Original subtitles

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-For me and for millions of others,

The story of peter is one of the most moving in the gospels,

Because peter was rash

And he sometimes very slow to understand, fearful and perfect.

In other words, a human being just like the rest of us.

And jesus chose him to carry on his ministry,

Not in spite of, but because of his humanity.

We've done our best to tell the story of this man

Who was a fisherman, a humble fisherman,

Who was given the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

Saint peter.

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[ indistinct conversations ]

His name was simon or shimon,

Which means "he who heard the word of god."

His brother's name was andrew.

He was a simple fisherman, a working man.

The work was hard and the times were harder.

But there was one voice that stood out.

-Galileans... People of galilee...

Listen to me.

We are all so quick to see the fault in others.

We open our eyes. We see.

We understand quickly because we are looking from afar.

Not within.

No. Not within.

That is never comfortable.

But listen.

The next time you find fault with your wife

Or your brother...

Or your neighbor

Or even your enemy,

Look within before you speak.

Look within and you will find the purest expression

Of the fault you see in the other.

Yes.

Yes, you will.

This is true.

[ birds chirping ]

-Will you get out of our boat now?

-Put down into the deep water

And lower your nets off the right side of the boat.

-[ chuckles ]

Just get out of our boat.

-We've been out all night and caught nothing.

It's too late now.

-Lower your nets from the right side of the boat.

I tell you, there are fish there.

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-[ grunting ]

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-It's not possible.

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-Follow me and I'll make you fishers of men.

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-[ laughing ]

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[ sighs ]

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Sister. How can I help you?

-[ spits ]

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-Hey. That's the way. That's the way.

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-[ spits ]

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-What is this life we're living now?

-I don't know.

-I don't understand half the things he says.

-Neither do I.

-How can anyone forgive the whole world?

How can anyone forgive someone who's wronged you?

-I don't know, but he can.

That woman who spat on him...

The one who spat on me...

He forgave her over and over.

-That's him. He's not like other men.

-Do you think he comes from god?

-What do you think?

Do you think he's the messiah?

-I think I was compelled to follow him.

I changed my life to follow him.

-So did I.

-When someone is hungry, he feeds them.

When someone is alone, he comforts them.

And when someone is sick, he heals them.

But when I speak to him...

He answers.

-Yes.

-That's something new in this life.

-Yes... It is.

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-You were taught well by your father.

-My father never leaves me.

-I knew your father. May he rest in peace.

-My father is in all things and all people.

He is eternal.

-Be very, very careful what you say, nazarene.

-They honor me with their mouths.

But their hearts are worlds away.

And they worship me in vain

By teaching their own human inventions as my doctrines.

- Isaiah? - Yes.

And his prophecy has come to pass

With your generation of hypocrites.

You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces.

The very people who are trying to enter!

You trudge to the back of beyond,

Looking for a single man to convert.

And the moment you succeed,

You start making him twice as much a child of hell as you are.

-It's not wise to keep company of this man.

He's not your messiah.

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-Master. You think that this was wise?

They took offense at your words.

-As well they should. They are blind.

If the blind lead the blind, they all fall into a pit.

-But what does that mean?

What does all of it mean, master? We don't understand.

-I think you do understand.

But you deny that you do because you are afraid.

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-It was andrew...

Thomas...

Bartholomew...

Mary of magdala...

And mary, the mother of jesus,

Judas iscariot and simon peter.

They, along with the others, were the ones who remained.

The disciples who became the apostles...

The ones who would spread the word

As far and as wide as they could.

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-Master...

What do we do now?

Because now the pharisees will suspect us and watch us.

They watch everything we do.

Won't that harm our mission?

Your mission? Is it our mission? I don't know.

-My dear one...

I chose you, all of you...

Each and every one of you.

And that includes the one who will betray me.

And the one who will deny me near the hour of my death.

-Your death?

-Yes. My death.

But after three days, I will rise again.

-How can you say these things?

How do you even dare to speak of your own death?

Betray you?

Deny you... -out of my sight, satan!

You're speaking in the tongues of men.

I'm speaking the words of god.

-This is too much.

I've had enough.

I've had enough!

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-Simon.

There are things that you will only understand

After I've risen from the dead.

-Master...

I was born a fisherman.

It's hard work, but it's a decent living.

I could go back to that life.

But you've revealed so much to me.

Some of it I've understood.

A lot of it, I...

I-I know no scripture.

I work with my hands.

I'm a much simpler man than you think I am.

-Simon.

I'm giving you a new name.

Peter.

-Why?

What for?

-Because you will be my rock.

The rock on which the church will be built.

The faith.

I'll give you the keys to heaven's kingdom.

-Me?

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Why me?

I don't understand.

I... I don't understand.

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Master, what are you doing?

-I'm going to wash your feet.

-No, you will never wash my feet.

-I told you.

There are things you can't understand now,

But you will understand them later.

You call me master.

Don't you? - Yes.

-So the master is washing the pupil's feet.

