Jesus and Peter:
Growing in friendship with God
Michael Perham
SPCK £9.99
(978-0-281-06754-1)
Church Times Bookshop £9 (Use voucher code
CT852)
THE subtitle of this book is
Growing in friendship with God. Michael Perham, the Bishop
of Gloucester, uses the biblical accounts of the life of the
apostle Peter as a matrix for examining what Gregory of Nyssa
called "the one thing truly worthwhile" - becoming God's friend. He
sees in the life of Peter, as recorded in the New Testament, a
pattern of personal and spiritual growth: follower, disciple,
servant, friend. The process where the mercurial Peter was
concerned was never likely to be straightforward, but it is in the
moments of failure, setback, and misunderstanding that the author
discerns the building blocks of true friendship.
The book, which has many of
the marks of a devotional biography, reveals the biographer's
familiar infatuation with his subject. Peter was the disciple once
labelled "Satan" by Jesus, the one who denied that he knew him with
an oath, the one who came up with ludicrous suggestions on the
Mount of the Transfiguration and had a head-to-head altercation in
Antioch with his fellow-apostle Paul over the issue of
circumcision.
For the author, all of these
moments of human fallibility are simply transitional events in a
developing friendship between Peter and the one he called Master,
and between Peter and the one he calls God. Thus, more perhaps than
John, he becomes a model for the ordinary follower of Jesus who,
despite failures and falls, keeps on the path through discipleship
to divine friendship.
Because of that, and because
of the care with which the author delineates that path, this book
would make a splendid resource for a home Bible-study group, or
even a sermon series. It does not answer all the questions, of
course. How, for instance, can we be "friends" (in any normal sense
of the word) with the one who is our Master and Lord? But pursuing
them with this wise and perceptive guide will surely throw more
light on the road to that "one thing truly worthwhile".
Canon David Winter is a
retired cleric in the diocese of Oxford, and a former Head of
Religious Broadcasting at the BBC.