Noli timere.
—The last words of Seamus Heaney1
In 1939, the Nazis occupied Kraków, Poland, and moved at once to close the city’s university. Its professors were murdered. Its students, including nineteen-year-old Karol Wojtyla, were pressed into slave labor, in his case at a limestone quarry not far away. After two years, Wojtyla escaped the labor camp, and he lived out the war in hiding. At one point he eluded a Gestapo roundup by hiding in the basement of his uncle’s house. He knew the horrors of the German occupation firsthand, and they remained the ground of his identity for the rest of his life.
Wojtyla then came to maturity with his city locked down by another occupying power: the Soviets. The puppet government of Poland during the Cold War was a brutal stand-in for Joseph Stalin and his successors. Wojtyla emerged as the Communist regime’s most powerful antagonist when he became the archbishop of Kraków in 1964, but his resistance was just beginning. In 1978, he was elected head of the Roman Catholic Church and became Pope John Paul II.
In June 1979, brushing aside the objections of Poland’s Communist government, the now white-robed Wojtyla traveled to his hometown of Kraków, where, in a field on the outskirts of the city, he celebrated Mass for anyone who would dare to come. Because open practice of religion was effectively outlawed, everyone in attendance risked, at the very least, the loss of a job or an apartment or the schooling of children—reduction to the condition of non-personhood. That was why each one in attendance had come to the field expecting that almost no one else would have dared to be there.
But look around! Wojtyla might have said. More than a million people had shown up for the Mass—twice the population of Kraków. His refrain, though, was even simpler. “Be not afraid!” he had said in his first pronouncement as pope. “Open up—no, swing wide the gates to Christ! Open up to his saving power the confines of the state, open up economic and political systems, the vast empires of culture, civilization, and development. Be not afraid!”2 Now, in Poland, the pope declared, “The Polish pope comes here to speak. . . . He comes here to cry with a loud voice. . . . You must be strong, dearest brothers and sisters. There is no reason to be afraid!”3
In a fraught political context, John Paul’s message was by necessity oblique, but it came through with clarity anyhow. He demonstrated his own unbreakable solidarity with the Polish people, and in doing so he invited them to reclaim their solidarity with one another. Talk of love, especially coming from preachers, is cheap. But the love John Paul II lifted up was the antidote to the rank individualism that, by isolating Poles, had enabled the regime to have its way with them.
All subjects of totalitarian systems are convinced by their very subjugation of their unworthiness. That they are enslaved convinces them that they deserve to be—a demoralization on which the tyrants depend. Idealism, nobility, courage, selflessness—these are practical impossibilities, and few if any Poles of Wojtyla’s time had had open experience of such virtues. The timid throng that made its way to Wojtyla’s field knew this about themselves, and, more to the point, they knew it about one another. Every person present at the Mass had reason to believe that every other was an informer, an agent of the state, ready, for survival’s sake, to do the Communist government’s bidding. Each one knew that of the others because—here is the essence of totalitarianism—each one knew it of himself. It was precisely to this condition that the Polish Pope spoke. Do not be afraid of yourselves! Do not be afraid of one another!
One of those who heard Pope John Paul preach in that field outside Kraków was an unemployed electrician who had hitched a ride from the coastal city of Gdansk. Barely more than a year later, at his home shipyard, that electrician used a souvenir pen he had bought at the pope’s Mass to sign the founding charter of the illegal trade union Solidarity. He was Lech Walesa, and, having heard Wojtyla, he found it possible to act as if he were afraid no more. In Wojtyla’s presence, the solidarity of subjugation—the universal shame that was the first bond of victims of the Soviet imperial system—was transformed into a solidarity of resistance. The Solidarity Walesa and his fellow workers established, and the solidarity it embodied, would lead to the nonviolent overthrow of the Communist regime in Warsaw and, ultimately, to the demise of the Soviet Union itself.4
Every Pole heard the echo in Pope John Paul II’s refrain “Be not afraid.” As the pope intended, the throng of secret Catholics recognized that exhortation as having come again and again from Jesus himself. No one goes around saying “Be not afraid” unless there are mighty things to fear, and it would have been at least implicitly apparent to the demoralized people of Poland that Jesus, in his own time, had also been addressing a throng of dispossessed and powerless victims of a brutal imperial occupation.
