The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, Caravaggio, 1601. Tradition has it that the Apostle Peter was arrested and crucified around 64 AD, in Rome, during Nero’s persecution of Christians. And, it is believed he asked to be crucified upside down, because he felt unworthy to be crucified like Jesus.
Special to United Methodist Insight | Oct. 14, 2025
There is a curious passage in the Gospel of John that has bothered me for years. I think it is because it tells about something I would rather not think about.
Jesus is talking to Peter, the disciple who denied him three times on the night of his arrest. Now after the Crucifixion, and during a Resurrection appearance on a beach after breakfast, Jesus gives Peter an opportunity to redeem himself. He asks him three times, “Peter, do you love me?”
Pete answers yes two times, and then when Jesus asks a third time, Peter’s feelings are hurt and he says, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.’ Jesus says to him, ‘Feed my sheep.’” And then he adds the line that Biblical scholars, and those like me who seek to be faithful followers of Jesus, have wondered about for over two thousand years:
“Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.”
There are many places in life where I do not wish to go. Just last week I was at the dentist’s office, a place I did not wish to go. Tomorrow, I have an appointment with a urologist I am dreading. There will be uncomfortable questions and perhaps intrusive tests. I do not want to go. But I will take my 74-year-old prostate and go, because I can’t go like I used to!
Someday, someone I love may take me to the nursing home, or hospice care, and I will go, because there is no other choice. Life presents us with many unpleasant circumstances. In my work as a pastor, I have observed people in many difficult situations where I would not want to go.
I once sat with a young mother with three children, who had to make the decision to let her husband die. He had been hit on top of the head by a falling light fixture at work. A virus invaded his brain, and, after being on a ventilator in intensive care for several days, the doctor advised the family that he was brain dead. He encouraged them to let him go.
The wife made the wrenching decision to have them turn off the machine that was keeping his body alive, she said, “to give him peace.” Her husband’s mother accused her of killing her son. Her blaming anger had abated somewhat by the time of the funeral a few days later.
On another occasion, a man who was not a member of the church came to my office to ask me to visit his twin teenage sons, seniors in high school, who were in jail for burglary. He also said he was separated from his wife, who was manic depressive. I wept with him as he poured out his heart about how helpless he felt. We prayed together, and the next day I went to visit his sons in the county jail.
Throughout history, ordinary people have often been (have always been) confronted with impossible situations that test their faith in unimaginable ways. This seems to be what Jesus was telling Peter when he warned that he would be taken where he “did not wish to go.”
The Gospel writer explains in parenthesis “(He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.)”
Tradition has it that the Apostle Peter was arrested and crucified around 64 AD, in Rome, during Nero’s persecution of Christians. And, it is believed he asked to be crucified upside down, because he felt unworthy to be crucified like Jesus.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t know if my faith is strong enough to do what Peter did. Most of us are more like the Peter of the early years, deny, deny, deny, to save our own skin.
Naomi Shulman wrote about the “nice” Christian people in Germany of the 1930s and 40s who closed their eyes to the atrocities happening all around them. “They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away.”
Noted author Naomi Shulman, in an essay titled, “No Time to Be Nice: Now Is Not The Moment to Remain Silent,” wrote about the “nice” Christian people in Germany of the 1930s and ‘40s who closed their eyes to the atrocities happening all around them:
“Nice people made the best Nazis,” she wrote. “My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than ‘politics.’ They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.”
Shulman added, “I thought of my mother’s neighbors right after the election, when apolitical friends of mine breathed a sigh of relief that we could stop talking about politics. ‘That’s over!’ they said happily. ‘Let’s focus on other things.’ ‘I choose not to discuss politics publicly,’ one friend said. ‘And posted a picture of puppies.’”
JoAnne Harbert Bhati, who served with Jesuit Volunteers International in Tanzania, East Africa, once taught in the journalism department of St. Augustine University of Tanzania. She tells how easily a nation can be divided and destroyed when good people ignore injustices.
Bhati said, “Many of my journalism students talked about the Rwandan genocide, which had happened just six years prior. Before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, extremist propaganda radio regularly called the Tutsi ‘cockroaches’ that needed to be exterminated. And would broadcast messages like ‘clear the tall trees.’ Tutsis were blamed by Hutu extremists as the source of Hutu problems. Almost one million people were murdered in Rwanda in 3 months, mostly by Hutus who had cached machetes in advance and used them to attack their neighbors.
“The triggering event of the genocide was the plane crash with Rwanda's president on board. It was shot down by a surface-to-ground missile right after he had signed a peace deal with the Tutsi RPF. The Tutsi RPF was blamed for this assassination, but it was likely Hutu extremists who did it. They used this as a pretext to start the murders countrywide. Hutu extremists had lists of ‘enemy’ names that they read over the radio to direct people on whom to attack.”
We can take hope in knowing that in every time and place in history, when there has been great suffering and death, there have always been a few faithful souls who have risked everything to do what is right.
Esther Raab, (1894-1981), a survivor of the Holocaust, tells about the farmer who hid her in his barn for nine and one half months after her escape from the Sobibor death camp in Poland. “That man had seven children, and his entire family was in danger if he had been caught helping us.”
Esther Raab, a survivor of the Holocaust, tells about the night before she and "...300 of her fellow inmates at the Sobibor death camp in Poland mounted a daring escape. Her mother came to her in a dream, she said. Like so many European Jews, they had been separated during World War II, not knowing each other's fate. "I said, tomorrow we are escaping, and she said, 'I know.' And then she took me by the hand, out of the camp, and showed me the barn that she said I should hide in."
It took Esther two weeks to find the barn, because she could only move about at night. When she finally found it, she made "...a startling discovery. Her brother, whom she had believed had been shot to death during a Nazi execution of young Jewish men, emerged from a shadowy corner of the building. He had heard her speak a few Yiddish words.
The siblings, each thinking the other had died, were incredulous." Esther's brother had been in the barn for nine months, and cared for by a farmer who "...regularly brought him bread, milk, and newspapers.” She said the man was thrilled to see her, and kept them alive for nine-and-a-half more months, until it was safe for them to emerge.
"That man had seven children, and his entire family was in danger if he had been caught helping us," she recently said in a phone interview. "They would have all been killed." (Damien Jaques, “ ‘Esther’ Keeps Alive Painful Memory of Camp, Escape,” Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, September 15, 2004.)
One who is righteous, like the Apostle Peter, is willing to risk everything to be faithful to God.
Most of us need a little guidance from the Holy Spirit, and sometimes a big push, to go where we do not want to go.
I remember a clergy association meeting in Kenosha, Wisconsin when our guest speaker, who was the chaplain at one of the local hospitals, told about a man who received such a push. It seems his brother was dying. He came into the hospital room, hat in hand, and asked, “What can I do?”
Chaplain Denise Arneson said to him, “Put down your hat, go in and lay down on the bed beside your brother. Tell him you love him. Stroke his hair. Go ahead!”
John Sumwalt
The Rev. John Sumwalt is a retired pastor and the author of “How to Preach the Miracles.” Email