Tag Archives: Jesus

Just Start Walking

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By Alex S(User talk:Alex S).Alex S at en.wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], from Wikimedia Commons

Jerusalem, by Alex S(User talk:Alex S).Alex S at en.wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons

Lent begins today, and many of us have already made preparations: we’ve prayerfully considered what we will surrender during this time, we’ve made arrangements for our fasts, we have sought out an Ash Wednesday gathering to be a part of.

All of these are good, good things.

But they’re not the best thing.

One of the verses that always gives me pause is located in Luke 9.

As the time approached when Jesus was to be taken up into heaven, he determined to go to Jerusalem (v51).

The Greek for this passage would read something a little more like: “He resolutely set his face to go Jerusalem.” The phrase indicates a sense of courage and determination. Moreover, it is also a reference to Isaiah 50v8:

The LORD God opened my ear; I didn’t rebel;
I didn’t turn my back.
Instead, I gave my body to attackers,
and my cheeks to beard pluckers.
I didn’t hide my face from insults and spitting.
The LORD God will help me; therefore, I haven’t been insulted.
Therefore, I set my face like flint, and knew I wouldn’t be ashamed.
The one who will declare me innocent is near. Who will argue with me?
Let’s stand up together. Who will bring judgment against me?
Let him approach me (vv5-8).

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, knowing what is waiting for him: insults, beatings, and attempts to discredit and shame him. He goes, however, with a steadfast faith in God’s call on his life, and a belief that ultimately God will vindicate him through the resurrection.

And here’s the deal:  his disciples are on the road to Jerusalem with him.

Lent is ultimately not about giving up chocolate, or fasting, or praying extra prayers, or attending gatherings, or anything. These are great—even necessary—tools, but for me Lent is ultimately about “setting my face” towards Jerusalem and journeying there with Jesus, with no agenda but to follow Him, and to attempt to be present, really present, through this last season of His ministry. 

As we begin our Lenten journey, don’t just commit to giving up something; don’t just commit to an extra gathering or devotion.

Commit to walking with Jesus on his road to Jerusalem. 

Commit to staying with him during his time of trial.

Commit to staying faithful to him when he is arrested. 

Commit to being with him at the Cross. 

And here’s the deal: He knows our weakness, just like he knew the disciples’. He knows that we will fall asleep, that we will look away, that we will deny him.

But he invites us anyway.

 

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Again, and again, and again.

Baptism, Belovedness, and Brené Brown (See what I did there?)

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My bible study has started one of our epic journeys again, this time through Mark’s Gospel. Last week we spent some time in chapter 1, and we talked a bit about Jesus’ baptism:

About that time, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and John baptized him in the Jordan River. While he was coming up out of the water, Jesus saw heaven splitting open and the Spirit, like a dove, coming down on him. And there was a voice from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.”

There are a few interesting threads going on here, but for where I’m at right now the thing that has always stood out to me about this story what Jesus hears from his father before his ministry begins.

Before the healings.

Before the feeding of the multitudes.

Before the transfiguration.

Before the cross.

Before all of that is, “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.”

Those words precede Jesus’ ministry, and—I would suggest—were so deeply woven into his identity and his spirit that he was able to live out his ministry that they were (and are) in a sense Jesus’ ultimate identity.

He is the Beloved.

And the Father is pleased with him.

I’ve seen and heard Brené Brown’s name recently, and though I haven’t yet read her book Daring Greatly but if the 20 minutes of this TEDTalk are any indication, I think it’s going to be an important one.

She is ultimately speaking on vulnerability, but she begins with a concept that grabbed hold of me. In speaking about people who are have a healthy sense of what she calls “worthiness,” she says that “The people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believed they were worthy of love and belonging.”

She goes on to explain that this sense of worthiness, what she calls being able to “wholehearted”, flows from this belief, and ultimately allows people to live with courage, compassion, and connection to others.

Doesn’t that describe Jesus?

The courage with which he embraced his mission and vocation, the compassion with which he dealt with the hurting and broken, and the deep sense of connection that I believe he had with his disciples, all of these things flowed—in a sense—from that statement in Mark 1v11.

“You are my son…

“Whom I dearly love…

“In you I find happiness.”

Does that describe you? 

It actually does. 

The words that the Father spoke to Jesus He longs to speak to you; the difficulty is that sometimes we are either too scarred or too distracted and busy to hear it.

But this statement needs to proceed anything you do or want to be.

Because otherwise you’ll be unable to have the courage, the compassion, and the connection that you could possibly have.

