Sunday, September 19, 2010

John 18:38b-19:16a

09/19/10
John 18:38b-19:16a
Hudson UMC

Here, in this passage, we have both Pilate, the Roman authority in Jerusalem, refusing to stand on the side of justice, preferring rather to avoid the political consequences of standing against the angry mob, and also the crowd of people, especially those who led them, insisting so strongly that Jesus needed to die that they insisted that a violent revolutionary be released instead of the innocent man they had betrayed. None of the people, whether religious or secular, Jew or Gentile, come out looking very good at the end of this passage.

One of the things I have noticed about much of the history of interpretation of texts like this, especially in the Protestant tradition, is that it tends to demonize those people in the gospels who stand against Jesus. For example, we hear all the time about how evil the Pharisees were. Now, I don’t want to say that they were not evil because Jesus claims that they are, and it is probably because Jesus claims that the Pharisees were evil that so many Christians have really played up this theme in their sermons and commentaries. However, it tends to paint a one-sided picture of them.

We do not only see this with passages that deal with the Pharisees, though. There is a tendency to demonize people like Pilate, the rich young ruler, and anyone who does not behave according to the highest standards of the Christian life. Part of the problem is that this way of thinking does not do justice to the fact that, while we live on this side of the resurrection, ascension and the giving of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the people we are reading about in the gospels didn’t. How could we expect the people to understand who Jesus was before the resurrection? Perhaps faith has come easily to us, but many of us grew up in communities full of believers and we inherited a way of life and thought that not only did not consider Jesus to be an enemy, but lifted him up as the greatest of all humans, if not the fullness of God in our midst, as traditional Christian faith has proclaimed.

However, in spite of all that, I think that there may be a hidden motive in our tendency to treat these people harshly. If we demonize the people who so clearly do not believe in the gospels, we distance ourselves from them. The problem with that is that, if we do that, we prevent ourselves from seeing that we are more similar to them than we might like to admit. If we do not come face to face with our own problems as revealed in people like Pilate and the Pharisees, we can never let God truly reconcile that area of our lives.

It is easy for us to condemn the Jewish leaders for trying so hard to secure Christ’s conviction, because we clearly know in this time and place that they were wrong. However, I don’t think it does justice to the actual people involved if we assume that they were doing evil with the express intention of doing evil. We need to understand that they believed, deep in their heart of hearts, that they were doing right, that they were opposing some solitary religious quack who had some bizarre cult following who was teaching some deeply destructive ideas about God. Just to be clear, I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way as some do today, as if they were saying, “That Jesus tells us to love one another; isn’t that terrible?” Instead, I mean what were seen as really destructive ideas about God, like attacking the unity of God, overthrowing the traditions that had stood for centuries, and seriously disrupting the social order. I don’t mean to soften this in any way. The people were genuinely convinced that Jesus had destructive religious ideas.

I want to put forward two very contemporary examples in hopes to show that, perhaps, we as human beings and even we as Americans, are not as far away from this kind of reactionary behavior as we might wish to think. A word of caution is required here, though, before I go on as it is possible that I might be misunderstood. Someone could say to me, “Pastor Travis, do you really think that those are parallel to the mob demanding the crucifixion of Christ?” My only point is to demonstrate the power that religious convictions, and they violation of those convictions, still has, even in a culture that is, by and large, secular and pluralistic.

There is a religious group who makes their religious convictions concrete and public by going from place to place, protesting one thing or another. I first came to be aware of them when they were protesting the funerals of American soldiers who had died fighting for a country that, in their mind, is fighting for sin in all its forms. Very recently, they were planning on coming to UNI’s campus to protest an upcoming theatrical production, although I understand that they never actually showed up. The point is that, they have become so well-known and so incredibly disliked, that their protests tend to mobilize the people in the areas to which they are traveling to organize counter-protests. Even though these counter-protests are intended to fight against hatred and intolerance, many times, the content of the signs that are made are no less hateful and intolerant than the ones they are protesting against.

