Peter is speaking here first of all about his own experience of communion with Christ. But he does not mean only the fact that he was with Jesus during His earthly ministry. The apostle draws attention above all to his experience connected with...
Peter is speaking here first of all about his own experience of communion with Christ. But he does not mean only the fact that he was with Jesus during His earthly ministry. The apostle draws attention above all to his experience on Mount Tabor, to the experience of the Transfiguration. And to his encounter with the risen Jesus, who foretold his death as a martyr. It is precisely these words of the Savior, spoken to Peter after His resurrection, that the apostle recalls when he says that he will soon have to “leave this dwelling,” evidently meaning his physical body and thus his earthly life.
For the apostle, as we can see, what matters most is not the experience of simply being beside Jesus, but the experience of sharing with Him in the reality of the Kingdom that He brought into the world. Both the Transfiguration and the Resurrection are experiences of the Kingdom, and it is on these that Peter focuses his attention. He bears witness first and foremost to his own experience of the Kingdom—as, indeed, do all the apostles, for Christianity is nothing other than life in the Kingdom.
But alongside his own experience, Peter also invokes another: the experience of the prophets. This is the experience reflected in the Sacred Scripture of the Jews—the prophetic books having already formed part of Judaism's Sacred Scripture in the Gospel era. It was a reference both to Sacred Scripture and to Tradition, for Tradition was founded on the prophetic books no less than on the Torah. For Peter, however, Tradition is inconceivable without what today is sometimes called its charismatic component. To interpret the texts of the prophetic books adequately, one must have the same spiritual experience as the prophets had, or at least a similar one. Otherwise, nothing will come of it.
This is the essence of genuine Tradition, with a capital T: it cannot be preserved like food sealed in a jar. For Tradition with a capital T, to preserve means to recreate and experience anew, making present here and now what the authors of the relevant texts experienced in their own time. Genuine Tradition then becomes part of the experience of the Kingdom, and therefore part of the new, now Christian, Tradition. It becomes part of the Church's experience as well, for the Church is the Kingdom on earth.
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1:16 These things are worthy to be always had in remembrance For they are not cunningly devised fables - Like those common among the heathens. While we made known to you the power and coming - That is, the powerful coming of Christ in glory. But if whatthey advanced of Christ was not true, if it was of their own invention, then to impose such a lie on the world as it was, in the very nature of things, above all human power to defend, and to do this at the expense of life and all things only to enrage the whole world, Jews and gentiles, against them, was no cunning, but was the greatest folly that men could have been guilty of.But were eyewitnesses of his majesty - At his transfiguration, which was a specimen of his glory at the last day.