But the Gospel accounts give the exhortation its particular resonance. When Peter and the other apostles were terrified on open water during a storm, Jesus appeared to them, saying, “Do not be afraid.” When Peter and the others cowered after seeing Jesus transfigured with Moses and Elijah, he said to them, “Rise, and have no fear.” After his resurrection, Jesus said to the women, “Do not be afraid.” He compared his frightened followers to sparrows, whose survival is forever so precarious, yet after whom God so lovingly looks. With such radically vulnerable creatures in mind, Jesus concluded, “Fear not, therefore.”5
For Jesus, “Be not afraid” was not a magic refrain, a cheap exhortation akin to whistling past a graveyard. The precondition of the fearlessness he preached was the terrifyingly brutal circumstance of Rome’s lethal capriciousness, and he knew about fear from his own experience—dating back to the Roman legions’ rampages through the territory in which he was raised, climaxing in the cruel fate of his mentor John the Baptist. And there’s the point. “Be not afraid” was corollary, for Jesus, to “You are my beloved Son”—the transcendent affirmation that came to him in John’s presence. Having been spared from fear himself, Jesus understood what that release was like.
To repeat, if Jesus found it necessary to say “Be not afraid” again and again, it was because there was much to fear in the world he and his friends were living in. But Rome, however terror-inducing, was only part of what threatened. Indeed, the condition of totalitarian slavery presents one sort of danger, but the human condition itself, even under the best of circumstances, presents another. No one gets out of life alive. Death is, overwhelmingly, the thing to fear, and it was that fear that Rome, like every totalitarian system, could so efficiently play on. Jesus had seen that up close in the fate that befell John the Baptist, which was the occasion, as we saw, of his discovery in himself—“Tell that fox”—of the capacity to rise above it. Before long, Jesus would have the cup of death forced upon him, and, having prayed, “Let this cup pass from me,” he would add decisively, “nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.”6 From disabling fear of death, above all, Jesus had been released.
Here, perhaps, is the point of the transforming affirmation having come, upon his baptism by John, from one who identified himself as “Father”: “This is my beloved Son.” Christians hear of this father-son image as if it is a given note on the scale of religious reference, a plunge into the warm bath of daddy love. But that this most positive assertion is understood as coming from the primordial source of life—the parent—is itself a pushback against the law of mortality, the iron legacy of death. Freud’s conviction that every intuition about God is at bottom a reiteration of the power of paternity points to the awful complexity of the parent-child dynamic as the only imagined release from the limitations of time. As the offspring, propelled forward out of the past, rescues the progenitor from oblivion, the paternal blessing bestowed upon the child forces the future open with its promise of life to come. Against Freud, it is the most natural thing in the world to see in this structure of generativity not a “projection” but an analogue of its Author, whose faithfulness transcends time, and therefore death.
Again, and importantly, it was as a Jew that Jesus had come to his understanding of the Father’s blessing as the trustworthy promise of life. “Be not afraid” is the most frequently repeated admonition in the Hebrew Scriptures as well, appearing more than a hundred times, from Genesis (“Fear not, Abram, I am your shield”) to Exodus (“But Moses said to the people, ‘Fear not, stand firm’”) to Psalms (“Do not fear the terror of the night”) to Isaiah (“Be strong! Fear not! Behold your God”) to Jeremiah (“Fear not the king of Babylon”).7
To preach fearlessness in the face of a brutal regime that cynically depends on the fear-ridden subservience of a broken people is a profoundly political act, as Pope John Paul II knew very well, despite his insistence that all he ever preached was religion. If there can be no surprise that, as a result, even a twentieth-century pope was targeted for political murder,8 where is the surprise that Jesus was?
In Jesus’ case, from the various accounts, it seems that his message about fear was aimed at one person more than others. We have seen how I-Thou intimacy shaped Jesus’ youthful coming-of-age in relation to John the Baptist. Now, still measuring our reading of texts by the principle of plausibility, we can see that Jesus came into his maturity through a second quite particular friendship—with the fisherman Simon Peter. The Gospels’ “fear not” verses feature Peter, again and again, as the one to whom Jesus was addressing himself.