Thinking just a little bit further back, just over a week ago, there was a man who said that he was going to publicly burn the sacred book of another religion. America got up in arms, posting this thing and that on the internet, getting upset over it and even threatening to physically harm this man who was deemed as insufficiently concerned with the cares of others. In the end, he decided not to do it, but not before there were riots in parts of the world over what this pastor of a relatively small church might do.

Now, I hope you all know me well enough by now to know that I am in no way affirming, defending or glorifying the actions of these people, nor am I saying that everyone in America is either like them or like the ones who violently and dramatically stand against them. My point is much more general than that. My point is that human beings have a tendency, even if they are calm and laid back about most things, to get very excited and angry when other people flagrantly violate their deepest religious convictions.

We can all see how Jesus violated the religious convictions of the ancient Jewish people gathered in Jerusalem for Passover. He claimed to be the Son of God, that He and the Father are one, that His actions are the very acts of God. He pointed out, both by His words and by His actions that the way things have always been done were not God’s ways and that the tradition was so far from honoring God that it was hindering people from knowing and loving God like they should. By looking at these contemporary examples, we can see that people still get excited when people claim that our ways of understanding God and the godly life are wrong, but by looking at Jesus, we can see that this reaction is not reduced but rather increased when that challenge is right.

It might be argued that the reactions against these fringe groups, who do not represent the mainstream of American culture, is not religious in nature, but social or perhaps even political. It is those things, but it is really and truly religious as well. Perhaps it is because I am a pastor and am attracted to religious responses to events like these that I have seen a large number of reactions pointing out a misunderstanding of who God is. However, there have been many people, who claim not to believe in a god at all, who have insisted on putting a religious spin on their commentary. They might claim that they are responding with religious convictions, not because they have deeply held belief in God, but because those who are inciting this reaction are making religious claims, but I think there is more to it than that.

Let’s say that I were to do something like misrepresent the Cub’s World Series record, saying that, since nobody can actually remember a World Series in which the Chicago Cubs won, they must not ever have won, there are probably many of you who wouldn’t care. The most I would get out of many people is, “Oh, well, that’s wrong, but who cares?” There are some, however, who would get very upset about such a misrepresentation. Why? Because they love the Cubs and they know in their hearts that I am wrong and that, by misrepresenting the Cub’s history, I am doing real violence to something they love.

I say all this because people would not make a point to complain about how other people misrepresent God if they did not have deep-seated feelings about who God is and what He is like. Sometimes, this objection is made on the basis of who Christ is, other times, an appeal is made to God as an idea, God in the abstract (which, as a Christian, I can make no sense out of. So far as I am concerned, there is no God in the abstract, but only the God that actually exists). The point is that the religious claims of fringe groups deeply offend people who do not think they have religious convictions because these other people have violated the convictions that they do not even believe they hold.

The people in Jerusalem at that time were having their religious convictions trampled upon. Their actions showed that they believed very concrete things about God and that Jesus violated them in a serious way. By their actions, they proclaimed that they did not believe that God would come among them, that God would meet them where they were at, that God would be more concerned with their hearts and souls and minds and lives than with their political independence. They did not believe that God would come so close as to become one of us and one with us, to shoulder our burdens, to share in our shame that we might share in His glory. They did not believe that God would stand against all the clever religious activity that they had thought up. If those are some of the things that their actions showed they didn’t believe about God, what did they believe?

They believed that, at the end of the day, the one thing that God really wanted for them was to be free of the Romans. God wanted them to be free of a political oppressor and the only way they could imagine that He would do that is by raising up a political leader, someone who was willing and ready to overthrow the government, to take lives in their following of God’s call. This is why, when Pilate offered to release Jesus, the one who had done no wrong, the people refused, choosing instead to have a man named Barabbas released. Our text just says here that Barabbas was a bandit. What this means, however, was that Barabbas was a participant in a political insurrection against Roman rule. Barabbas had shed blood in the fight for political freedom. He was a military hero, one like the great Judas Maccabeus, who would lead them to victory over the overwhelming force of the Roman army. What the people wanted was a God who would give them military glory like He had done in the past. What they wanted more than anything, though, was a God who thought just like they did.