This is what we will do for each other.

As I'm doing for you, you will do for one another.

For all others.

If you understand this now,

Any of you, then you are blessed.

But I don't expect that you will.

Tonight one of you will betray me.

And after they've taken me, one of you will deny me.

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-Me?

No, never.

-Three times before the cock crows.

This is the way of men, my beloved peter.

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-No!

-Don't do it.

-No, no!

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[ grunts ] no!

No! No! [ grunts ]

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[ indistinct conversations ]

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-Aren't you a follower of jesus the galilean?

-Don't know what you're talking about.

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-Wasn't that man with jesus of nazareth?

-That's what I thought.

- I never met the man. - You're one of his followers.

I know you are.

You have a galilean accent just like him!

-Listen to me! I've never once laid eyes on this man!

Leave me alone!

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[ rooster crows ]

[ rooster crows ]

[ rooster crows ]

[ breathing heavily, cries ]

[ sobbing ]

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-Hey, brothers!

-Who is that?

-I don't know. I've never seen him.

-Did you catch anything?

-No! Nothing!

-Lower your nets off the right side of the boat!

-It's too late!

-Lower your nets from the right side of the boat!

I tell you, there are fish!

-Just to humor him.

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[ water splashes ]

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-Move! Move!

-[ grunts ]

[ laughter ]

-Nets all day now.

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-Master, it's you.

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-Peter... Do you love me?

-[ crying ]

Master, I betrayed you.

-As I said you would.

-I'm so ashamed.

-But I told you that you would.

Your shame is no concern of mine.

-Master, I...

I just...

[ crying ]

-Do you love me?

-Master, you have to know that I love you.

-Feed my sheep.

-But, master, I... -feed my lambs.

Shepherd my sheep. Feed my sheep.

-Yes.

Yes, I will, master.

-And remember this.

When you are old,

You won't be able to do as you did when you were young.

-Yes, yes. I know that.

-Listen to me.

You'll have to stretch out your arms

For someone else to dress you

And take you where you don't want to go.

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-I knew it was the lord.

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-I've made breakfast for all of you.

And your nets will hold.

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-Brother.

-I'm just a poor fisherman.

He was...

He is the son of god.

-You are the rock.

-And he taught all of us to follow him by his example.

-But you understood him far better than I did.

-Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Understanding comes for every person in their own time.

-Yes. But you didn't deny him.

You stood by him when he was put to death.

I denied him.

-And what did you see in yourself

When you did what he knew you would do?

-My shame.

And...

And... - What, brother?

-My soul.

-He lit a flame within you, brother peter.

-Now you have to light the flame in others.

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[ whispering in global language ]

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-All of you...

I want you to listen to me carefully now

Because I speak of a man, a prophet.

Jesus of nazareth.

He was given to you by god

And made known to you with the signs and wonders

That god worked through him.

And this man jesus, who they allowed to be crucified,

He allowed it.

And then god his father raised him up

And released him from death.

"I see the lord before me," said david.

"he's always at my right hand."

David lived and he died. He's buried in his tomb.

But david knew that god would send the messiah

And god would lift him away from death.

God has made this man both lord and messiah,

This jesus whom they crucified.

I know this man.

I love this man.

He was...

He is the messiah of love and constant forgiveness.

Forgiveness to all before you, friends and enemies.

Because how else are we to break free from vengeance?

So I say to you, repent.

Repent and be baptized.

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I baptize you in the name of jesus.

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I baptize you in the name of jesus.

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-Peter and the other apostles

Were called before the sanhedrin,

The jewish legislative body made up of pharisees and sadducees.

They were questioned about preaching

And healing a lame beggar in the name of jesus.

-You're questioning us about a good deed done

To a crippled man.

You demand to know how he was saved.

By what power?

So here's your answer.

It was in the name of jesus christ who was crucified

And whom god raised from the dead.

There's no other way to salvation,

And there is no other name under heaven

Given to anyone in the human race

By which we can all be saved.

Whatever judgment you hand down,

Whatever instructions or prohibitions we may receive,

These matters are of no consequence to us.

We will never stop speaking of jesus of nazareth,

Of what he said and what he did.

We will never stop preaching in his name,

And we will never stop shouting his name

From the roofs of every house

And from the tops of every mountain.

-I am the one.

I am the one who was cured by this man.

Many of you in this room know me.

You know what I was.

And you can see now what I am.

-Great is the power of the lord.

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-They were forbidden from preaching in the name of jesus.

They were taken to be flogged.

But there was no denying that the christians,

As they would later be known, were a new

And lasting spirit in the world.

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Peter took to the road to evangelize.

His task was to go to the nations

And convert the pagans, the ones who believed in the old gods.

Peter traveled through syracuse, in sicily,

To calabria on the mainland and up through the bay of naples,

And from there to the appian way, which led to rome.

[ indistinct conversations ]

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-Babylon.

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-Shortly after peter's arrival,

A massive fire broke out in rome.

It devastated the city

And destroyed 4 of its 14 neighborhoods.

