NOTES for Pe2 1:16

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.

After listing at the beginning of the chapter how growth in faith takes place, the apostle Peter brings us back to its first and most difficult act. The apostle even introduces the discussion by saying that, as long as he lives, he will continually remind them of it, and that after his death everyone should remind himself. He does not confuse them or tell them tales; he merely bears witness to what he himself saw and heard. He heard God the Father’s testimony about the Son, and he received Jesus as his Savior. This is not so easy to do, because this simple fact compels one to accept His Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection, and to accept all His words. One cannot limit oneself to a single step: once one agrees that Jesus is the beloved Son, one must accept everything in Him and everything about Him. It is as difficult as deciding to entrust oneself to a surgeon or to another person. But sooner or later there comes a moment of decision, when one must make this choice of faith that changes one’s whole life. Having remembered our conscious return to the Savior and remembered that all the prophecies were fulfilled in Him, we must preserve this knowledge while we remain “in the bodily tent” and pass it on, as it has been passed down from the apostle Peter to our own day.

Peter emphasizes once again that he is an eyewitness to Christ’s deeds and asks us to take particular account of the fact that his testimony about His teaching is not based on what others have told him, but on his own direct recollections. Peter bears witness to what he saw on the Mount of Transfiguration, about which Christ asked them not to speak “until the Son of Man is risen from the dead” (Matt. 17:9). We can hardly imagine how easy or difficult it was for Peter to keep such an astonishing event secret, but now the time has come to tell of it.

And here we see that the apostle places above his own testimony the prophetic word spoken several centuries earlier by those who did not live to see Christ’s coming. Personal experience as a witness might seem more important than something heard or read, but for Peter it matters that what he testifies to is an integral link in the unbroken chain of the one process of Revelation. In this process, what is new not only does not deny what was proclaimed before, but is confirmed by it and acknowledges everything that comes from God.