QUOTE : Now I would like to stress that what we have just seen described is actually much more difficult, and produces much more of a shake-up, than seems to be the case from St Luke’s account. The reason is that we are all actually far more run by our systems of purity, the things which keep us “us” and the other “other”, than we realize. Peter, for instance, was not someone who was in principle a citizen of the world, but just happened to hold to a purity code as a pleasing cultural option. He had been completely brought up within a system, had taken it for granted. The system had given him to be who he was. It hadn’t even occurred to him for quite a long time after hanging out with Jesus, after Jesus had risen from the dead, and after he, Peter, had been performing miracles in Jesus’ name, that all this was going to have unpredictably huge cultural consequences. So what we witness is him being taken to a place at the very limit of his experience. He actually finds himself being asked to do something repulsive.