It was rumored that the emperor nero himself

Had ordered the fire to clear out areas for construction

Of a new palace complex.

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-Aren't you thankful for receiving food

From this man of god? - Words of satan.

-But aren't we teaching kindness in others?

-We're comforting those who need our comfort,

We're feeding those who need our bread

And bringing water to those who are thirsty.

Whether they thank us or not is a matter for men.

It has nothing to do with god.

-Yes, master.

-No.

There's only one who deserves to be called master.

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-According to the historian tacitus,

Who was in rome during the fire,

Nero used the christians as scapegoats.

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He rounded up their leaders

And sentenced them to die on the cross.

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Peter followed the way of his master from beginning to end,

Spreading his faith and speaking his word.

But he asked that his cross be fashioned differently

Because he felt that he wasn't worthy to die as jesus had died.

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"blessed are the pure in heart,"

Jesus says in the sermon on the mount,

"for they will see god."

And he might have been speaking of this man

To whom he entrusted everything.

Jesus told peter, "you will deny me."

Not because he wanted peter to resist or to test him.

Instead, he gave peter a way of seeing himself fully

And clearly, and from there a pathway within to real change.

And that was the gift that jesus gave to peter and to the world.

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Peter was fascinating to me

Because he was always a guy who was struggling to understand,

And the fact that he was always described

As being a hot-headed guy.

So my interest is jesus choosing peter because of the flaws

And the fallibility.

-Jesus is obviously a good judge of character.

I think he chooses peter for his strengths and his weaknesses.

First of all, he's a fisherman,

So he knows how to bait a hook, right?

He knows how to catch things.

He knows how to be patient.

So all these qualities that make a good fisherman.

But he also knows his weaknesses as we know.

And I think to be a leader of the community,

You have to know your weaknesses,

Because you have to remember your reliance on god.

And I think that made him the perfect disciple in a sense.

Richard rohr, the spiritual writer,

Said that peter comes to jesus not by doing right

But by doing wrong,

Which I think is really beautiful.

My old new testament professor, dan harrington,

Used to say that the name peter "rock"

Might have been a little bit of a nickname

And a little bit of a play on his character,

So it's not beyond jesus to use that kind of two ways, right?

You're the rock on which I'll build my church,

But you're also kind of a tough guy.

You're kind of hard-headed, rocky.

-God's ways are not our ways.

The person who doesn't have the appearance of a true believer

Has it at its core.

And that's peter, right? If there's a point to it,

It's to remind us to try to judge character,

Not by our usual criteria.

Who's the best behaved, the most reliable.

-What's the greatest commandment, you know?

To love. And the idea

That you're changed by feeling that through suffering

And through emotional experience, you transform.

The thing I love about him is

How he's always saying, "I don't get it."

You think about somebody who's super emotional.

It's a volatile way to live

Because you're yanked around by how you feel.

He must have been terrified.

I mean, it's one thing to be like with jesus there

And another thing to see him being led away...

-Yes. Exactly.

- And knowing he's going to golgotha.

You just have the feeling that after that face to face

And that level of repentance and forgiveness

In the living moment, he became willing to go to his death.

He wouldn't have denied him.

-Yeah, that's the real mystery and strength of christianity.

It's what happened between that moment

And going on the road and taking it.

-It has to been the resurrection.

A lot of people say,

"well, it was the disciples kind of remembering him.

-You don't put your head on the block for remembering.

-Peter, who was ready to go back to his old job, right?

- "I'm gonna quit. I'm out." - yeah.

-So he needed something dramatic...

And I think all the disciples did... to show this is real,

The resurrection is real.

And it needs to have been physical,

Visual, something that's unmistakable.

And then he's changed. - My favorite sequence,

Where he dives into the blue water

And then he's face to face with him.

He's in that state of profound repentance.

-Jesus offers him forgiveness three times.

He asked him three times, "do you love me?"

To counterbalance peter's denial three times.

Right?

But he also doesn't say, "do you apologize?"

Right? It's all love.

-You know, the way you characterize it.

He denied jesus in the strongest possible terms.

As they say in the newspapers.

He could have kept denying.

"I didn't really mean it. I was under a lot of pressure.

I didn't want to die, too."

But he doesn't go there. He owns it.

And that straightforwardness makes it possible

For him to receive that love.

-And the risen christ offers him not revenge.

He offers him love and peace and forgiveness and reconciliation.

-I think this episode gets us back to the beginnings

Of christianity, where we can see how strange it was,

How reckless it was to commit to this.

And that's what I took away from the final image.

The resurrection,

Or jesus himself, turned peter's life upside down.

We can see that and feel that.

-And it was so luminous.

I found it very moving, that final image.

-In one of the chapels in vatican city,

Where the pope prays right after he's been named pope,

Is a michelangelo image of that.

And it's peter upside down

And peter staring out at you and you...

They often say, you know,

When the pope sees that, it's a reminder, you know,

Of who came first and what was sacrificed.

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