** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 671 22 March 2016 - QUO VADIS?

'WHERE ARE YOU GOING, LORD?' ST PETER ASKED THE RISEN CHRIST. A STORY OF BETRAYAL AND REPENTANCE, HIGHLY RELEVANT AT THIS EASTER TIME.
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‘Where are you going, o Lord?’ In Latin, ‘Quo Vadis?’ The legendary words St Peter asked the risen Christ carrying his cross, as the Apostle fled Rome under Emperor Nero’s bloody persecution. ‘I am going to Rome. To be crucified again. Because you abandoning my people’ Christ replied. Peter got the message. He bowed his head in obedience and went back to Rome, thus embracing his own impeding martyrdom. ‘I am not worthy to suffer death in the same manner my Lord did’, he said. So they crucified him upside down.

Who are the denizens of the nethermost pit of Hell? Not terrorists, not child abusers, not robbers of the poor and the disabled but the traitors. Four types of them, according to Dante’s Divine Comedy. A brotherhood of woe. Traitors to their kindred, their country, their guests and their lords. Peter, who had previously betrayed Christ three times, had a narrow escape!

The ultimate emblem of treason for Christians is Judas Iscariot. The infamous one among the Twelve Apostles. He betrayed Jesus Christ to the Jewish leaders with a kiss, for thirty pieces of silver. So Dante has him thrown into the hellish pit, where a huge, bat-like Satan sunk in ice eternally gnaws at the miscreant's body. But what where Judas’ motives? Lucre? Envy? Revolution? Or even jealousy, sex? (A crypto-gay in love with the Son of God?) You name them. Allahu a’alam – God knows. Peter, however, I find a more topical emblem.

Judas was extraordinary. Peter was ordinary. He was afraid. Yes, fear. A basic, most human emotion. After Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane and led before the High Priest of Judaism, Peter had followed timorously, from a distance, and stood in the courtyard outside. First, a woman accused him: ‘You too are with Jesus!’ Peter denied it: ‘I don’t know what you are talking about!’ Then another scurvy female came up: ‘He is one of them!’ Again, Peter rejected the charge. Lastly, other bystanders piped up: ‘You sound like a Galilean, like that Jesus!’ (Peter’s rough country accent betrayed him.) Peter swore up and down: ‘I don’t know that man!’ Then he heard the cock crow twice and remembered his Master’s prophecy: ‘Before the cock crows twice you will deny me three times.’ Peter broke down and wept.

So Peter was a coward. The greatest fault in a soldier but very common in average human beings. Peter looked after his own skin. He did not totally abandon Jesus, notice. He followed him from afar. But when it came to confessing his Lord publicly, risking his life, he drew the line at that. Still, when the cock crowed, he realised the enormity of his sin. He repented and wept. Repentance does it. It washes away the darkest records. That is why he is not, like Judas, thrust down into Hell.

St Peter is an emblem of the Church. To Peter Christ handed the keys of the kingdoms of Heaven and Earth. But, like in the Quo Vadis story, to be found in the apocryphal Acts of Peter, Peter was flawed. Besides, the good Christian folks at Rome wanted him to escape death, to continue preaching the Gospel elsewhere. Actually, he was about to forsake Christ once more. Only when the Master appeared to him and spoke that burning question, Quo Vadis, did Peter come to his senses. However, like the Apostle, the Church too can fall into apostasy, again and again.

Quo Vadis? ‘Where are you going?’ Christ demands. As regards the Anglican Church the answer is simple: to betray you. Not a dramatic, stunning kind of betrayal, like Peter’s. Just a low, creeping cowardice borne of feebleness and stupidity. Afraid to confront and vigorously denounce secular culture and its filthy idols, the Church of England finds refuge in obfuscation, evasion and silence. Like the Danish Lutherans savaged by Kierkegaard in his epoch-making ‘Attack on Christendom’, Anglicanism’s most frightful sin is to render good people incapable of distinguishing a fake, a travesty from a true Christianity. Bishops and priests should break down and weep and lament. Will they repent?

Quo Vadis? ‘Where are you going’, the Lord asks the English people. Dante writes of traitors to their country but nations and peoples can betray, also. Like, it seems, the people of England. They no longer worship and follow the laws of God. A Christian race, a noble nation baptised into the Gospel since when St Augustine baptised King Ethelbert in Canterbury, is now degraded, fallen back into practical paganism. Their heroes are squalid celebs, their cult consumer goods and their chief pleasures located in the genitals and the belly. God is left out. Can a people sink any lower?

Quo Vadis? Christ asks the youth. What are your aims in life, a priest once inquired of a young man: ‘Oh, I want to get a job’, the answer came. And then? ‘A girl friend’. And then? ‘Get a house.’ And then? ‘Get married, perhaps.’ And then? ‘Have children, go on holiday, all that’. And then? ‘Well, get a good pension, have a comfortable retirement’. And then? ‘Then, I suppose I shall die’. And then? The youth gaped. Did not know what to say. Thereby is the youth’s tragedy.

Too pessimistic? Fear not. After the Cross comes Easter, the Resurrection!

Revd Frank Julian Gelli




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