When we consider the fact that it was the religious leaders who were so violently opposed to Jesus, we as the church cannot dare to walk away from texts like this with nothing more than a warm and fuzzy feeling. Texts like this humble us and remind us to hope in grace, not only because grace is promised to us, but because without grace, there would be no hope for us. As a preacher I both love and hate texts like this. I hate them because they expose all my sin and shortcoming; after all, as a pastor, I am a religious leader and yet, in spite of my status as a leader, in spite of my training, both formal and informal, in spite of all my best efforts to be faithful, I see in this text, among others, the sober fact that the religious leaders of the time were so far from supporting and defending the work of God that they set themselves against it and the same could very well happen in our time and place.

However, I love this text and those like it because it reminds me of the incredible nature of grace. In spite of all the faithlessness of the Jewish leaders and their shocking thirst for the blood of the Son of God, where human beings do not come off looking very good at all, the grace and love of God has not abandoned us, but binds us to Himself. After all, when Jesus is hanging from the cross, innocently enduring indescribable pain at the hands of people who hate Him without cause, He cried out, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

But what we need to reflect on is whether there are any deep convictions that we have about God that Jesus, by His words, actions and being, challenges. I mentioned at the very beginning of the sermon that, so long as we tend to demonize the angry mob that wanted to put Jesus to death, we would never be able to come to terms with the similar passions that exist within each of us. If we come at this question from the start by presupposing that our view of God is not challenged by Jesus, we will never take it seriously.

Perhaps most importantly of all, we must not assume that we are immune from this critique by the Word of God because we go to church or perhaps even are greatly involved in the church. After all, the people who wanted Jesus to be executed were not the evil people, they were not the Gentiles, the “other nations.” Instead, it was the Jews, the very people of God, and their leaders more than the rest. It was those who seemed like the most faithful, the greatest religious leaders, those who seemed to know the way of God better than anyone else, that were the most likely to reject Jesus. This is not a warning to the violent or to those who have nothing to do with God; it is a warning to us, for whom it is so easy to rest secure in our relationship with God.

Again, there is no sugar coating of this passage, no way to twist it around and make it warm and fuzzy, no way to avoid the searching questions it directs toward us. And yet, there are few passages more hopeful and joyful than this one. The reason it is a source of such hope and joy is because we know that Jesus was not taken by surprise by all this; He had seen it coming a mile away, and yet He had no problem coming to be one of us and take our burdens upon Himself, bearing and bearing away our sin so that we might be restored to relationship with the God who loves us. So, as we reflect on the ways that we are challenged by this text in the weeks to come, let us also live knowing the grace that God has extended, even to us. Let us pray.

AMEN

Monday, September 13, 2010

John 18:28-38a

09/12/10
John 18:28-38a
Hudson UMC

There are some very interesting statements made in this passage. For instance, it is very interesting that the Jewish authorities take Jesus to Pilate, the Gentile authority to be condemned but Pilate, at this point, does not do so. This is an amazing instance of the people who we would think should understand and support Jesus don’t and those that we wouldn’t think should do so, do exactly that. It is also very interesting that the various gospel writers, John included, consider it necessary in order to fulfill prophecy, that Jesus be executed by the Romans instead of the Jews because the Romans would crucify Him as a political criminal while the Jews would stone him to death. It is also interesting that Pilate calls Jesus the king of the Jews and that Jesus responds in such a way as to make it clear that, although he was about to die the death of a political rebel, He was, in reality, instituting a kingdom of a far different nature.

In spite of the fact that all these things are very interesting and we could spend some time talking about them, there is one moment, at the very end of the passage, that I think is so incredibly contemporary and relevant to our culture and lives today that I would be failing my responsibility to connect the Scripture to our modern world if I did not spend the majority of my sermon this morning speaking about it. Jesus finished up his statement to Pilate by saying, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate’s response is made up of three simple words. “What is truth?”

The quest for truth, which has been so popular, both in modern thinking and in the post-modern thinking that is so very common in our culture today, is nothing new. As far back as we have records, it is clear that people have been obsessed with finding and knowing the truth, at least in the Western world. What is amazing to me is that, in spite of the many ways that people have tended to look for truth, it has almost always been looking where truth cannot be found. I want to give something of an overview of the history of the search for truth.