And it takes time: trust me. I know I still fight to hear these words sometime.

But they will be spoken; they will come.

If you’ve never tried, you can begin to open up your heart and life to this by just setting aside a small body of time—even just 5 minutes—and begin to repeat that verse to yourself:

“I am God’s son/daughter; I am dearly loved. In me God finds happiness.”

It’s not a quick fix, but most good fixes aren’t quick. Say it long enough, and it will sink down deep into the rhythm of your life…

And you will believe.

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As We Come To It …

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I won’t be posting on Christmas Day, and as we all get ready for the last push to get Christmas gatherings prepared, gifts bought, parties prepared for, here’s a note about peace from Brennan Manning…

When we are in right relationship with Jesus, we are in the peace of Christ. Except for grave, conscious, deliberate infidelity, which must be recognized and repented of, the present or absence of feelings of peace is the normal ebb and flow of the spiritual life. When things are plain and ordinary, when we live on the plateaus and in the valleys (which is where most of the Christian life takes place) and not on the mountaintops of peak religious experiences, this is no reason to blame ourselves, to think that our relationship with God is collapsing, or to echo Magdalene’s cry in the garden, ‘Where has beloved gone?’ Frustration, irritation, fatigue and so forth may temporarily unsettle us, but they cannot rob us of living in the peace of Christ Jesus. As the playwright Ionesco once declared in the middle of a depression: ‘Nothing discourages me, not even discouragement’ (from Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas).

Peace—real peace—to all of you over these next few beautiful days.

 

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When Good News Is Really Good Pt 1 (or “It’s Okay With God if You Don’t Join the Choir”)

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Mark’s Gospel

I confess: I’m passionate about the Bible. Maybe it’s too reflective of my status as a (decidedly not young) grad student, but I am determined to see it taught well, and “used” accurately.

I was talking to a friend the other day, and we were talking about how there can be a difference between the historical meaning and significance of Scripture and the individual/devotional meaning and significance.

I land decidedly on the historical/contextual side: Jesus meant what he said, not what we in the 21st century wish he would have said.

I’d like to suggest this: the overwhelming agenda of the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) is to prove that God’s story was coming to an epic resolution and fulfillment in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Everything that we read in the gospels flows into and out of that. Unfortunately, we have a tendency to separate Jesus sayings (and actions) from this agenda. 

For the next few weeks, I’d like to spend some time pushing back on some (what I believe) are misreadings of the gospels, and try to recover some of the (sometimes even more explosive) things that Jesus actually may have been saying.

Let’s start with a story out of Matthew. Jesus says the Kingdom of Heaven can be illustrated by the story of a man (generally understood to be God) who goes on a long journey. He entrusts  different sums of money to his servants, and when he returns he asks what they did with the amounts. Two of the three double his money, while one buries it.

The two that gained money get praise from the master, but the one who buried it (safely) gets some harsh words: “‘You wicked and lazy servant… To those who use well what they are given, even more will be given, and they will have abundance. But from those who do nothing, even what little they have will be taken away. Now throw this useless servant into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”

Just in case you were wondering, historically, the “outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” is just as bad as it sounds.

… and cue awkward silence.

Is God really that way?

Divorced form the agenda of the gospels, this can be (and has been) taught as a story about stewardship and giftedness.

Again, is God really that way? 

If you don’t play in the church band, are you going to be thrown into outer darkness?

If you don’t risk investment (in people or things or whatever), is what you have going to be taken from you?

Gnash teeth much?

Ugh.

But once you understand the agenda of Jesus—and the gospel writers—things begin to fall into place a bit more…

  • if the sums of money represent God’s mission and message in the world…
  • if the servants—including Israel—are people with whom God has entrusted His mission…
  • if (by extension) the “wicked and lazy servant” is the religious establishment in Israel…

… then we begin to see what Jesus (and Matthew) might be saying here:

  • God has entrusted his mission to people, specifically Israel
  • Israel believes that God has left on a long journey—His presence has not returned to the Temple
  • God has come back to find (a) that unexpected people have valued His mission/message, and (b) Israel (or rather their leaders) have buried His message
  • God is taking His message away from Israel and entrusting it—through Jesus and his ministry—to others (the Gentiles; that’s us)

Is God still stern? Yes, because His mission is at stake. When you read the parable this way, this is why Jesus uses such strong language.

Good news is really good: God isn’t concerned so much with how much risk you take in life, or whether or not you serve in the nursery (though you should!); He’s concerned with how faithful His church is to His message and agenda in the world.

