The Choice to Follow: Peter and Jesus John 13:33-38; 18:1-19:37
“Peter said to him, ‘Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.’ Jesus answered, ‘Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly I tell you, before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times.’”
Who could imagine that following Jesus would come to this? From the day three years before when his brother had come to him saying, “We have found the Messiah,” until five days before the Passover when Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, Peter was an unremarkable disciple. In John’s Gospel, except for one scene when some had turned back from following because Jesus’ words were too hard for them and they did not believe, Peter is silent. Not until Jesus asks the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” does Simon Peter speak. “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Peter says more than he knows.
So do we. Sometimes I think that words are as close as we get to eternal life: repeating what the church has said for centuries in creeds and doctrines; speaking disembodied truths that we cannot make our minds believe, hard as we may try. Time and time again in John’s Gospel, characters respond to the Word Jesus is with misunderstanding. He is taken literally by religious authorities who have chosen, from the beginning, to know good and evil rather than to know God. He is taken lightly by a world more in the market for a miracle, a wonder, a quick religious fix than for the eternal life that he is. Maybe Peter says more than he knows in the hope that, if he keeps on following Jesus, the words of eternal life will begin to make sense of the brevity of his mortal life. I repeat: so do we. We keep coming back to these stories, back to these hard pews, week after week because something in our lives—like a destiny—is missing.
We next hear Peter speak on the evening of Palm Sunday when Jesus kneels in humility to wash Peter’s feet. After initially resisting, Peter endearingly exclaims: “Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head!” Then Satan enters Judas as he takes the bread from Jesus’
hand and John tells us “it was night,” tells us the darkness is about to take center stage. “Where I am going,” Jesus says to the eleven who remain, “you cannot come”; but to Peter Jesus makes a promise, “Where I am going, you cannot follow now; but you will follow afterward.” Peter persists: “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.” Then Jesus, the one in the world who sees from above, who sees as God sees, who sees us whole, says to Peter,
“Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly, I tell you, before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times.”
You could conclude, and not be wrong, that while Peter may have followed Jesus faithfully in his living, at the end he lacked the inward conviction necessary to follow Jesus in his dying. Likewise, we may live in Christ’s light, we may walk in his ways, we may obey his commands, thereby living a better life, a more abundant life than the life we had lived before we knew him. Yet if discipleship were to involve going to the gallows, if we were faced with Peter’s predicament, our following might also come to an end. I think of Graham Greene’s whiskey priest on the day of his execution. “What a fool he had been,” Greene writes, “to think that he was strong enough to stay when others fled. What an impossible fellow I am, he thought, and how useless….He felt only an immense disappointment that he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage.” Perhaps Peter’s discipleship had come to an end because he lacked the little self-restraint and the little courage he would have needed to have been a saint.
Yet I am more and more convinced that this is not at all the reason Jesus says the disciples and Peter in particular can no longer follow. Not by chance on that fateful night in John’s Gospel, the disciples do not forsake him and flee as they do in the Synoptic Gospels.
Instead Jesus tells the soldiers and the police to let his disciples go. According to John, he releases them and I think he does this because he only can go forth to do what he has come into the world to do: to love the world in the way that God alone loves. Yet none will understand the way of God’s love nor can they follow until “afterward,” until Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Still commands them, on the night of his arrest, to love in the way he has loved them. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” How has God in Christ loved you? The love with which God has loved you is the love that “is shorthand for a narrative: death and resurrection….Seen from [above], death and resurrection is what love concretely means,” Robert Jenson writes.
Put another way, Jesus was not going to die a martyr’s death. This was not the unjust execution of a good man who would live on in the memory of his followers and inspire them to be better human beings because of the way he once lived. Jesus was going to the grave to defeat the power of death over human existence once for all with the almighty powerlessness of love.
God so loved the world, God loved the world in this way: God gave his only begotten Son over to death, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. That sentence is incomprehensible unless it is the beginning of all comprehending, unless the one we have been following is who John says he is from the beginning: the Word of God become flesh.
What you must remember when you are in John’s Gospel is that in Jesus you are having to do with the Word that was in the beginning and was with God and was God. This is not a human being who grows into the role of Messiah or a man who, in the Jordan River, was adopted as God’s Son. From the beginning God was in Christ; in him the eternal life that God is was destined to dwell with us in our mortal flesh because, created in love for love, we are destined to dwell with God, to dwell in the love that God is, to abide in the love that knows no end.
The enemy of the love that knows no end is surely death and the power death exerts over us by convincing us that we must “hold on to our selves in order to survive.” [Jenson] Peter is no match for death, for the encroaching darkness, and therefore he moderates his love in order to hold on to himself. God knows we do this day by day. I imagine he reasons from below that it will do the cause no good if he loses his life and thus is unable to love as Jesus has commanded him to love. But Peter did not yet know love because death had proved stronger than love in the courtyard; he did not yet know love because the shepherd was only now on his way to lay down his life for the sheep; he did not yet know love except as a promise that ends with “till death do us part.” Therefore when asked if he is a disciple of the man in the garden on the way to the cross, Peter responds “I am not.” Peter’s words are not so much a denial of Jesus as they are a denial of Peter’s own discipleship that has come to an end. Again, he says more than he knows.
Simultaneously, Jesus’ confrontation with death commences as he does battle with religion and politics, both thinking together that they can wield the power of death with finality when, in truth, they have become players in the cosmic drama that will be “finished” on Friday and will render death powerless on the first day of the week. “Do you not know that I have the power to release you and the power to crucify you?” Pilate asks Jesus in fearful desperation.
“You would have no power over me,” Jesus answers, “unless it was given you from above.”
Seeing from above, Jesus gives himself up, hands himself over, goes forth to his death and the grave. It is what love does for the beloved; it is what God in Christ has done once for all.
After the cock crows, Peter is not said to weep bitterly in this Gospel. He simply disappears from the narrative. He is absent from the crucifixion and, for the most part, so are we.
Only afterward will the light pierce the darkness of our lives that are relentlessly determined by death and command us to love one another as Christ has loved us. The next we will see Peter is
as he races the Beloved Disciple to the empty grave on Easter morning, lingering long enough to see but not believe. Easter morning is likely when we will also see one another next, unless it should happen that you choose to follow him, in the week ahead, to the table he has set for you or to the foot of the cross where he has loved you to the end. Chances are, instead, you will keep your distance in some courtyard where the question posed to Peter will be the posed to you, because why in the world would someone think you were following him? “You are not also one of his disciples, are you?” The gospel is this: “I am” has answered for you, has claimed you as his own, has freed you from the dominion of death so that you may love one another with the love that is shorthand for death and resurrection. Thanks be to God.
