Easter 3, Year C
So there was this one time I did something wrong. And I knew that my dad knew about it. I found out he knew on a Friday. We then went on a previously planned weekend
trip, just me and him. And here’s the
thing. He did not mention the thing I
did wrong to me at all until the last
hour of the drive home at the end of the weekend. I had to sit there for two days, knowing that
he knew. And he knew that I knew that he
knew. That entire weekend, I was waiting
for the hammer to drop. It was terrible. I’m pretty sure the waiting was also
intentional on his part. If I remember
correctly, I think the waiting served as my punishment.
Can you remember a time where you had done something
wrong, and you knew you were caught?
That gut-tightening feeling when the truth comes to light,
and you have to face up to what you did?
And you are waiting for the hard conversation with those
whom you may have injured or disappointed?
Does this sound familiar to anyone?
Every time I read this story of Peter and Jesus on the
sea shore, I remember the feeling of waiting for the hammer to drop. For the wrong to be addressed. I think this is a story of one of the most
awkward breakfasts in history. How often
do you get to eat breakfast with the tortured and murdered man you personally betrayed and deserted to
suffer his fate alone? And who has come
back to life?
For Peter, there goes any chance of hiding his deed. There goes any hope of spinning the story he
would tell to everyone else that he had done what he could, but it just was not
enough to save Jesus. Peter already had
to sit with the other frightened disciples, stewing in the shame of his
three-fold denial of Jesus after vowing to never desert him. None of them were innocent of desertion, but
Peter’s denial stands out. The chief
follower of Jesus became the chief deserter.
Peter, at this breakfast, will need to face his
past.
I mentioned on Maundy Thursday—the
Thursday before the Easter celebration—the night before Jesus’s arrest and
crucifixion, the night he foretells Peter’s desertion and denial—that memory and remembrance has particular meaning
in a Christian context.
We—all of us—are held in the memory and care of God.
All of our pains, all of our joys.
All of our wounds, all of our woundings of others.
We follow a God who carries the weight and memory of every pain and
trauma and joy and mundane moment of existence.
To God, no one is forgotten. No injury is overlooked.
At the very least, we count our injuries, too, don’t we?
[Do we count our injuries of others with as much care?]
It would be easy and understandable for Jesus at this point, on the
shore of Galilee, to say that the betrayal and denial of Peter is enough to
prove Peter is unworthy of the task Jesus would give him. It would be understandable for Jesus to say
the severity of the betrayal of the Son of God Himself is too much to overlook,
and that Peter is no longer worthy. Instead,
Peter deserves to be cast away.
When we recoil from our injuries, do we not say something similar?
[Do we not say that those who injure us are now unworthy to be called a
friend?]
But this is not the nature of God, or Jesus.
Now, on the
other side of the resurrection, Jesus is fulfilling the mission he was
given. Earlier in the same Gospel of
John, Jesus tells us that the will of God was that Jesus would not lose any of
those he was given, but that he raise them up—that he comes not to condemn but
to save.[1] This
applies not only to the disciples, but to the whole world; yet, in Jesus’s
appearances after the resurrection, he comes to the disciples to reconstitute
the community that he had formed. He
comes back to gather the scattered sheep that God had given him. He comes back to show the disciples that
there is resurrection—the ability to stand with dignity restored—and a loving power
beyond desertion, and betrayal, and the worst violence that the world can do.
And so, even though it would have been easy
for Jesus to write off Thomas—remember last week? Doubting Thomas?—Jesus comes
back to give Thomas exactly what was needed to bring him back into fold—an
experience of the risen Christ, in the
flesh. Thomas had to have that
experience, because before Jesus and his entourage even arrive in Jerusalem in
advance of the crucifixion; it was known that going there would mean
death. And Thomas, in his first recorded
sentence in the Gospels, said that they should “go and die with him [Jesus].”[2]
Both Thomas and Peter have particular betrayals and desertions recorded in
scripture that had to be redeemed.
And here, in our gospel passage this morning,
Jesus is returning to give Peter what he needs—redemption of his past as a
denier.
You see, salvation is not simply a matter of
saving one’s soul. The whole self is the
concern and theatre of God’s saving work, and the past of the self is included
in the scope of God’s saving purpose.[3]
Our memories and our reactions to our
memories make us and shape us. Our
memories—our experiences—shape our understanding of who we are and how we will
react to what we see before us. The
shames, the guilts, and the injuries we suffer constrict us. They make us more reticent to reach out to
others—with the exception of when we might seek revenge on those who hurt us,
or we inflict pain on others in an effort to drown out our own agony. Often they compel us to seek shelter in the
darkness rather than risk exposure in the light. We’d rather hide our failures, which may
also include attempts to push them out of our own memories.
