The Confession of Peter is our reminder that when we believe we have figured it out, when we believe we have arrived, that it is actually not of our own doing, and we are never not impacted by the world around us, which will always offer us a better, an easier deal.

God doesn’t live in an easily-parsed B-movie world, type casting each of us into either hero or villain roles. God lives in the very entanglements, lives with us, and loves us, weedy as we might be, with the same abundance as the sower who throws seed every which way, placing hope even in the more incredulous of places.

There is a reluctance in our transactional culture to accept hospitality and grace we believe we have neither earned nor have the capacity to reciprocate. Imagine showing up to social event after social event in people’s homes and eating their food without once bringing a host or hostess gift with you. If you felt a twinge of anxiety at all in imagining that scenario, a) you are not alone, and b) we can too easily intertwine thanksgiving for hospitality with a refusal to be vulnerable enough to be ministered to—believing that a bestowal of grace is a sneaky way of God getting the upper hand somehow on us.

It is the lifelong unlearning of existential scorekeeping—modeled after our God who delights not in ticking off the boxes of how we each have erred—and good friends, each of us has erred magnificently at some point despite our best attempts—but in recalling us to God’s nature from the beginning steeped in yada—the intimacy of knowing and loving our God; our God who knows us, and loves us anyways.

Whether we want Jesus to note where we are located at any given moment is another thing altogether; it reminds me of when we might have called our parents on a Saturday night, trying to hush down the background noises while we were on the phone, the noise indicating that we were at the place we were specifically told not to go.

Basically, John is that one friend from college who needed to make everything ‘deep’ and ‘profound’ and ‘big picture’ when you just wanted to complain about your professor.

The God we are anticipating may not be the God who comes to us. But the God who comes to us, abides with us, reconciles us, will be the God who loves us, and in whom we are made whole.

The body of Christ is made up of each of you, each of us, because each of us on our own will never be enough, because we were created to be enough only when we are together. Imperfectly together.

Only a God who knew the messiness of the incarnation—of being both human and divine, loving and hurting, sheep-chasing, coin-hunting, fatted calf-preparing as a means of love, could find redemption and promise, phorismo, wisdom, prudence, shrewdness, in a thorough scoundrel.