The Lord Turned and Looked upon Peter

Luke 22:54-69

“And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And Peter went out, and wept bitterly.” (Luke 22:61-62)

I relish Advent: the watchfulness, the expectancy, even the penitence. And I love that we have in our lectionary some splendid texts that direct our eyes to the Lord. In the first week of Advent, Jesus instructs us to “look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh” (Luke 21:28). In the second week, John the Baptist makes good on the words of Isaiah, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” The image here is of a royal highway along which we behold God bringing salvation for all flesh to see (Luke 3:4, 6). But then we also have today’s text on Peter’s denial of Christ. As Peter “followed afar off” when Jesus was led away (Luke 22:54), was he looking at the Lord? Did fear or another self-regarding passion cast his eyes downward?

         The nature of Peter’s denial of Christ has an interesting place in the history of moral theology. In the second part of his Summa Theologiæ, St. Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225-1274) argues that Peter’s denial was a mortal sin through which he indirectly lost the virtue of charity through a passion such as fear, since charity, being an infused rather than an acquired habit, can never withstand mortal sin (see 2a2æ, q24a12). The assumption here is that God’s infusion of a virtuous habit cannot compete with our graver sins, which might strangely make acquired habits even more resilient than those that are divinely infused.

Aquinas was responding to the earlier Cistercian theologian William of Saint-Thierry (ca. 1085-1148), who challenged the distinction between mortal and venial sins by suggesting instead a distinction between sins against charity and sins of weakness. Peter’s denial, he says, was the latter, as his tears demonstrated the ongoing presence of the virtue of charity. Peter may have been influenced by affectio, a loose attachment to untruth, but he didn’t lose his affectus, or his persevering relationship to love (see the Nature and Dignity of Love). It’s worth observing that William’s theology proved to be influential in our Anglican tradition. In his Unum Necessarium, the Caroline divine Jeremy Taylor likewise rejects the mortal-venial distinction, but on the grounds that even venial sins are severe from the point of view of God. Nevertheless, like William, Taylor’s emphasis is less on the juridical than on the development of virtuous habit.

         Amidst this history, it’s easy to repeat Peter’s self-regarding passion by focusing so much on the nature and classification of sins that we neglect one of the most touching aspects of the narrative. As though to form a counterpart to all our Advent texts that direct our eyes to the Lord, here we read, “And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter” (Luke 22:61). Can we imagine what this look was like? Could someone suffering from scrupulosity be helped by turning their attention to the character of the Lord’s looking upon us?

         As we age, our eyes seem practically unchanging. Something about our eyes is indelibly a part of the persons we are. And yet what the eyes communicate differs dramatically from moment to moment. A furtive glance may express decades of regret and pain. A transfixed gaze can disclose depths of desire a discourse couldn’t begin to plumb. A wink, an askance look, the squint of a smile, a teary glint, pupils dilated with fear—eyes are half the poetry of the face. What poetry was there in Jesus’ face as he looked upon Peter that night?

         There’s life in the eye. It’s not a coincidence that the words “eye” and “egg” likely share a common etymological root. Think of a raptor’s eyrie, or nest. In another’s eye we catch a glimpse of our very self. Not until that regard from another are we properly speaking “persons.” The Greek word for “person” (prósōpon) implies a towardness of the face, an eye-to-eye at the root of our personhood (literally, the root suggests that which is opposite the eye of another: próti + ōps). And so there’s an important sense in which St. Peter’s very personhood depends on the Lord’s looking upon him, just as our own personhood is established in the Lord’s looking upon us. Only in his eyes can see ourselves truly.

         Advent asks us to look up, to be watchful of the Lord’s coming. What do we see? Dare we see our Lord beholding us back, giving to us the truth of our personhood? This eschatological dimension at the heart of personhood checks any overly scrupulous quandary over classes of sin. In those eyes, such distinctions retain pastoral use for those of us who hear and make confessions. Most importantly, however, in those eyes is surely a regard that pierces all bitter weeping, as much as it pierces our subtle distinctions, and restores our fractured personhood.

The Rev. Carson Webb, St. John’s Tulsa