We have seen how Mark unfalteringly—and unflatteringly—portrays a profoundly fallible Peter, and we assumed that the author of the text did so because he was addressing a beleaguered people for whom good news could only take the form of a message of acceptance, despite every failure. The people were afraid, with reason. And the message addressed their fear. The later Gospels continued to press that theme, and Peter continued to be central to it. Indeed, Peter emerges as the captain of trepidation—a surprising characteristic, perhaps, for a man who made his living on the sea. Ironically, as the story is told, that profession did not inure him to fear but hobbled him with it.
Peter was one of the first four whom Jesus recruited, and they were all fishermen. As such, they were figures of low social status in Galilee, but they were also practitioners of a demanding and often dangerous trade. Those who could find alternative livelihoods did so, because to be a fisherman in Galilee was to spend a good deal of time deathly afraid.
If puritanical asceticism was the nub of John the Baptist’s character in resistance to which Jesus found himself, the equivalent in Peter’s case was a peculiar depth of fear. In one situation after another, he was rattled. If the ever-human Jesus, as the stakes grew higher in his progress toward mortal confrontation, had to push against an inevitable anguish of his own, he had a perfect foil in one who, by all accounts, was his closest friend, and who lived submerged in anguish. What Peter saw in Jesus, meanwhile, was a man who offered an escape from his innermost dread, and one of the Gospels’ most well loved miracle stories makes clear how and why a Sea of Galilee boatman might feel that way.
And a great storm of wind arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care if we perish?” And he awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” And they were filled with awe, and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?”9
As we saw, the author of the Gospel of Mark is traditionally identified as having been the intimate companion of Peter, and the narrative is taken to reflect the special experience of Peter. Indeed, the Gospel’s anecdotes, sayings, and parables are assumed to have been drawn from Peter’s own preaching, and it is easy to imagine Peter telling the tale of Jesus’ bringing calm to a stormy sea as the perfect image of the astonishing inner peace that the always anxious Peter himself felt in his Lord’s presence.10
All four of the Gospels honor Peter’s primacy as one on whom Jesus depended. Yet this bears repeating: except for Judas Iscariot, no one in Jesus’ circle is shown to be more feckless or unreliable than Peter. Mark’s surprising portrait is carried forward by the Gospels that came later. The surprise lies in the fact that the Gospels come at a time, late in the first century, when the nascent Christian movement presumably had an institutional motive for the elevation of Peter. He had emerged as a key leader of those following Jesus, and was remembered as such. The movement had a need to valorize him. Yet these texts represent a strange sort of mythmaking—especially when taken to reflect Peter’s own point of view.
If Jesus is shown to be a calm, inner-directed, yet compassionate man, with a firm sense of destiny in the service of the One whom he called Father, Peter is very much the opposite. There is something buffoonish about this character whose exuberance defines his first response in every circumstance—those houses for Moses and Elijah; that “not I, Lord” about betrayal. It was Peter who pulled out a sword in the garden of Gethsemane, as Jesus was being corralled, to slice off the ear of the man doing the arresting. After the death of Jesus, Peter leaped from a boat at the sight of a mysterious stranger on the shore (having first put his clothes on). The encounter that occurred then, early in the morning, brought the friendship between Jesus and Peter to its transcendent peak.
The elegant anecdote of that meeting on the beach appears only in the Gospel of John, the last of the four to be written, and, paired with the story of Peter’s denying Jesus three times during the night of the crucifixion—“I do not know the man!”—the story has the aura of literary masterpiece about it, one of the greatest moral reckonings ever recounted.
Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the beach; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them, “Children, have you any fish?” They answered him, “No.” He said to them, “Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in, for the quantity of fish. That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on his clothes, for he was stripped for work, and sprang into the sea. But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, but about a hundred yards off. When they got out on land, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish lying on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three of them; and although there were so many, the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and so with the fish. This was now the third time that Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was raised from the dead. When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed my lambs.” A second time he said to him, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”11
This encounter between Jesus and Peter is the ground on which the Christian church stands, and the revelation of what its faith most centrally concerns. Peter comes to this moment having epitomized not virtue, but human weakness. He had been terrified and had acted accordingly. He had drawn from Jesus that transcendent rebuke, as Satan. Finally, his role in the death of Jesus was not exceptional, but defining. His betrayal of Jesus, that is, was not incidental, but essential.
