Sermon preached in the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft on 5 February 2025

Peter said: Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.

I wonder what was going on for St Peter, heavenly patron of the Abbey, that made him utter these heart-rending words? Was he completely humbled, shamed perhaps, at the extraordinary catch of fish? After all, he was supposed to be the accomplished fisherman who should know when and where to make the greatest catch. In fact, he had used all his skill and expertise throughout a long night, with no result. Jesus comes along, says ‘try over there’, and lo, a catch that his nets and two boats couldn’t cope with.

Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.

Of course, Peter is making a statement of fact—he is a sinner, as much as any of us, but the ‘go away’ is interesting. Go away from me, Lord—a sullen reaction from someone feeling unworthy, threatened perhaps.

Rather than rejoicing in the extraordinary catch of fish, perhaps Peter feels exposed, vulnerable. It’s all too much for him. All the scaffolding of his competence and independence as a fisherman has been stripped away. Go away from me, Lord, you make me feel bad, useless, small. This feeling, this refusal, Peter acknowledges, is to do with his sin.

Culturally, we are encouraged to think of sin as something rather salacious, even delicious—eating too much ice cream or chocolate, and let’s not even begin to talk about sex. The language of sin is adopted by advertisers promoting any guilty pleasure, which is all the more pleasurable for being, in a rather camp way, forbidden, naughty. But this is a hopeless trivialising of a tragic element in human behaviour, a persistent fault in our being human; something that really does need treating with much greater seriousness.

Peter gets us closer to the heart of it.

Go away from me—he says. He is putting up a defence against Jesus, against the One who is blessing him with an unmerited gift; a gift which he feels unable to receive, perhaps because it puts him at such a disadvantage. Perhaps it undermines his sense of his own autonomy, his independence, his self-worth. He is a fisherman, and it’s not just that Jesus appears to be a better one (that would be bad enough), but that this makes Peter look like nothing at all, useless, superfluous.

Go away from me, Lord—and I wonder whether Peter was implying: ‘let me just carry on in my own little way. Let me be happy with who I am and what I am, secure in my own fantasy, in my own carefully-curated version of myself.’ If, as I suspect, Peter is throwing up defences against a threat to his ego, then he might be showing us, better than any advert for ice cream or chocolate, just what sin looks like. Go away from me.

Sin is not so much a series of naughty things that we do—or at least, sin is something more fundamental than these mostly trivial behaviours. The behaviours are more like symptoms of a deeper malaise. What Peter might be showing us is that sin is our self-defence, our guard against the good, our refusal of gift, our barricade against blessing. Not that we achieve this all the time; fortunately, our defences are leaky. There is plenty of good, gift, and blessing that gets through, although St Paul suggests that this is more often despite us than because we are open to it:

I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God, I am what I am.

Paul’s apostleship (a great good, gift, and blessing) is bestowed on him, gets through to him despite his powerful, weaponised defences against the Church and its Lord; a persecutor (attack being the best form of defence). It is clearly not through any effort or merit or character of his that the apostleship wins through. It is nothing but grace; a gift that overwhelms his defences, his sin.

Why would we set up defences against what is good, against the blessing of many fish or whatever, against the gift of our own apostleship? I don’t think it is because we are naughty. It is more to do with the tragedy of our defensiveness, whereby we tend to treat God, and other people, as rivals; as threats to our autonomy, as competitors for the goods that we want to control for ourselves. It is the tragedy that our first instinct is to fear—to fear other people and to fear God, not in that way that is the beginning of wisdom, but in the way of St Peter: Go away from me, Lord; you undermine and unsettle me.

‘Do not be afraid’, says Jesus to Peter; an instruction, an invitation Peter will hear repeated many times, especially after the resurrection. The repetition suggests both its importance and the difficulty we all have in hearing it.

Sin is born of fear: it is a defence and a refusal, a refusal of risk—the risk that opens up the possibility of disaster, yes, but also the possibility of relationship, of change and growth.

It is because he is without sin that Jesus walks straight into risk, and into disaster.

I should remind you, (Paul says to the church in Corinth) of the good news that I proclaimed to you, through which you are being saved.

And this good news is not about being defended against risk.

I handed on to you as of first importance (Paul continues): that Christ died for our sins, that he was buried, that he was raised.

Christ risks himself to the judgement of his people, and is utterly rejected. Like Peter, they tell him to go away. The hands that offered blessing, healing, were not just tied but nailed. If you want to defend yourself against a powerful person, you do well to bind their hands. He was put to death and buried, to put an end to the threat he posed. They sealed his tomb with a stone and set up a watch. Even in death, everyone was on guard, on the defensive. But then, it seems, even hell’s defences couldn’t hold him.

And he promises that if we will follow him, if we will risk lowering our defences against him and against others, then even disaster will not overcome us, for we will share, now and hereafter, in his victory, in his resurrection. In the end, he promises, our sins and even the sins committed against us will be no barrier to his grace and the promise of life.

This is his blessing to us, his gift, his ultimate good, and it is given to us despite our sin; despite those tragic, fearful defences that turn us inwards, making us self-focussed, mistrusting of relationship, that deny our dependency on one another and on God.

Our hope is that God is not despairing or intimidated by anything we throw up against him or one another. Like St Paul, like St Peter, our defences can still be overwhelmed by unmerited grace, to make us fishers, gatherers, of people, apostles sent out to declare Christ’s victory over every barricade of sin; and even the deep stronghold of death.

Peter may speak for us all: Go away from me, Lord, for I am sinful.

Fortunately for us, the Lord is not so easily dissuaded.