Good Friday: Love to the End

Just before the events we hear about this morning take place, Jesus had been telling his disciples that he had to go away to his Father so that he could send the Advocate or Holy Spirit to change and transform them into Jesus’s own likeness. The disciples really struggled though, to understand Jesus’s somewhat poetic, prayerful, abstract words. So he finally tells them plainly: “I came from God the Father and have come into the world; the time has come though and now I’m leaving this world and am returning to the Father. His disciples reply to him: “okay now we get it. Now we know that you know all things; now we know that you came from God.” Jesus responds with a question: “do you now believe?” 

And yet this morning we know that just a short time later, after Jesus is arrested, Peter wavers just like we do. He first tries to defend Jesus, even cutting off the ear of one of the arresting soldier’s servants. His faith is strong when he is clear and certain about his mission with Jesus. But when Jesus is arrested and tried - he’s suddenly tempted away from following Jesus, even denying his relationship. It’s not merely fear of the Jews that tempts him though; there’s a deeper root to his temptation that I believe is the same for all of us.

Peter looks at his circumstances - Jesus, this one from God, is arrested and tried and condemned. He looks around at the world and says, “there is no good; it’s all falling apart; all the things I thought should happen, they can’t happen now; where is God’s justice; where is God’s power; how can God be here now as Jesus said, and yet the whole world he promised is falling apart right here and he’s allowing it to happen. He’s allowing himself to be arrested, to suffer, to be in pain and agony, to be humiliated and condemned. I need to take a safer route.

And just like Adam and Eve decided to chart theirs, Peter denies Jesus at the cock crow as Jesus tells him he will. Jesus saw Peter’s denial, and he sees ours through the action of Adam and Eve right from the beginning. He knows our hearts and minds; he knows every single moment that shapes our responses making an idol out of God rather than allowing God to change us. 

Jesus knows the trials and temptations - physical, intellectual and emotional - that we face and he knows that we will go astray. “The time has already come when you will leave me alone; you will be scattered. But I am not alone because the Father is with me. I have said this to you so that when you are in the darkest valley - when you feel shocked by your circumstances, frightened, and confused; when you feel hollowed out, numb with grief; watching people go about their lives while your own life seems to have come to a full stop; when you lose sight of me, lose hope that God is there at all in the midst of the turmoil of conflicts, suffering, a lack of moral goodness - I have said these things to you - I am going away, but not leaving you; I am am not alone, the Father is with me, even when I have to go where and how I do not want to go. For where I am going, to death upon a Cross, only I can go right now. I do not want to go there, to bear the consequence of rejection in loving my enemies. But I know that when I go there, I will destroy the power sin has to keep you there forever. This is the way, the only way, the way that I must go, to release all of you from death.

This is why Jesus scolds Peter for cutting off the soldier’s servant’s ear: should I not follow the will of my Father. What is the will of the Father, that those who are willing to take up their crosses, those willing humble themselves, to open themselves in the middle of experiencing the trials and temptations of this life to follow Jesus rather than their own self protective ways, might find themselves raised in and by Jesus Christ, to new life in God. AMEN