to remove me from the wretchedness in which I find myself, but I am incapable of doing it myself. And so he sends his Son, a Son who brings the mercy of God translated into an act of love toward me. But you need a special grace for this, the grace of a conversion. Once I recognise this, God works in me through his Son.’ It is a beautiful synthesis of the Christian message.

And then there is the homily with which Albino Luciani began his papacy at Vittorio Veneto, when he said he had been chosen because the Lord preferred that certain things not be engraved in bronze or marble but in the dust, so that if the writing had remained it would have been clear that the merit was all and only God’s. He, the bishop and future Pope John Paul I, called himself ‘dust’.

I have to say that when I speak of this, I always think of what Simon Peter told Jesus on the Sunday of His resurrection, when he met Him on his own, a meeting hinted at in the Gospel of Luke (24:34).

What might Peter have said to the Messiah upon His resurrection from the tomb? Might he have said that he felt like a sinner? He must have thought of his betrayal, of what had happened a few days earlier when he pretended three times not to recognise Jesus in the courtyard of the High Priest’s house. He must have thought of his bitter and public tears.

If Peter did all of that, if the Gospels describe his sin and denials to us, and if despite all this, Jesus said ‘Tend my sheep’ (John 21:16), I don’t think we should be surprised if his successors describe themselves as sinners. It is nothing new.