''And when He had spoken this He saith unto him, Follow Me." — John xxi.,19.
This word which stands at the close of the Gospel was spoken to Simon Peter, and in this respect the Gospel closes as it began, for the call to Peter to follow is to be found there as well. The repetition is surely of come significance. It is more than a mere repetition. The intervening circumstances lend it a new color. When we begin to think about it we see meanings in the call.
Perhaps the most obvious thought is that this call dominated Peter's life, persisted through every phase and stage of it, could not be avoided or escaped. 'Follow Me' met him at the beginning of the story; it is still sounding In his ears at the end. Between the two are all the strange twists and turns, the alternating progress and reversion, the blended lights and shadows which go to make up human life, all of them accentuated in the case of Peter by his impulsive nature.
Peter was the kind of man who must either be taking great vows of loyalty or else denying his allegiance with an oath upon his lips. It was he who said, "I will follow Thee whithersoever thou goest, I will lay down my life for Thy sake;" it was the same Peter who swore to a maidservant that he had never known Jesus. The quieter levels of ordinary speech were not for him. I think it must have been Peter whom the Lord had in mind when He gave the strange commandment, "Let your communications be yea and nay," but that was probably the last teaching of Christ which Peter would learn to obey. The common yes and no were not enough for him; they were too dull and cold. His world was a world of color and of movement; a world of amazing insights and stupendous blindness; of great things burning in the mind like fire and cowardice freezing the lips into silence.
At one moment he comes to the fore as a man into whose ears God has whispered a tremendous secret, at the next he is thrust back as by the voice of the devil. He is always first whether in right or wrong. He answers first at Caesarea Phiiippi, he talks first on the Mount of Transfiguration, he springs out of the boat first when he sees that Jesus is on the shore, he denies first when the naked realities of the Judgment had force themselves upon his soul.
It is a man of this stamp whose relationship with Christ fills so of the Gospel story. It is doubtful whether anyone but Jesus would have tolerated him through the whole of it. If nothing else bad closed the story the denial would have done so in the case of any other leader. It was blank disloyalty and cowardice. The man for a moment was a traitor, not far removed from Judas, the only difference being that Judas had sold his Master for gold, while Peter sold Him for fear. Would anyone but Jesus have forgiven such an act? The question as to whether there is a gospel of Divine forgiveness for the moral failures of the world is settled once and for all by Peter. In the spiritual alchemy of Christ the traitor's failure, which in the eyes of everyone also would have damned him for ever, became a new link between Master and disciple. Christ treated His follower as though the failure had never been there, and Peter could never forget the love which itself seems so able to forget.
It is, then, in the light of this turbulent story that we must read the repeated call to follow. Peter may deny his Lord, but he cannot silence His call. There was no escape from it. It is the key to Peter's life, and the only key. All the varying moods and feelings of this impulsive soul are, as it were, bound together by the unvarying summons of Christ. Here in our text we have another instance of the same truth. If failure did not silence the call of Jesus, neither did the prospect of suffering and death with all their attendant fears. For the Lord has just been anticipating Peter's last days, and a terrible picture it is for a soul which loved freedom: — ''When thou shalt be old thou shalt stretch forth thy hand, and another shall gird thee and carry thee whether thou wouldest not.' There is no sunshine on the picture, no sweetness of the gathered years, no mellowness of peace; there is instead violence and bondage, which to youth are a trial, but to old age spell despair.
And now with that picture in mind, read on: — "After He had spoken this He saith unto him, follow Me." Then a moment later, when the human heart of Peter wants the consolation of knowing whether his bitterness is to be shared by another, his question is set aside, and the reply is given to him: — "What is said to thee, follow thou Me." The call, all the way from the beginning to the end, through sinning and suffering, the unsilenced call.
Now, if this were merely a study of character and the urgencies and motives which determine it, we need not dwell on it as I do. Even then it would have the interest of dramatic significance. But the function of all true drama is to interpret life through the medium of a character in the endless struggle of motive and circumstances. Here before us is a study of that kind. We are all in strange fashion kinsmen of Simon Peter. The red blood of our common humanity flowed in the veins of this passionate soul who oscillated between the careers of a traitor and a martyr, and managed to achieve both. And if that be true, this other truth deserves to be set side by side with it; the dealings of Jesus with Simon Peter speak of the divine purpose which broods over the world and shapes the lives of men. Using the insight gained from the personal story, there are two points I single out for emphasis, the first concerned with the Divine aspect of the relationship, and the second with the human.
