Roger Steer

The Archbishop whose ‘love was so feeble’

The Appian Way is a famous road which was built in 312 BC from Rome to southern Italy. When the Apostle Paul disembarked at Puteoli, he travelled on the Appian Way on his first journey to Rome, being met (Acts 28:15) by groups of Christian disciples at the Forum of Appius (43 miles) and Three Taverns (33 miles from Rome).

There is a story which tells how the Apostle Peter escaped from his Roman prison the night before his martyrdom and was fleeing along the Appian Way when he met a familiar figure bearing a cross. ‘Domine, quo vadis?’ – ‘Lord, where are you going?’ asked Peter. ‘I am going to Rome to be crucified afresh,’ replied the Lord. Hearing this, Peter returned and was found in his prison when the guards came for him in the morning. History or legend? We don’t know. If history, then fact or dream? We don’t know. The story shows that the early Church thought of Peter as still showing to the end some of the weakness of Simon, son of John. But the love of the Lord led him captive at the last.

William Temple, who was born in the Bishop’s Palace in Exeter in 1881, commented on this story in his Readings in St. John’s Gospel. Discussing the passage in John 21:15-19 where Jesus asks Peter three times ‘Do you love me’ and concludes the conversation with the words of the Lord to Peter ‘Follow me’, Temple wrote this: ‘Will Peter follow to the end? Yes, to the very bitter end; yet even so, if the (quo vadis) legend is trustworthy, there lingered to the end some of the old weakness which makes Peter so unfailing a spring of encouragement to most of us.’

Temple followed this by writing with great humility: ‘The example of Paul is of little use to me; I am not a hero. The example of John is of but little more use; my love is so feeble. But Peter is a source of constant encouragement, for his weakness is so manifest, yet because he was truly the friend of his Lord he became the Prince of the Apostles and glorified God by his death.’

William Temple wrote that in 1938 when he was Archbishop of York, before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942, a period which was overshadowed by the Second World War and his own ill-health, though he is remembered for his public speeches and radio broadcasts. The honesty and humility of his words ‘I am not a hero’ and ‘my love is so feeble’ are striking just as his reminder that the same Peter who had denied his Lord three times went on to become a successful evangelist and Prince of the Apostles are an encouragement to us in our weakness.

We would do well to pray, with William Temple, the prayer with which he concluded his Readings in St John’s Gospel: O Lord Jesus Christ, Word and Revelation of the Eternal Father, come, we pray, take possession of our hearts and reign where you have right to reign. So fill our minds with the thought and our imaginations with the picture of your love, that there may be in us no room for any desire that is discordant with your holy will. Cleanse us, we pray, from all that may make us deaf to your call or slow to obey it, who, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, are one God, blessed for ever. Amen.