Good Friday 2019

Good Friday 2019 At our Maundy Thursday service last night, I began a conversation that I would like to continue about what does it mean to be a disciple. Now, there’s no right answer to this question, and there are probably as many different interpretations of this as there are people in this room. But as we walk through these holiest days of our church year, I believe our readings give us an opportunity to engage this question for our own lives and to encounter the stories through this lens. What does it mean to be a disciple? The Latin root of the word disciple literally means a pupil. And these holy days show us how Jesus has taught his original disciples and us how to be his followers. Now this isn’t just an intellectual teaching, a teaching for our minds, but it is also teaching for our hearts and our souls. Today, I invite us to focus on Peter and the ways, in John’s passion gospel that Peter fails as Jesus’s disciple. Because they are the ways that we all fail as Jesus’s disciples, too. My friend, the Rev Carol Mead, writes a daily devotion that goes out on email, and she started her devotion from Wednesday of Holy Week in this way. I think it gets to the heart of Peter’s failure as Jesus’s disciple and to the heart of our own failures as well. She writes, “A story on professional wrestling considers why fans like a 'sport' that even its participants admit is faked. The story suggests that many people drawn to it are themselves, ‘heroes of their own imaginations.’" She continues, “In our culture we need to be seen as strong, and sometimes that need can turn into delusion about what we control. But if we could get past that need for the appearance of strength, we could be more authentic to other people and to ourselves.”i Peter was very much a hero in his own imagination. Immediately after Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, Judas leaves to go betray Jesus, and Jesus gives the disciples his new commandment—to love one another as he has loved them. Then Jesus tells them that he will be going away. (This is John 13:36-38.) “Simon Peter said to him, ‘Lord, where are you going?’ Jesus answered, ‘Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterwards.’ 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.” Peter imagines that he will act heroically when the time of trial comes, but Jesus predicts that he will, in fact, deny him three times. And this is indeed what happens. And what is interesting about this is that Peter doesn’t deny the person of Jesus three times when the rubber meets the road. As we heard today, Jesus is arrested, and Peter and the other disciple follow to where they take Jesus. And two out of three people question Peter and they ask him, “Aren’t you one of his disciples?” And two times, Peter says, “I am not.” In his third denial, they ask if he was there with Jesus when he was arrested, and Peter denies that, too. What is striking to me about this is that in the comfort of the gathering with Jesus and his other disciples, Peter imagines that he will follow Jesus to the extent that he would even lay down his life for him. But in times of trial and difficulty, Peter denies that he is a disciple of Jesus. And we get that don’t we? How many times in our lives have we imagined that we are heroes in the ways that we live out our faith? How many different ways do we think that we are faithful disciples and followers of Jesus? But then, when things get difficult or the stakes are high, how many times do we deny, through our words and our actions, that we are disciples of Jesus? It’s probably not as dramatic as Peter’s denial, but our denial is there in how we treat people, in the words we say to them or about them, in the devices and desires of our own hearts, in the way that we put ourselves above others, in the ways that we act like we are in control when we are most definitely not. I invite you today to recognize and admit those failures, those times that you have denied, through word or action, being a disciple of Jesus, and to bring them to the foot of the cross. I invite you to offer them to Jesus, and to hear him offer you his forgiveness, this day and always. i. Carol Mead “Heroes” April 17, 2019