First, let us consider the thought of the very most ancient philosophers in Greece. These early thinkers looked to the universe for truth and argued with one another where truth was most fully to be found. They spoke of four basic elements from which everything else was composed, but they argued back and forth about which element was the very most basic, hoping that they could reduce the world into different manifestations of fire, or earth, or water, or air.

Equally ancient were the Pythagoreans, who formed a secret society, that was almost like a secret religion, where they explored mathematical and geometrical relationships as the purest example of truth. To them, these relationships seemed to be so necessary that they were almost divine.

Moving forward just a little bit, we find Socrates, who said that the truth that people were seeking in nature could not be found there but resides inside the human person. He is famous for saying, “Know yourself.” He did not just mean that we need to be in touch with who we are, or that we need to have clarity in our knowing of ourselves before we can really know anything else, but that we should know ourselves because, at the end of the day, that is where truth is to be found and where alone truth really can be said to exist. This inward turning of thinking has marked the search for truth ever since.

Plato, who was a student of Socrates, held that what we can see, hear and touch is not really real and so not really true, because things are always changing and passing away. In order to maintain some sense of reality, he spoke of an ideal plane, where forms, ideas and images existed eternally, never changing and never passing away, which are impressed in some inexpressible way, on the human mind. When this was given a religious spin, this eternal plane ended up being seen as generated from the mind of God. In our daily life, we see things that are shadows and dim reflections of what is really real, but we ourselves live only in a transient world. What we must do is transcend this world of space and time, get out of our bodies, as it were, and begin to commune with the real that is independent of everything we know and have seen.

Plato had a famous student, Aristotle, who agreed that what is real is not what we can see or touch, but thought that we cannot have any kind of knowledge of those things except by abstracting from what we experience. Aristotle coined the influential phrase, “There is nothing in the mind which is not first in the senses.” Truth was not what you could see, hear and touch, but what you could deduce from those things.

If we leave the ancient world behind and step into the high middle ages, we find a completely different way of knowing truth. In the middle ages, the institutional church gained tremendous power over the lives of people. Truth was not something that was lodged in anything as reliable as the natural world or mathematics, or even in some ideal plane, but truth was what the church told you was the truth. Now, it needs to be said that this is not the same thing as saying that truth is what the Bible says, because the church believed that, left to our own devices, we could never really understand what the Bible says and so we need to be told what the Bible says.

Eventually, this whole way of thinking so upset educated people that, in the aftermath of the Renaissance, people began to question whether God had a role in our knowing of the truth at all. More and more, people turned to science as a way to know the truth. At first, this was done by people of faith, because of their faith in the one God of Christian faith, who, as the one Creator of heaven and earth, imparted to it a distinct order of its own that shows up everywhere. Again, this emphasis on science was first pursued by people of Christian faith, but quickly, it became a form of Deism which said that God created the world but left it to itself, like a watchmaker creates the watch and, after winding it up, leaves it alone. Eventually, scientists began to feel that including God in their considerations was a hindrance to their knowing the truth, so they abandoned Him.

At the same time this was happening, there was a quest in Europe to find foundations on which absolutely certain knowledge could be built. This was the goal of Rene Descartes in his famous experiment where he climbed into his oven and systematically doubted everything he could doubt. Finally, he got to the point where he realized that, in order for him to doubt, he must exist, for it was he who was doubting, so he found he could not doubt his own existence. “I think (or doubt), therefore I am.”

This trend continued on, trying to build this foundation. Every time someone thought they had found a basis for real knowledge, someone else would come along and point out that it is wasn’t as good as they thought it was. A thinker named Immanuel Kant came along and suggested that, instead of trying to try to find truth in the world, and make our thoughts and lives conform to what exists in the universe, perhaps we should try to approach nature as if it has to conform to our thinking. Hopefully, by building on our experience, we could find some foundation for our knowledge.

You could almost predict it, but it didn’t work. Thinker after thinker came along, only to find that they were not able to find the foundations they were looking for. It became overwhelmingly clear that there are no foundations on which we can build our absolutely certain knowledge, and that whole project collapsed to the ground. No longer could people claim to have any kind of knowledge that did not depend on their upbringing, their gender, their race, their socio-economic status, and their community. What can we do if that is the case? The conclusion of the mainstream of philosophers was that we can no longer know anything for sure and we can only do what seems best to us. A whole school of thought called “deconstructionism” arose, where the goal was not to put forward any clear and authoritative position, but to show how other people, who did claim that, really were nothing more than the product of their environment.