-e

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Jesus’ Family Problems

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I wrote this for my church’s e-news. Thought I’d include it here. 

During our Tuesday staff meeting, Mark and I were talking about Jesus’ family, and how he experienced not only the blessing of having a father, mother, and siblings, but how he also may have experienced the “blessing” of family loss and sorrow. He encouraged me to write out my thoughts.

You see, Jesus did in fact have an earthly father; his name was Joseph. However, scripture records something interesting about Joseph, namely that he disappears

Saint Joseph with the Infant Jesus by Guido Reni, c 1635 via Wikipedia

relatively early in the story of Jesus’ life. In fact, the last mention of Joseph in the gospels comes in Luke chapter 2, when Jesus is about 12 years old. After that, there’s no mention of Joseph at all in Jesus’ adult ministry. Tradition has held that Joseph died, leaving his wife and children alone.Even understanding that “adulthood” began a lot earlier than it does for us today, that’s pretty huge.

Jesus grew up without an earthy father.

Jesus also had a family, and Mark’s gospel actually lists Jesus’ brothers and sisters (in a way): James, Joseph, Judas, Simon, and sisters (plural, though they remained nameless). Including Jesus, that makes at least seven children.

All without a father to provide and care for them.

What’s more, we are also told in Scripture that those brothers and sisters didn’t think too much of their preaching brother. Mark notes that his family thought he was “out of his mind” (3:21), and John indicates that even at the cross, Jesus had to hand his mother over to the care of the apostle John (John 19:25-27), implying that his brothers and sisters were nowhere to be found.

They wanted no part of Jesus’ life, much less his death. 

(In their defense, Jesus’ brothers eventually came around to recognized him as Messiah; his brother James was the leader of the Jerusalem church and eventually wrote the book of James).

So, though Jesus knew a loving mother, and had an earthly father, as well as brothers and sisters, he also knew…

… the lack of a father

… the possible poverty and marginalization that a widowed family of seven children endures

… rejection and abandonment from his brothers and sisters

What I’m trying to say—and what part of the “Good News” is—is that not only does Jesus come to us in the midst of our family wholeness, he comes to us in our family brokenness. 

He knows it.

Personally.

He knows our sorrows, as well as our joys.

“God-With-Us”—Emmanual—indeed.

The Scandalous God

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In Luke 14, Jesus describes a great feast.

15 Hearing this, a man sitting at the table with Jesus exclaimed, “What a blessing it will be to attend a banquet in the Kingdom of God!”

16 Jesus replied with this story: “A man prepared a great feast and sent out many invitations. 17 When the banquet was ready, he sent his servant to tell the guests, ‘Come, the banquet is ready.’ 18 But they all began making excuses. One said, ‘I have just bought a field and must inspect it. Please excuse me.’ 19 Another said, ‘I have just bought five pairs of oxen, and I want to try them out. Please excuse me.’ 20 Another said, ‘I now have a wife, so I can’t come.’

21 “The servant returned and told his master what they had said. His master was furious and said, ‘Go quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ 22 After the servant had done this, he reported, ‘There is still room for more.’ 23 So his master said, ‘Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full. 24 For none of those I first invited will get even the smallest taste of my banquet.’”

About 4 years ago, my understanding of Jesus began to be radically rebuilt; I came to realize that most of what I’d been taught Jesus, salvation and faith was not necessarily wrong, but just incomplete. Ever since then I’ve carried a key assumption with me to the text of the bible:

there is probably something going on in the text beyond the obvious. 

It’s easy to carry our 21st century assumptions into the Bible, and that can surely illuminate some of the stories and message, but it’s also easy to miss the original (and often explosive) agenda of Jesus and writers of both Testaments.

So two quick, related observations. First, the parable takes place in the context of a discussion on humility. In fact, the man’s comment in verse 15 is a reaction to this previous exchange:

7 When Jesus noticed that all who had come to the dinner were trying to sit in the seats of honor near the head of the table, he gave them this advice: 8 “When you are invited to a wedding feast, don’t sit in the seat of honor. What if someone who is more distinguished than you has also been invited? 9 The host will come and say, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then you will be embarrassed, and you will have to take whatever seat is left at the foot of the table!

10 “Instead, take the lowest place at the foot of the table. Then when your host sees you, he will come and say, ‘Friend, we have a better place for you!’ Then you will be honored in front of all the other guests. 11 For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

12 Then he turned to his host. “When you put on a luncheon or a banquet,” he said, “don’t invite your friends, brothers, relatives, and rich neighbors. For they will invite you back, and that will be your only reward. 13 Instead, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. 14 Then at the resurrection of the righteous, God will reward you for inviting those who could not repay you.”

