We all like the idea of people getting “second chances.” It seems only fair, and it’s deeply ingrained in us. America is a country of second chances, a lot of times you hear it said that it’s the place where everyone can invent themselves all over again. If things don’t work out for you in one career, then just pick another one. If you need to get away from the place where you grew up, then just go somewhere else, maybe to California or Alaska, where everyone gets to start over, no questions asked. Starting over takes guts, we tell one another, and those who can pull it off deserve a pat on the back, or maybe even a made-for-television movie about your inspiring story.
Seen in that light, today’s Gospel should be the perfect story for us. Because if there is ever a gospel which showed someone getting another chance who in almost every respect didn’t deserve it, it has to be this one. The big second chance, of course, is Peter’s. If there were ever anyone who needed a second chance, who felt complete misery at how he had ruined his life, failed at the thing most important to him, and betrayed his friends it had to be him. We hear this familiar story and what we forget is how desolate Peter must have felt before Jesus reappeared to him, a complete failure, the wrong choice from the start, obtusely missing most of the points that Jesus was trying to make while he was alive, and then even worse, watching him die from a distance, afraid to be seen with him. With Jesus’ death, he must have felt as though nothing could ever deliver him from the guilt and the defeat. And so he just went back to fishing.
And of course, he gets this chance to redeem himself. Everything about this story is meant to remind us about how Peter denied that he ever even knew Jesus, earlier in this same Gospel, denied him three times, sitting around a charcoal fire outside of the high priest’s palace in Jerusalem. And now, another fire, another three questions, this time, the answer “Lord, you know that I love you,” that makes up for “I do not know the man.” If anyone ever got new life from the resurrection, it was him.
It’s a moving scene that almost seems to be taking place in a dream world, and it’s satisfying for those of us who like happy endings. And yet like most Gospels, there is a reminder here that even if we like the story, we can leave the scene without noticing its real message.
For one thing, it’s hard to hear this story and not wonder about how we extend this myth of the second chance to the world around us. Because while we know that Peter was due to come out all right in the end, and so we know in advance he deserved it, there is no doubt that we don’t often extend our gift of new life to people we think have betrayed us or let us down. Whether it’s our attitudes towards criminals and punishing them, or keeping our distance from people who have betrayed us personally, or the way we talk about our political leaders, we’re always tempted to fall back on our gut feeling that someone who stiffs us shouldn’t be given the same chance again, and that if they could do it to you once, the odds are you’ll be sorry you’ve got no one to blame the next time but yourself.
In some cases, of course, we’re right. We are not here to be stupid and allow ourselves to be abused by people who say they’re going to change, and they don’t, and won’t. And yet, it’s hard to hear this reading and not question our willingness to consign so many people to the pile of those who had their chance in life to do the right thing, and missed it.
That brings us to the second chances we give ourselves. Many people are afflicted with the sense of chances missed that Peter surely felt. Like him, perhaps dramatically, perhaps just under the surface of our lives, we feel a sense of regret and guilt, for things we once did wrong, things we wanted to do for ourselves or our families or others and didn’t, lives that we haven’t spent exactly how we thought we would. Yet we tell ourselves that we’re the creatures of the choices we’ve made, what’s done can’t be undone, and we go back to the fishing.
The message today for someone who feels that way, is not that everything’s OK, or that we’re automatically forgiven everything we’ve done wrong or neglected, but that the chance for new life always seems to be in front of us despite our best efforts. Peter needed a lot of second chances in his life, he is the founder of our church and even better, the patron saint of people who fail everyone and need redemption.
Our second chance, and third chance, and fourth chance, is here around the fire somewhere, like him we’re offered the same choices again and again. And yet God for some reason kept coming back to him, as if to tell us, you and everyone else have a chance to answer the questions in your life differently this time. And I’ll keep asking, until your answer is the right one.