What happened in the church during this time? Well, starting in the eighteenth century, the concept of history went through a major transformation. For the first time, people began to operate with what we could now call a “tape recorder” view of history, where, if it could not have been videotaped or audio recorded, it cannot be “historical.” This had not ever been the view of history throughout the history of the world. However, once you do that, all kinds of tensions start to show up in the Bible. What were people of faith to do?

Those who came to be known as “liberals” took the challenges seriously; so seriously, in fact, that they tended to run away from history into their own world of religious experience. After all, if I have encountered God, nobody else can change that, even if the Bible ends up being historically unreliable. Those who came to be known as “conservatives” tended to respond by ramping up their understanding of Biblical inspiration. Now, the Bible was understood to be inspired in such a way as to claim that it cannot be untrue in any sense of the word, regardless of whether the topic at hand is theological, scientific, historical, or anything else. What is ironic is that, just like the liberals, the conservatives tended to run away from history. It does not matter what archaeologists and historians discover; everything in tension with the Bible is wiped away as if it did not exist.

When I think about this whole history, I am amazed, not so much with what people have tried to do to find truth, but by what people, in general, haven’t tried to do. Throughout history, people have said that truth is finally in the natural world around us, in the purity of mathematics, in an ideal plane that is cut off from us, except in shadows and images, in the human ability to think abstractly and deduce from experience, in a rigidly hierarchical institution, in scientific exploration, in firm foundations of knowledge, in our own experience, in an inspired text as a text, and finally in our own will to power. Notably absent is the answer that John’s Gospel presents for us.

Pilate asks, “What is truth,” but John does not tell us his answer here. The reason he does not provide an answer at this point is because he has already told us the answer a few chapters before, or rather, Jesus has told us the answer. Back in chapter fourteen, when Jesus was comforting His disciples, he told them to believe in God and also to believe in Him. He was going away to prepare a place for them, but He would come back. They shouldn’t lose hope because they knew where He was going. Thomas responds, saying, “Lord, we do not know where you are going, how do we know the way?” Jesus’ response is incredibly important, and we so seldom take it with all the seriousness it deserves. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me.” Most of the time, when we hear this verse in our modern context, it is made to cut down other religions, but that is not primarily what Jesus is saying here.

One of the important things to understand about this statement, I have said many times in the last few months. That is that, if we are searching for truth as a what, that is, as something, we have missed it and have started on the wrong foot altogether. Truth is not a thing that we can possess or exercise any kind of authority over. Truth is a person, it is a who. Truth is not something that can be collapsed into a series of statements. We can’t reduce anything to nothing more than statements, how much less can we do so to the very Truth of God?

The other thing I want to emphasize is that God has given Himself to us. The gift that we have received from God is not just something about God, but it is God Himself. This means that God has actually moved and decisively revealed Himself among us as the man Jesus. Since this is what God has actually done, we are not free to live as if He has not done it. If we are searching for a truth that somehow bypasses God’s actual self-revelation in Jesus Christ, we are searching for the truth by avoiding the Truth.

In a society where both the modern idea of absolutely certain knowledge and the post-modern idea of no absolutely certain knowledge live side by side and pull our world in a game of tug-of-war, this bold assertion by the Gospel is something we need to hear. The Gospel reveals that any way to search for Truth that does not lean on Jesus as the self-revelation of God, is confused and completely mistaken. This says to those who want to find foundations for truth that you can’t treat truth as if it were something you could control and assert dominance over. There are no foundations of truth outside of Christ. The one on whom all our understanding of truth relies is not a logical foundation but a living and active person.

The response that the Gospel makes to post-modern relativism is just as pointed. It says, “In spite of the fact that we cannot bring to explicit articulation how we come to know the Truth, there is indeed Truth and we do indeed come to know it. This knowing is not something that we can reduce to words, but something that transcends us and comes to bear upon us in power and glory in Christ and through the Holy Spirit.”

