Easter 4: Enduring the "Great Ordeal"

Last week we heard Jesus commission Peter to feed, tend, and love Jesus’s own sheep, his people. You’ll recall that Jesus asked Peter this three times. This wasn’t simply to reverse the three times Peter denied Jesus out of fear when Jesus was arrested. It was to cause Peter to ground his faith and so his mission in Jesus’s own life of loving his Father and his neighbours and enemies, summarized on Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and the Easter Resurrection. 

The ground of faith is love. Not our love of God; but God’s love of us. A love that we receive when we follow Jesus. But to really follow Jesus, is to die to our will: our egos, which cause us to develop all sorts of defenses to keep ourselves safe. To follow Jesus, then, to be able to respond with Peter to Jesus’s question, “do you love me,” yes, I love you Lord, is to die to our own will, our ego, our defenses, our fear of being vulnerable, open, and willing to be changed, just as Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane: “not my will but yours be done Father,” all the way to the Cross that we recall on Good Friday. That’s the first thing Jesus asks Peter and so us: do you love me? Are you willing to take up your cross as I did and die to self? Because this will be required of you if you are going to be able to point to God instead of using God as a cover for your own anger and insecurity. 

The second time Jesus asks Peter the question recalls Holy Saturday: will you persevere in the faith through times, places, and with people that draw you into hell, Sheol? Will you persevere in faith, not lashing out, not condemning, not losing hope and resorting to destructive ways of responding, when you are taken where you do not wish to go. Will you stay put in following Jesus’s ways rather than your own gut reactions, ego driven defenses, even though doing so will often take you through the darkest valleys of relationships and situations, as psalm 23 puts it, and through the great ordeal of testing, as we hear in our reading from Revelation. Will you follow Christ’s way of proclaiming the truth with passion bridled by compassion, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self control when you respond to people or situations? 

To follow Christ is not to be free from pain, suffering, or a living hell. These things are the result of living in a world where people still experience the rotten fruit of those who choose to live only for their own welfare, according to their own self protective beliefs, so often treating others as if they are merely a means to an end for serving their own limited views, or the realities of physical, cognitive, mental and emotional decline. To love Christ is to follow his way: it is to refuse to fall into the trap of responding to these things as if God does not exist, believing that you alone can see fully and completely as God does and so respond to them with an eye for an eye justice of revenge; cutting off the ear of your perceived wrongdoer; judging others from your glass house ready to cast a stone unaware of your own sin. To feed Jesus’s sheep, you must be willing to bear life in the trenches of hell with his enemies, who may very well be yours too. 

Finally we have the third time Jesus asks Peter if Peter truly loves him. Peter, as we know, feels hurt by this third question. But it presses Peter to recognize that the outer garment or armour of faith he puts on cannot protect him from the perils of this world. Peter will die in feeding Jesus's sheep. The outer garment of faith sustains Peter through the difficult, sometimes hellish mission of proclaiming God’s love for and power in this world, not with physical protection, but with the assurance of hope that drives him to speak to others and act, with love, grounded in Jesus’s own resurrection and the promise of sharing in his resurrection.

Peter recognizes finally, that although he is in this still fallen world, he belongs, for all time, to God. And this changes everything about how he thinks and acts in this world just as it did for Paul or Saul last week. How would you treat others, how would you think about all the things you do, say, all the fears and anxieties and frustrations you have, about how you prioritize things in your life, if you truly believed that you already have life in God? Perfect life, perfect love, perfect belonging, no more fear, no more death, no more suffering, no more loss, no more need for tears, or the mental anguish of uncertainties. 

This is why Jesus asks Peter the third time: do you love me? For a life grounded in the assurance that God has you provides the garment of courage to let go of your own claims, even to your own life, and allow yourself to be a catalyst for God to reach other people not with coercion, terror, fear, or harm; but as who he is: perfect love. He has you, he has always had you, and will forever have you because you were joined to him in his resurrection, recognized with your baptism.  

This is Peter’s reminder, and so ours, that it is “[t]hese [who let go and persevere in obedience to Christ's ways that] have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason they are before the throne of God and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat, for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes." AMEN