Jesus’ prayers for Peter — and perhaps for Judas as well — express God’s unfathomable respect for human freedom. Even when he senses his close friend will betray him, Jesus does not intervene with a freedom-crushing miracle. He allows history to take its course, at enormous personal cost, praying all the while that even betrayal and death may be redeemed as part of the outworking of the grace of God. For Peter’s sake, for Judas’s, and for the world’s, that prayer found an answer.