Pilate is unwilling to ruffle feathers. He stands at the meeting of two significant and very different cultures. He wants to let them both go their own way, but is forced to decide between the Jews who are convinced that Jesus is a criminal and his own government that can find nothing wrong with Him. If he makes a stand one way or another, he could be criticized, removed from his office, or even rebelled against. It is convenient to stand back from truth, because truth causes too many problems. Truth demands that we live in a way appropriate to the truth, that we cannot be the lords of our own lives. Pilate wants nothing to do with that; he just wants to keep doing his own thing and it just seems easier to let the Jewish leaders have their way.

Brothers and sisters, this does not have to be our conclusion! We do not, we ought not, we must not, fall into either error, either thinking that truth can be found outside of Christ or that there is no truth. The very Truth of God has become incarnate in our midst, breaking into our human condition and transforming our lives. The truth has come, the truth is alive, and the truth has invited us to renounce ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow him. Let us do so with joy, because to suffer for the Truth is far better than to live in ease in opposition to the Truth. Let us pray. AMEN

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

John 18:15-27

09/05/10
John 18:15-27
Hudson UMC

There is a technique that the gospel writers sometimes used where they would take one story, split it in half, and stick another story in between the two halves. When they did this, they were tying the two stories together in a powerful way. The two stories have to be seen as shedding light on each other and helping us to understand what is going on. To give an example, Mark tells us a story of a hungry Jesus coming upon a fig tree that had no fruit on it. In response, He curses the tree and says that it will never bear fruit anymore. Jesus and the disciples then go into Jerusalem. On the way out of town, they see the tree again, only now it has completely withered. The disciples are amazed, but we are confused, because we cannot see why a story of a withered tree would be included in the story of Jesus.

However, when we look to see what happens while Jesus and the disciples are in Jerusalem, things begin to make more sense. Right after Jesus curses the fig tree for having no fruit, He goes into Jerusalem, to the Temple, and turns over the tables, harshly criticizing the religious leadership that had abandoned God and were not providing real spiritual leadership, that is, they were not bearing fruit. The cursing of the fig tree turns out to have next to nothing to do with agriculture, but everything to do with the Temple that Jesus was standing against and replacing with His own self. However, that depth of meaning only arises in our minds if we look at both stories at the exact same time.

You probably would like to know that I am not just bringing that up just for the sake of sneaking some helpful hints for Bible study into the beginning of my sermon. We actually care about that particular bit of information this morning because John has done precisely this with his telling of Peter’s denial of Christ and Christ’s interrogation by the high priest. John has split the story of Peter’s denial into two parts and placed the story of Jesus being questioned in the middle. The point that he is making is that these two things are deeply related and that we cannot really understand them unless we think them through at the same time. There is meaning to these two stories that we will miss if we focus on them just one at a time and do not allow their interplay to impress itself upon us.

It is this interplay that we are going to focus on this morning. There are all kinds of interesting details in this passage that we could spend a lot of time on, but aren’t going to. For example, who is this “other disciple” who both follows Jesus and is known to the high priest. How is it that this other disciple is not questioned by anyone about whether he follows Jesus or not while Peter is asked by everyone? To be honest, many of the greatest minds in the church have had no answer to some of those questions, so we will focus on what seems to be the larger issue, the comparison and contrast between Jesus and Peter and what it tells us about God, about humanity, and about the Gospel.

Let us start by looking at Jesus in this passage, because it is in light of what we see in Jesus that we understand the seriousness of what we see in Peter. Jesus is standing before the high priest, without doubt one of the very most powerful leaders in Jerusalem at the time, short of Herod and Pilate. People were not called directly before the high priest unless they were in serious trouble. History shows us that, when most people were brought face to face with the high priest, their reaction was of humility, pleading for mercy and safety, hoping against hope that they would be set free, or at least that their sentence would be mild.

