MAY172024

At the end of St. John’s Gospel, after Jesus rehabilitates St. Peter’s triple denial with a triple affirmation — “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” — he says to him, “Follow me.” This is, of course, a repeat of the first thing that Jesus said to Peter and the other disciples at the beginning of his ministry. It sounded different here at the end. At the beginning no doubt the disciples were imagining all of the wonderful things they would be capable of doing in following Jesus. At the end, they had learned how flawed, how broken, how messed up they were. Yet, Jesus still wanted them to follow him. The lesson: they weren’t called to be followers becasue of how wonderful they were. They were called with all of the faults and failings that made up their character. That is our story as well. God calls us to be followers just as we are. As a contemporary gospel song puts it: “We fall down but we get up. For a saint is just a sinner who fell down and then got up.”