The first truth on which we must lay stress is that all God's dealings with man must be read in the light of the relationship which Jesus established with Peter. The repeated insistence of the words "Follow Me" takes us to the heart of the whole story. It is the story of the race. It is a story of denials and returns, strange light and perplexing darkness, of triumph and failure, of passionate impulses behind reckless heroisms and equally reckless desertions. The glory and the shame of it are near akin; the achievements are never safe, the failures never final. The spirit of turbulence is at the heart of it all. History has often been described for us as a flowing stream, but if we are to have a true picture we must see it not as a sheet of placid water flowing on even current between untroubled banks, but as rushing and winding and plunging, a conflict of varying currents, but still a stream because all the movements are connected. What is the bond of connection in history? What force and urge is behind it? You may answer, the spirit of man in its restless seeking; but there is a deeper interpretation than that. The spirit of man is the answer to a call, and it is the call which gives meaning to the whole story of life.
Sometimes we ask ourselves what is the meaning of this rushing stream of life, this endless series of strifes and wars and tumults, these sudden aspirations and hopes, these restless new movements? Some observers are bewildered by the movement which never ceases, and they murmur to themselves, "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity." But if there is much which forbids us the refuge of an easy creed, there is also too much that is great and splendid for us to reconcile ourselves to the finding of despair. Somehow one finds that at the end of every great failure in the human story there is a promise of better things. Perhaps you are sometimes oppressed by the feeling that there is no security in any stage of progress, that some breath of passion may sweep away the gains of years. At least set side by side with that the fact that there is no finality of judgment and condemnation. The world is not bound to its evil; men are never doomed. Over the whole story there broods a God of untiring patience and compassion, who, when things are at their blackest, sends His flaming summons out over the world of men, "Follow Me."
We are discovering that truth anew today. The world has never lived through a greater tragedy than these last four years have shown. Even though the promise of peace has come to the world, the future is dark and uncertain. Restless forces are abroad, new movements are at their birth. Yet never was there a time so filled with hope and expectation. Every true man and woman feels that a voice is calling them as surely as if they heard it sounding in their ears. We feel the onward instinct. That is God speaking and working. It is not merely a sigh of man's undying spirit or a testimonial to human endurance. It is something deeper than that; it is the Spirit of God calling men still to follow. The same Divine Spirit touches us in our personal lives. You find the same story in individual experience as you find in the history of the world. Denials and hardships, the mingling of diverse elements, all enter into our experience of life. Sometimes we forfeit life's gains by inward failure, sometimes our hopes are dashed to the ground by the tyranny of outward circumstance; but all through the story of life there is something still to seek, some light which lures us on, the call to follow is never silent. It is the key to individual experience as well as to the history of mankind.
Now as to the human aspect of this great relationship. What we call faith in its fundamental meaning is the answer to this call. Here, again, Peter illustrates what in varying degree is true of all of us. What did faith mean to him? Was it the love which bound him to Jesus or even the great confession which came from His lips? These entered into his faith, but ultimately faith for Peter was in readiness after every failure to get up and to go on in answer to that call. I believe that to be true for all men, that faith is a trust in the higher voice which even when it has been denied still summons us to follow. It does not find the same expression with all men. Some men recognise the call as coming from Christ Himself, they discern His personal leading in life, and the journey of life to them is to His first disciples. Others have no such sense, but on account of that we are not going to class them as without religion and devoid of faith. God's work in humanity is wider and deeper than that. His spirit does not wait to bless until its working is acknowledged. And the supreme truth for all faith is that life is overruled by that Divine patience and compassion which Christ showed to Peter.
Because He is Lord there are no final failures; there is no doom resting on any soul. Whatever a man or woman may have done that Divine forgiveness and patience are not exhausted. Denied a thousand times, the call to follow will never cease. That is what the love of God as we find it in Christ is like. It will never let us go. His call is as inescapable as His patience and love are tireless. No failure in life counts ultimately if we refuse to accept its verdict. No moral weakness is final if we have the courage to get up and go on. The only death we need fear is the snapping of that thread which binds us to the vision of the good. Such faith is the light and life of men. History and experience both show its place in the story, and the crowning reality of the world is the love of God, from which there is, and can be, no separation, because He will never resign us to our failure and never cease to call us to follow.