But the disciples—and we—are confronted by the
risen Christ, whose body also bears the wounds of his suffering; and yet he
comes to us offering and urging forgiveness and communion.
Christ returns to us as a
victim who offers victory through resurrection, not through hiding, silent suffering, or violence. He continuously shows that there is a power
beyond the worst that the world can muster—a power from God grounded in love and
healing.
The healing Jesus offers
is free, but it is not cheap. The price
is our willingness to confront the actions and injuries behind our shame and
guilt we live in— by either the acts we have done, or the things that have been
done to us.
And in this passage, on
the shore of Galilee, Jesus confronts Peter with the memory of his
wrongdoing. An interesting detail that
the English translation obscures is that the fire Jesus lights is the same kind
of fire around which Peter warmed himself when he denied Christ. The Greek word for the charcoal fire is anthrakia, and it only appears in the
Bible twice: in the story of Peter’s
betrayal, and this moment of his reckoning.
John drives home that this is the moment of reconciling Peter’s
denial. Peter has to bear the full
weight of his denial. He has to experience
the hurt of the denial, represented by being asked three times about the true
nature of his love.
If Peter is to be called
again, if he can again become a true apostle, the “Peter” that he is in the
purpose of Jesus rather than the Simon who runs back into the cozy obscurity of
an ordinary and hidden life, his desertion and betrayal—his failure—must be truthfully
confronted, lived through again and brought to a good end.[4] Only after this fullness of reconciliation
can Peter know himself as truly forgiven; and only then can Jesus fully
commission Peter as the new shepherd of the flock. Only then can Peter find his past
transfigured from shame to hope as he witnesses that the power and graceful
mercy and love of God can redeem his earlier weaknesses.
If you are still with me
at this point, here is why this matters in Christian life.
Even if it is
well-intentioned, the famous saying that one should “forgive and forget” is not
quite what the Christian faith adheres to.
God carries the memories
of the whole universe at all times.
We carry memories too,
even as much as we would rather forget or hide some of them.
But they are remembered
because our faith rests in God who promises that death and destruction and evil
will not finally hold sway.
And we follow a God who
invites us to glory with him in the moments when the tragic is redeemed and
turned by love into joyful remembrance of God’s healing presence.
Or when a wrong is
truthfully faced and reconciliation is offered in exchange for hatred.
We remember because God
gave us memory and calls us to be witnesses to the wonders love makes possible.
If the phrase “forgive
and forget” has a Christian resonance, it comes not from the notion that wrongdoing
is forgotten, as though justice is not important. It comes from an experience of God that
allows us to move beyond a wrongdoing in such a way that death and hatred has
no hold on us because we instead cling to love and hope and the power of resurrection—the
ability to stand with dignity restored.
Every time Christ appears
to the disciples after the resurrection, he heals the memory of the disciple’s
betrayal. The memory of the disciple’s
shame and guilt—their memory of the betrayal—is not canceled out or forgotten by
Jesus showing up and by his “being okay”--as though the crucixion and death were 'not that bad' since Jesus is back--but because the truth is that God
will set all to right in due time. And
our memories of pain, ours and others, are the points of our lives where Christ
the Risen Victim invites himself and us to heal memory—to transform our
injuries and our failures and our betrayals and our desertions into stories of
redemption and grace.
How might you need to
experience Christ’s healing of injury or shame or guilt in your life?
How will you accept his
invitation to meet him in that interior space where the heart is open, and no
secrets are hid?
How might a community of believers model that healing and
reconciliation in the world around us?
[1]
This promise is mentioned at Jn
6:39, 17:12, and 18:8-9. While it
refers to the disciples in particular, it can be generalized as Jesus’s mission
to the whole world; Jesus has been given the mission to overthrow “the ruler of
this world” (cf. Jn 12:31 and 16:11) because he was sent not to condemn the
world but to save it (cf. Jn. 3:16-17, 8:11, 8:15, 12:47).
[2]
John 11:1-16 (particularly v.16). It is
not particularly clear if Thomas means to die with Lazarus or Jesus, but it is
clear that following Jesus to Lazarus could mean their deaths as it puts them
in proximity to the authorities looking for ways to silence Jesus.
[3]
This sentence follows closely Rowan Williams Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (Cleveland: Pilgrim
Press, 2002), 23.
[4]
Borrowing heavily from Williams, 28-29.
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