Jesus is talking about humility and how critical it is to a “resurrection life.”

In Jesus’ context—1st century Palestine, a conquered Roman territory—this is a scandalous notion, and Jesus’ pushes the point even further with his banquet story.

This other meaning of Jesus’ story here begins to be revealed when we understand two things:

  1. In the first century, honor and reputation were of absolutely paramount importance. People made decisions based on how it might enhance their public honor and/or reputation.
  2. One of the ways that you could enhance your honor and reputation was by hosting a party and inviting the right” people to it. 

To restate this, if people wanted to know how awesome you were, how “honorable” you were, they would look at comes to your table. If “the best folks” came to your house for a party, it made you look good; really good.

And this mattered to you.

A lot.

So Jesus is talking here about God’s reputation, and how it plays into the Kingdom.

God starts out by inviting “the usual suspects”, but they reject his invitation (essentially, by the way, this a comment about the rejection Jesus is experiencing during his ministry). So God, in this culture, does the unthinkable.

He throws the concern for his reputation aside and invites “the riff raff.”

He forsakes his honor, his reputation, and essentially says, “Bring them on.”

What do you do with a God like that?

What do you do with a God who lays aside His honor and status in order to welcome everyone in?

What do you do with this God who …

… sets aside His status?

… embraces humility?

… even embraces death as a criminal? as a rebel?

The truly radical and explosive nature of this parable is that Jesus is saying, “You need to sit at the lowest seat at a wedding banquet; you need to embrace humility, because that’s what God does.”

Design Decisions

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Design Decisions

Okay so I’m a sucker for design, especially modern design.

I could stare at Dwell for hours.

Frankly, I find great beauty in the clean lines and sharp definition; I feel peace when I see the discipline of editing and minimalism.

(p.s. These things are not always present in my life.)

One of the striking features about excellent design is the forethought that goes into material selection and function. Over and over again, you can see this played out in spaces with features that actually look better now than they did when they were new (in some cases maybe 40 or 50 years ago).

In other words, good designers make choices today with the future in mind. They are asking, “How will this doorknob, this pull, this frame look when it has been used 5,000 times by children’s hands…

…when it has been beaten by the wind…

…when it has been broken and repaired…

The point is this: The best design decisions—and materials—age well. It’s not about price or perfection, it’s about what a building, or a piece of art (or anything with intentional design) will look like when it has aged. When “life has happened” to it.

This is profoundly similar to our lives.

Most of our lives—both in terms of our “stuff” we have and the decisions we make—isn’t designed to age well, if at all. 

We buy for the short term; we organize and decide for the here and now.

Cheaply designed bookshelves break rather than age…

Hasty choices can be the same way. 

But what if we took a step back and asked, “What are the one year implications for the way my life is designed now?”

How will my life’s “design decisions” age over five years? Ten? Twenty?

Because that is the evidence of good design. We’re not supposed to look perfect; but we do have the opportunity to show the scratches and weathering of good use and design with a long view.

“Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds on a house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse because it is build on bedrock. But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn’t obey it is foolish, like a person who builds his house on sand. When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash.” (Jesus, Matthew’s Gospel, 7:24-27)

peace

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THE Prayer, Part 8 :: Deliver Us From Evil

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Our Father, who lives in the heavens,
May Your name be kept holy.
May Your Kingdom come,
May Your will be done,
On earth just like it’s done in Your presence.

Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive our sins
As we forgive those who sin against us.
Don’t bring us to the times of trial,
But deliver us from the evil one.
Amen.

It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to believe in the presence of evil. In fact, it may be easier to believe in the power of evil than it is to believe in God. After all, the headlines are definitely sexier:

  • suicide bombers
  • poverty
  • drug addiction
  • promiscuity that leaves lonely and shattered lives in its wake
  • acts of hatred committed in the name of religion (almost all of the religions)

And that’s just off the top of my head.

The last line of the prayer (at least in Mark’s version) asks us to deliver us from “evil” or “the Evil One”, and sometimes it seems like God has chosen to ignore this request.

Has He?

Ultimately, I have neither the brains or space or typing capacity to wrestle with the question of why evil ultimately exists, but I do have a few thoughts.

