After the Angel had freed him from prison, we hear St. Peter say, “Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod.” We then hear St. Paul say, “I was rescued from the lion’s mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed.” Both men refer to the action of God who intervenes not just to rescue them from death but also for the purpose of ensuring that they remain free to carry out their mission to preach the Gospel and to establish the Church.

But long before they were rescued in this way, they had each been rescued from something far worse – from their own worst selves. A bit like those photos you see of someone “before” they lose weight and “after” they’ve lost it, Peter and Paul had a “before” and an “after.” Before, there was Simon and after there was Peter. Before, there was Saul and after there was Paul. The change of name corresponds to a change in their persons, a profound and radical change as the result of the mercy of Christ. In Peter, the change was gradual. In Paul, it was more sudden.

A French bible expert, Stanislaus Lyonnet, once said during a retreat that when God wants to draw someone especially close to Himself, He makes that person first experience their own degradation. He faces them with who they really are, not who they think they are. God wants a relationship with the real you, not with the construct of yourself you have invented. Jesus gradually leads Simon to see that he is not the brave and courageous man, friend or leader he thought he was, however sincerely.

Simon begins to learn this when, after the miraculous draught of fishes, he kneels and says, “Lord, leave me. I am a sinful man”, a statement Jesus doesn’t contradict. Then there’s the time when, despite the bravado, Simon begins to sink into the water and cries out, “Lord, save me or I perish!” Moments after Jesus calls Simon by the name of Peter and the rock on which He will build His Church, He calls him Satan because of his worldly way of thinking. At the Last Supper, despite Simon’s protests, Jesus tells him that Satan has had his way to sift him like wheat and that he will deny Jesus three times that night. And when the moment comes for him to be threatened by death due to his association with Jesus, Simon curses and swears vehemently that he doesn’t even know “that man.” It is St. Luke who, when the cock crows the third time, recounts that Jesus looks straight at Simon. It wasn’t a look of condemnation but of mercy.

For Jesus knew that Simon would experience a profound, bitter and tearful spiritual crisis when, at last, he was faced with who he truly was: a coward, an impostor, an egoist. All of that will have felt all the more painful because Simon probably thought that that would be the last time Jesus would have seen him before dying. It’s as if his entire relationship with Jesus had been a lie, had ended in utter failure. Despite everything Jesus had done for him and been to him, he couldn’t even admit that he knew Him on the eve of His crucifixion. The truth is that Simon didn’t even know himself. He lied to himself.

But it was necessary for Simon to experience his own degradation. For precisely in that experience Jesus frees him from it. The merciful look of Jesus when Simon was in the very act of denying Him means that it is not our degradation, even when it’s flagrant, which has the last word, nor is it our self-image which has the last word: the last word belongs to the merciful love of Jesus. He leads us to our degradation to lead us through it, in this life or in Purgatory. He unmasks the false truth of who we think we are in order to lead us to the true truth of who we actually are. In Peter’s case, the Risen Jesus later goes to him to console him and to put to him three times that heart-breaking and heart-searching question: “Do you love me more than these?” Jesus shows Peter that his true self is not the self-made idea, the lie, he has about himself nor is it his denials of his Lord: no, the true Peter is the forgiven Peter, the Peter who, free of lies, can at last truly love Jesus. Through that mercy and love, the rock of Peter’s faith on which the Church of Jesus will be built is shot through with love. Peter had to be humiliated in order to learn the truth about Christ and therefore about himself and so become the forgiven, humble servant of Christ.

A similar pattern holds for Saul. He too lived an illusion. His fantasy was of himself as the fierce and uncompromising defender of God against the Jesus sect. He approved the stoning of Stephen which infected him with a murderous rage against all followers of Jesus, women and children included. In a more sudden and dramatic way than with Peter, the Risen Jesus appears to Saul on the way to Damascus and faces him with the truth that he is not the defender, but the persecutor, of God, the God who Jesus is and who dwells in His followers. Saul falls to the ground, goes blind physically to express the spiritual blindness he had been in all his life, loses his appetite for three days. During those dark days how heavy his soul must have felt, how painful his heart. He had to accept that he had been living a lie and murdering the innocent. He even says years later that the reason he knows Jesus came to save sinners was because he himself was the worst of them. But that apparition of Jesus to him will also have served to reassure him that beyond his degradation, the Lord loved him and forgave him. In the strength of that experience, Paul then became the fearless preacher and passionate lover of Christ across the known world at that time.

It is only in a real, a true, relationship with Jesus that any of us discovers who he or she truly is. Without Him, we are impostors of ourselves. We become like paper cut-outs with artificial features randomly pasted together. It can all look good, colourful and sophisticated on the outside. But we can be like medieval actors who always held a mask over their faces to role-play. We cannot ever be truly happy in this way, because it is not authentic. We need to let Christ remove our self-invented persona and reveal to us through mercy the truly beautiful identity He has planted in the depths of our soul. He will rescue us from any falsehood within. It won’t be easy. It will involve facing our very own degradation, whatever it is, bitter tears and all. But, as with Peter and Paul, Jesus will be there, sustaining us with a merciful look and rescuing us from our degradation in the very act of facing us with it. Let us let Him do it. When we are then truly free, that is, when we are humbly and gratefully who we truly are in Jesus’ merciful love, then, as with Peter and Paul, He can do wonderful things with us and through us here below and in heaven above. Our “before” will become a forever “after.”