Hence, Jesus’ prediction: ”Truly, I say to you, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.”12
And so it played out—in the Passion narrative as rendered by all four Gospels. The threefold character of this betrayal—in the courtyard, on the porch, by the fire—makes the point that it comes from Peter’s moral center. In that sense, the act is paired as an ethical twin with the coldly premeditated sellout of Jesus by Judas Iscariot, although nothing in the narrative puts Judas in a place of intimacy to compare with the way Jesus had repeatedly entrusted himself to Peter. That’s what makes Peter’s treason worse. Indeed, every one of the disciples abandoned Jesus, but, given Peter’s intimacy with Jesus, his blatant faithlessness had to be by far the most grievous blow.
In the Gospel of Luke, the act receives this emphasis: as Peter spoke the third time, the rooster crowed, and “the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him: ‘Before the cock crows today, you will deny me three times.’ And he went out and wept bitterly.”13 The locked gaze between them is what did it. It is as if the two men saw a ghost standing between them—the ghost of an earlier ease, of pleasure taken together, of the quiet satisfaction from long hours on the road and the joint hauling of nets, of pointed silences, laughter, roughhousing, the stuff of friendship. Dead, all dead.
The stories about Jesus are consistently centered on his openness to misfits, sexual miscreants, collaborators, and ne’er-do-wells, but the Peter story shows that moral failure is a mark of the insiders as much as of the outsiders. Human weakness is universal. Jesus knew it, and he was not put off by it. That’s why his mantra was “Be not afraid.”
That Jesus kept repeating those words showed his deep understanding of fear as the ground of human existence. It had been the ground of his own, which surely is why the stark confrontation with Peter’s fear that day on the road to Jerusalem—“Get behind me, Satan!”—drew from Jesus such a ferocious response. Jesus still knew what fear could be and what fear could do, so when his best friend justified fear, he had to push it away. What Jesus put on display in front of his cowardly associates, in other words, was the furthest thing from condemnation. It was not even pity; it was empathy. Jesus knew where they were coming from because, driven in his youth to seek out John the Baptist, he had been there himself.
Here was the surprise: the pit of moral failure into which Peter fell was not disqualifying. After his gross treason, Peter “went outside and wept bitterly,” because when Jesus looked at him just as the cock crowed, Peter saw the ghost of their love—and felt the shock of his having betrayed it. But the point of this moment in the Passion drama is what Jesus saw. In that locked gaze, Jesus beheld not a ghost but a man. Only a man. There was no shock in Jesus, for he saw in Peter only what he already knew was in him. Peter was his familiar friend, even in his fecklessness. He was still his friend, although at that moment Peter did not know it.
Instead of being an anomalous sort of mythmaking, this portrait of the Jesus-Peter encounter, even down to the threefold betrayal, is perfectly consonant with what Jesus had been proclaiming all along. The commonwealth of God stands upon forgiveness, but in order for it to be real, forgiveness has to be arrived at through a reckoning with the full horror of what is being forgiven. Only then can the offense be left behind. The truth will set you free, yes,14 but only after shaking you to the core. That is why, in the Gospel of John’s rendition, the three betrayals of Peter had to be reenacted through the three questions posed by Jesus on the beach. Simon Peter, do you love me? Do you love me? But do you really love me? The questions, as all but explicit reminders of his threefold mortal offense, humiliated Peter, but that humiliation alone made the love of which they were speaking authentic. The solidarity of God’s commonwealth is the mutuality of failure forgiven.
Let’s assume for a moment that this slant on Peter’s story did indeed come from Peter himself, from his preaching, and from the author of Mark’s note-taking of what Peter said as he went about speaking of Jesus. In that case, a more typical panegyric celebration of a leader’s heroic virtue would have been entirely irrelevant to Peter’s purpose. Whatever impulse toward self-aggrandizement he might have had—and, like all men, he’d surely have had some—Peter understood that he could not speak truly of Jesus without speaking truly of himself. That was what it meant, finally, to feed the Shepherd’s sheep. And the truth was simple: all that separated Peter from the vile and suicidal Judas was that he, Peter, had lived long enough to find his offense transformed—through no merit of his own—by the loving acceptance of Jesus. The humiliated Peter was, in the same moment, the forgiven Peter.