This is not what we see Jesus doing. Here is Jesus in the same situation, and He is not afraid that they might put Him to death; He is quite certain that this is exactly what they are going to do. And yet, He does not cower before the merely human ruler, but stands confident. First, He exposes the hypocrisy and illegality of His arrest. In ancient Israel, like in modern America, a person who is on trial is not to be forced to bring forward information that could condemn them. Witnesses are supposed to be brought forward, and trials were supposed to be public. None of these things were the case here. Jesus reminds them that they were not even staying true to their own law by saying, “I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in the synagogues and in the temple, where all the Jews come together. I have said nothing in secret. Why do you ask me? Ask those who heard what I said to them; they know what I said.”

By saying this, Jesus is basically saying, “First of all, you already know what I have been teaching, you just want me to bow before you and renounce it. Secondly, you are asking me to condemn myself in a private, rigged trial with no witnesses. You are questioning me as if I were a criminal, but it is you who seem to be intent on breaking the law.” When we understand that Jesus was blowing the whistle on these leaders, it is much less of a surprise to read what happens next. “When he had said this, one of the police standing nearby struck Jesus on the face, saying, ‘Is that how you answer the high priest?’” The response is not one of humility, apology, or even recognition that wrong has been done, but violence. The one who slapped Jesus was hoping that, even if He were not intimidated by the presence of the high priest, He would be frightened by the prospect of physical harm.

But this is not what happened. Jesus responded to this attack by saying, “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” In spite of the long tradition of human beings that “might makes right,” where the ones who can wield the most force determine what is right and wrong based on their likes and dislikes, Jesus says that this is not so. Truth stands on its own; it does not need the support of human strength. Not only that, but the Truth of God will stand, even if every human being were to resist it. In Psalm 2, the Psalmist speaks of all the nations of the world conspiring together against the Lord and His anointed. The response is that God laughs at them, showing that even the combined strength of every human being cannot overcome Him. Jesus is standing on the strength of His integrity. His integrity is not just that He is remaining true to Himself, but that He is the Truth and nothing the leaders can do, even if it means nailing Him to a cross, can undo that fact.

Let us turn our attention now to the two parts of the story of Peter. It is something of a different story. Jesus is interrogated by Annas, the father-in-law of the current high priest and, quite likely, one who had been the high priest before, and yet He stands strong, unintimidated by the power of this mighty man. Peter is questioned, perhaps even casually, by a servant girl who stands at the gate about whether he followed Jesus. It was not totally clear as to whether Peter’s life was in danger for following Jesus. It seems that it probably wasn’t because the leaders were interested in having Jesus die as the one man who would die for the nation. The stakes are considerably different. Even though Peter’s trial is much less than that of his master, he crumbles, denying that he is a disciple of Christ.

After this first denial, he goes to warm himself by a charcoal fire, along with the slaves of the household and the police. Those who were gathered around asked him again if he was a follower of Jesus, and he denies it again. Other gospels have the people asking him, specifying that he must be one of Jesus’ disciples because his accent gave him away as one from Galilee, the same place as Jesus was from. It is as if someone born and raised in the deep south, or Boston, or even from far northern Minnesota or Wisconsin came to Iowa, trying to deny that they were from out of town. The evidence is stacked against Peter, and yet he refuses to tell the truth.

Here, after that second denial, Peter is put to the question in an extremely pointed way. Remember how Peter is gathered around a fire with the police? These were the same police who had just come to arrest Jesus in the garden in the very last passage. In the heat of the moment, Peter tried to defend Jesus by pulling out a sword and cutting off the ear of one of the police, named Malchus. As it turns out, we do not only have the colleagues of Malchus warming themselves around the same fire that Peter is, but we have one of his relatives there. That person asks Peter, “Did I not see you in the garden with him?” This is not the same thing as someone thinking they saw him with Jesus once upon a time, or someone who associates Peter with Jesus because they have the same accent, but someone who, just a moment ago, watched Peter cut off the ear of their cousin. It is as if he is saying, “Now see here, you; I saw you with Jesus just now, this very night, with Jesus, and you were so devoted to Him and that you were willing to take on a whole cohort of soldiers. In fact, you even attacked someone who is related to me. Are you sure that you are not one of His followers?” Peter, caught red-handed, unable to squirm his way out of the situation, continues in his masquerade and denies it once again.

