What Does Peter Mean in the Bible Read through 3 lenses

The meal is over and the towel is still damp from the washing of feet. Jesus says he is going away, and Simon Peter cannot let it pass: where? He is told that where this road leads he cannot come now, though he will come later. The going is not a trip to another place. There is only one real Being, and every thing that exists is borrowing its being from that one, so there is no distance to cross, only a veil to drop, and the veil is the self that thinks it stands on its own. Nothing can be poured into a cup larger than the cup. Each soul receives exactly as much as its readiness allows, and readiness ripens in its own time.

• Peter pushes back: why not now, I will lay down my life for you. The mistake is plain. He speaks as if the life were his to give and the strength his to spend. But a servant owns nothing, not even his own action; he is poor straight through, and whatever he does is lent to him in the moment he does it. Whoever truly knows himself knows his Lord, and what he finds when he looks is not a strong man but an empty place where God acts. The one he is speaking to had already said it of himself, that he did nothing out of his own hand.

So the answer comes back as a question, and then the hard word: before the bird calls at dawn you will say three times that you never knew me. Nothing is happening that was not already known. Every soul has a shape held in God's knowing from the beginning, and what comes out in that courtyard is only that shape showing itself. The three denials are not the end of him. They burn off the I will, and a man emptied of his own claim is light enough at last to follow.