  1. Jesus’ ministry, especially as portrayed in Mark’s Gospel, is a running battle with evil: over and over again we are told that Jesus confronts “evil spirits” and though they seem to know exactly who Jesus is (in contrast to most everybody else, including his own closest followers), they don’t stand a chance against him. So Jesus knows what evil looks like, and he doesn’t like it. At all. We like to think of Jesus running around, showing everyone what God’s love looks like, and being a good teacher; I don’t think we often think about Jesus primarily focusing on confronting evil, but that’s pretty much what Mark describes. 
  2. This battle with evil comes to a head, in a way, in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus leaves his closest followers behind and goes into solitary prayer. By this point, he can easily see where his actions are taking him—to death—and so he prays to God one of the most honest prayers we’ll ever read: “‘Abba, Father,’ he cried out, ‘everything is possible for you. Please take this cup of suffering away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.’”

    And God said, “No.”

    As N.T. Wright put it, “We have to come to grips with the fact that Jesus gave this prayer to his disciples, but that when he prayed it himself, the answer was ‘No’… He would be the one who was led to the Testing, who was not delivered from Evil… Jesus was called to throw himself on the wheel of world history, so that, even though it crushed him, it might start to turn in the opposite direction.”

  3. As Jesus embraced his call to the cross, I believe that he knew this call was to be a sort of ultimate battle with evil. However, this battle would not be fought on “evil’s terms”. It would be fought on God’s terms; which meant

    … surrender, not slaughter

    … humility, not arrogance

    … sacrifice, not triumphant destruction

    In other words, Jesus’ would fight and win the battle against evil by (ironically) letting evil do its worse to him.

  4. The early followers of Jesus struggled to make sense of the cross. Among other things, they recognized that something cosmic happened there, and it had to do with the power of evil in the world. One of those followers wrote this to a small church in Asia: “He (Jesus) canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross. In this way, he disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by his victory over them on the cross.”

So what do we do this this? Is evil defeated? Because sometimes it sure doesn’t look like it… How do we live in light of this?

  • Evil has been defeated, so we no longer have to pay undo attention to it. We are free. Some would call us to retreat from the world so that we won’t be contaminated by its evil, but we can say, “look at the cross; the powers have been defeated there.” We are called to live as free people in a world that God has created, and is redeeming.
  • Evil has been defeated, but that doesn’t mean we ignore it completely. Redemption is a process. History is moving. Jesus ultimately defeated the powers at the cross, and ultimately evil will be completely defeated, but in the meantime, we are called to help in its defeat, but using the method that Jesus used: by exposing the vacuous and empty nature of evil—of violence, of power, of economic supremacy, of consumerism (just to name a few)—through the humility, meekness, and even irony of the cross.

To pray, “deliver us from evil” is to simultaneously claim the power of Jesus’ ultimate victory and to embrace the call to be a part of defeating it, daily, hourly, moment-to-moment in our world and in our lives.

Shalom.

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THE Prayer, Part 7 :: Times of Trial

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Our Father, who lives in the heavens,
May Your name be kept holy.
May Your Kingdom come,
May Your will be done,
On earth just like it’s done in Your presence.

Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive our sins
As we forgive those who sin against us.
Don’t bring us to the times of trial,
But deliver us from the evil one.
Amen.

Following Jesus is not an invitation to pretend that the world is wonderful and perfect, and that nothing bad will ever happen to you again. Headlines sing a loud song to this illusion. Neither is following Jesus an excuse to believe that the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket, and so our main task is to be patient and wait until we die and go and meet Jesus somewhere in the sky.

The truth is somewhere in the middle, and it’s also hinted at by this line in the prayer.

It’s not strange that Jesus would leave us these words, because he knew “times of trial” intimately. Consider:

  • Though we don’t know when exactly, we know that Jesus’ earthly father, Joseph is out of the story fairly quickly. The assumption is that he has died, leaving Mary and her children at risk socially and economically. He wasn’t one of the “insiders”.
  • His ministry begins with 40 days in the desert, culminating with a confrontation/temptation with Satan.
  • He experiences constant surveillance and opposition from the religious authorities in Judea.
  • His ministry was marked by a constant confrontation with evil spirits.
  • His closest disciples and inner circle consistently misunderstand him.

Jesus knows what the times of trial look like and feel like.

They are the times when we are most susceptible to doubt, to fear, the times when we’re most tempted to give up, to surrender.