“At that moment the cock crowed.” I imagine that, when the rooster crowed, the words of Jesus rang loudly in Peter’s ears. Peter was so strong, so determined, so willing to die for Jesus, and yet here it has been demonstrated with incredible clarify that this was not the case, but that he crumbled under even under the least pressure. He, the strongest and most headstrong of the disciples, had failed.

Paul, in his letter to the Romans, wrote something that is helpful to keep in mind when we see Peter’s failure to stand strong for Jesus, especially when we realize that it is symbolic of all humanity’s failure to serve God like we should. Paul had been explaining that the Jews, who had received the law of Moses, were not following it and so they were no better off than the Gentiles who were stuck in idolatry. The question is raised, “Then what advantage do the Jews have?” Paul’s response is “Much in every way! For in the first place the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. What if some were unfaithful? Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means! Although everyone is a liar, let God be proved true.”

What Paul has said is that God is faithful, even when we aren’t. It is not as though God is able or unable to be faithful to His promises based on how well we fulfill His commands to us, but rather God is faithful and is true, even if every human being was a liar. Indeed, we find that, even when we are at our best, even when we think we are firmly rooted in the truth of the gospel, when we compare that to the very Truth of God, we find that, compared to God, we are liars, we do suffer from untruth. We say one thing and do another, either out of malice, or even just out of forgetfulness. With God, on the other hand, to say and to do is one and the same thing.

This applies to the story of Peter here in a powerful way. He must have been utterly overwhelmed with shame, his faithlessness exposed with such clarity. And yet, Jesus had predicted it earlier that night. Jesus knew just how wishy-washy Peter would be at this moment. Back in chapter thirteen, after Peter so boldly asserted his loyalty, Jesus says, “Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly, I tell you, before the cock crows you will have denied me three times.” Sometimes, we get the sense that Jesus is shaming Peter here, but I don’t think this is the case. I think that it is much more of a caution against idolatry. Peter is trusting on his own strength to defend his master, but Jesus knows better. He knows that if His plans were built on human strength, they would fall like so many empires. Instead, He wanted to correct Peter and show him that the work He had come to do did not depend on his ability to resist temptation.

It is marvelous that this passage falls on a Sunday where we are celebrating Holy Communion because it so captures the essence of the sacraments. Let us begin with baptism. As we are a church that, like the great tradition of the church, practices infant baptism, I would guess that most people in this room were baptized as infants. You were set apart by the grace of God, not only before you could choose to follow God for yourself, but before you were even able to speak or walk on your own. This basic idea is even true in my own case, who was not baptized as an infant. I was baptized on December 31, 2000 when I was sixteen years old. However, when I look back on my life, I realize that I only really came to know Jesus in a personal way in March of 2001, when I was on a Chrysalis weekend, much like the weekend that Austin Watts is on at this very moment. Even in my own case, when I was able to make a “decision” for Jesus, hindsight has taught me that God found me long before I found Him.

Today we will be celebrating Holy Communion. This ritual did not get invented one day by some great pastor or theologian as a great way to spend some time in a worship service. It was instituted by Christ Himself, where He interpreted His death as a sacrifice for the disciples and for all the world. We need to always remember who was at that table. Jesus shared that His blood was being poured out for Judas, among the others, the one who would betray Him. Even the terrible betrayal of Judas did not keep Jesus from celebrating that first Communion with him. However, more significant for our passage today, Peter was there, too. Peter, who, right after sharing in Communion, would make such extravagant promises that he was not able to keep and of whom it was predicted that he would deny Christ three times before that very night was over, was not excluded from the table.

What a joy it is that we can gather together and share a common meal where none are excluded. Even those who would deny and betray Jesus were welcomed to the table, how much more so can we come forward with confidence. None of us have betrayed the Son of God to His death. Regardless of who you are or what you may have done, even if it is denying Jesus over and over again, you are one of those for whom Christ died. You, too, are welcome to the table, even if you have worked to undermine the ministry of Christ in the world. It is at the table of the Lord that all of our petty differences are wiped away. We all partake, we all are welcomed, we all are offered Christ’s strength in the place of our weakness. Let us partake of this holy feast with joy and great expectation. Let us pray.

AMEN