If that was the message that this apostle carried away from his last encounter with the Lord, no wonder others soon looked to him as the movement’s central figure. Perhaps as a fisherman, Peter had been the net master, or the boat master; but this authority was different. His having stood more in need of forgiveness than anyone, and his having been nevertheless forgiven, was the source of his personal power. In his own being, Peter made the promise real. And look what happened then.
The first work of what might be called Church history is the Acts of the Apostles. Originally, it was the second half of the Gospel of Luke, but it stands in the New Testament as a separate book, carrying the story of Jesus forward from Jerusalem to Rome. As such, it picks up where all four Gospels end: after the Resurrection experience of Jesus. Whatever that was, the Resurrection had not been enough to assuage his followers’ anxiety, for the risen Jesus had still found it necessary to greet his friends with the words “Be not afraid.”15
At the outset of Acts, Jesus is shown taking his final leave, memorialized in the tradition as the Ascension. Clinging to him, his followers desperately ask, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” The life of what might be called the Church begins with this rebuking response from Jesus: “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority.” Jesus disappears then, and the dispirited, motley group makes its way back from Galilee to Jerusalem. They are still afraid, and they go into hiding “in the upper room.”16 After all they have been through, including, as the story is told, the triumph of Easter, the Jesus people are as much at the mercy of fear as ever.
But then what will prove to be the inciting incident of the entire Christian movement takes place. At that moment of demoralization and abandonment, as the text reports it, “Peter stood up among the brethren (the company of persons was in all about a hundred and twenty), and said, ‘Brethren, the scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David, concerning Judas who was guide to those who arrested Jesus. For he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry.” Peter, citing a psalm of David—“His office let another take”—goes on to preside over the election of a successor to Judas, restoring the apostolic number to twelve.17
But that bit of organizational staff development cloaks the real meaning of Peter’s act, which becomes apparent when, business-school-like, the case is unpacked. The life of the Church begins with an explicit reference to Judas, which puts everyone in the room in the same realm of moral failure—no one more than Peter himself. Only that one thing separates him from Judas, his having been forgiven. Everyone present knows that. Peter’s ethical identification with Judas, and the grace of what makes him different, is what enables him to “stand up.” Indeed, supreme coward that he is, the one doing this has to be Peter.
No sooner has Judas been replaced among the twelve with Matthias, as the text reports, than Peter finds it possible to lead the way out of the upper room and into the streets of Jerusalem, where he “lifted up his voice.” Before a vast throng, he gets right to the point:
Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know—this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. But God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. For David says concerning him, ‘I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken; therefore my heart was glad and my tongue rejoiced; moreover my flesh will dwell in hope. For thou wilt not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let thy Holy One see corruption. Thou hast made known to me the ways of life; thou wilt make me full of gladness with thy presence.’”18
This proclamation by Peter is celebrated as the initiating act of the Christian movement—in the argot, Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. The man who had denied knowing Jesus now blatantly accuses his hearers of responsibility for Jesus’ death. Leaving aside for the moment the way in which this indictment will later be twisted into a scapegoating of “the Jews” for a Roman execution, the point here is that Peter, aware of his own guilt, is prepared to announce the offense of others precisely because the burden of that offense has already been lifted. In the currency of God, judgment and mercy are sides of the same coin. Peter, as portrayed in the Gospel, had learned that from his encounter with Jesus on the beach. Unshakenness, gladness of heart, uncorrupted flesh, the permanent presence of the Lord—all of this, Peter declared on the authority of his own experience, was simply on offer to anyone who would receive it.19
It was the conviction of those who knew Peter that, on his own, he was simply incapable of the courage, eloquence, and hope that he displayed before the Jerusalem throng. Their certain knowledge of Peter’s culpability and cowardice forced the recognition that God’s Spirit had come upon him. Peter was different. That difference was the starting point of all that followed. As the text says, the people saw “the boldness of Peter,” and “those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and the prayers.”20 The rest is history.
The faith of the Church, down to the twenty-first century, rests upon this one man’s experience of Jesus.21 The Gospel began with him. Its central proclamation, therefore, was not of a noble project of virtuous action in the name of God, but rather of a solidarity in feebleness that, once acknowledged, could be transformed into strength. And, given all the ways that the beleaguered Jesus people were faltering just then, why should that news not indeed have been heard as good?