To be faced with a trial is to be faced with the temptation to fall, to fail. To pray that we aren’t brought to the “times of trial” is to implicitly acknowledge that they exist, but not necessarily to allow our lives to be governed by them. In the face of the difficulties that Jesus faced, he went about his ministry fully and faithfully, even in Gethsemane when the trials began to be backed by Roman fists and clubs, whips and swords.

If you find yourself in difficulties, understand that Jesus knows all too well what it feels like. He is there with you, and he knows what it feels like. 

Ironically, Jesus ultimately confronts the times of trial not with glamourous victory but with blood, sweat, peace and eventually the cross… but that’s for another post.

What about you? What does it mean to pray, “don’t bring us to the times of trial” (or more traditionally, “lead us not into temptation.”?

Voices

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She asked, “When do the voices stop?”

I don’t know if we all have them—I suspect that we all do, these whispers that seek to hamstring and cripple us. They know the worst words, words that trigger all sorts of negative feelings and reactions inside us…

“Liar.”

“Failure.”

“Whore.”

“Alcoholic.”

“Adulterer.”

The voices always like to walk right alongside us in life, seemingly choosing moments of glory and grace to sneak around our defenses and do their dirty work. Their agenda is to see us shamed, nullified, defeated, and inactive in the service of God’s Kingdom.

What do we do about the voices?

When do they stop?

The leaders of the first church—our “apostles” (and New Testament authors)—knew a lot about “voices”. Paul had blood on his hands, presiding over the arrests, torture, and executions of early Christians. James never believed in his brother Jesus’ messianic claims. His rejection of Jesus was so thorough that at the cross, Jesus entrusted his mother Mary to his disciple John. I was struck, however, with Peter’s voices, because, well, in a sense he repeated failed—at times spectacularly—fora long time.

  • Peter so thoroughly misunderstood the ultimate nature of Jesus’ ministry that his friend, rabbi, and Messiah called him, “Satan” and gave him a verbal beat-down in front of the rest of the Twelve.
  • He drew his sword in Gethesemane, betraying his understanding of the nature of Jesus’ “Kingdom”.
  • While Jesus was on trial, being beaten and humiliated, Peter denied knowing him.

Those are the big ones. And if you know the gospel stories, you know that in spite of this Jesus has said that he will build his church through Peter, and that at the end of John’s Gospel, Jesus restores Peter and forgives him symbolically for his betrayal. At this point, Peter has become PETER. Apostle Superman. The First Pope. Eventual martyr for Jesus.

… But there’s more.

In Galatians 1, Paul relates a disagreement he’s having with Peter:

But when Peter came to Antioch, I had to oppose him to his face, for what he did was very wrong. 12 When he first arrived, he ate with the Gentile Christians, who were not circumcised. But afterward, when some friends of James came, Peter wouldn’t eat with the Gentiles anymore. He was afraid of criticism from these people who insisted on the necessity of circumcision. 13 As a result, other Jewish Christians followed Peter’s hypocrisy, and even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.

When did this occur? Paul says in Galatians that is at least 15 years after his conversion. If Paul was converted between 31 and 36, then this confrontation—this complete screwup by Peter—happened between 46 and 51AD.

Jesus had been dead for almost 20 years. Twenty years later, Peter is still misreading and misunderstanding the nature of Jesus’ kingdom.

When does Peter stop screwing up?

What are the voices saying to Peter?

“Failure!”

“You NEVER get it do you?”

“When will you ever learn?”

Obviously, I don’t know what the voices said to Peter. No one does. But the thing is, there was another voice that whispered to Peter as well, and it says very different things:

“Get out of the boat; I believe in you!”

“I forgive you, Peter.”

“Feed my sheep; take care of my people.”

“You can do it!”

“Trust in me, and in my Spirit.”

“My peace I give to you.”

“God loves you.”

Here’s the deal: the voices never stop. They never stopped for Peter, or James, or Paul. But every one of them chose to listen to the deeper, truer voice that also doesn’t stop. The voice that rejects shame, and that calls you on to keep. on. running.

31 What shall we say about such wonderful things as these? If God is for us, who can ever be against us? 32 Since he did not spare even his own Son but gave him up for us all, won’t he also give us everything else? 33 Who dares accuse us whom God has chosen for his own? No one—for God himself has given us right standing with himself. 34 Who then will condemn us? No one—for Christ Jesus died for us and was raised to life for us, and he is sitting in the place of honor at God’s right hand, pleading for us.

35 Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death? 36 (As the Scriptures say, “For your sake we are killed every day; we are being slaughtered like sheep.”[o]) 37 No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loved us.

38 And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[p]neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. 39 No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Keep running.

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