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.”
A feisty Baptist preacher from the last century used to say, “The biggest lie told in America today is, ‘Jesus is Lord.’” He was referring to the distance between faith professed and faith practiced, a gap he himself experienced when he created an interracial, pacifist commune where possessions and money were shared rather than hoarded in Georgia – in the heart of the segregated South, and in capitalist America, just as the country was working up enthusiasm for “The Good War” (World War II). Needless to say, such an attempt to be faithful to Jesus was not so popular with the so-called Christians who surrounded their community. Not everyone who says “Lord! Lord!” is necessarily on board with the Founder’s program.
We see the same gap today when political candidates try to outdo each other defending “religion” while at the same time pushing policies which bear little resemblance to gospel values. Those folks are easy targets, of course. Perhaps harder to see is our own failed discipleship, whenever the allegiance we profess to our Lord and Savior is not truly manifested in the choices we make, the lifestyles we adopt, the practices we engage in. But then the cock crows, and suddenly all our denials and deferrals of authentic discipleship bring us up short.
We all need that rooster’s reckoning, over and over. That’s why confession of sins is like the old joke about the Saturday night bath. You bathe once a week whether you need it or not. We fall down and get up, fall down and get up, over and over. But there can yet be progress in such a pattern. We need not be Sisyphus, always returning to the same place he started, never really getting anywhere.
There is growth and progress in the Christian life, be it a zigzag, a spiral, or two steps forward one step back. Formation does produce measurable effects over time. “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now,” Jesus says. “But you will follow afterwards.” Jesus is being both realistic and encouraging here. He knows Peter isn’t going to get it all right now. But over time – through Christ and with Christ and in Christ - he will.
So for me the Lenten message in this passage is about both self-examination and self-compassion. We need to hear the cock crow (over and over, it seems), but at the same time we must remember that the story doesn’t end there, in the stunned shock of Peter’s “OMG” moment, but on the beach, by another charcoal fire, when Peter is given a new chance to be faithful. “Do you love me?” Jesus asks him. “Then feed my sheep.”
We might want to give up on ourselves sometimes, but Jesus never does, never will. He knows our weakness, but he believes in our potential.
— The Rev. Jim Friedrich+
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