The Loneliness of Revelation

Currently I am reading Helmut Thielicke's collection of sermons entitled, How To Believe Again. I was struck by this section:

'Our text [Matt. 16:13-23] reaches its climax in the words that are now spoken. For Peter feels himself driven to a confession the madness of which (there's no other way to put it) hardly hits us any more because, in the meantime, the words have become all too familiar. They have long since become a Christian cliché. But at the time this confession was uttered, it must have been a powerful shock to those who heard it...

'When Jesus broke the silence that followed this precedent-shattering statement (and there must have been a pause of astonishment and confusion) he explained to Peter and the onlookers that this statement itself was a miracle. It was miraculous that such words could be uttered at all. "Flesh and blood," mere instinct or mother-wit, could not have discovered this secret. For one moment the walls of fog that mysteriously shroud the figure of Jesus of Nazareth are parted, and the eyes of an incomprehensible majesty gaze upon a stunned Peter.

'At that moment Peter is the loneliest man on the face of the earth. He is almost as lonely as the Master himself. Formerly Peter was a man like everybody else. He was a man like you and me. He affirmed God's providence when things suited him, and he protested when they got in his way. He wanted to do the right thing, the consciousness of his sin weighed on him like a millstone. He had not settled matters with his own conscience and therefore, with good reason, steered clear of the circuit of the eternal Judge.

'That's the way it usually is with all of us. Peter was no different from you and me. But now, at one blow, all that changes. Now he is the only one who has felt the scales drop from his eyes. Now he sees that God's heartbeat can be touched and felt and heard, despite all of life's riddles, all the world's horrors, and even judgment itself. You are the assurance (Peter is now able to confess) that there is no "Fate," but that, far above our heads, there are higher and loving thoughts about us. You are the assurance that there is something other than the eternal law of crime and punishment, that there is a Father who forgives our incriminating past and gives us the miracle of a fresh start.'

The loneliness of the discovery of grace—by revelation and not by wit or work—is a loneliness in the world in which we are placed, but which is visited by the presence of God our Father, Christ and the blessed Holy Spirit. Any person who has borne witness to the truth of Christ will know the bitter sweetness of confessing him and having others know nothing of what is shared.

The loneliness of revelation is also part of the impetus for the proclamation of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Where we forget the loneliness of what we have we may well show that we forget the sadder and deeper loneliness of the person without God, an alien in this creation intended to be his home.

"Oh that world might taste and see the riches of his grace: the arms of love that compass me would mankind embrace... Happy if with my latest breath I might but gasp his name; Preach him to all and cry in death, "Behold, behold the Lamb!"