LENT 2016 – GOING TO JERUSALEM

March 20, Palm Sunday

Peter’s Denial of Jesus: Matthew 26: 69 - 75

            Once when I was a kid, playing catch with my older brother, I threw a wild pitch and accidently broke a window in the house. I ran and hid in the garden shed, fearing that my father would soon be out and he wouldn’t be happy. How I would have loved to have been able to say, “What broken window? I don’t know anything about a broken window. Not me! Must have been somebody else.”  I probably thought about even blaming my brother, somehow – that usually worked.

            Peter has been a silent bystander so far during the early stages of Jesus’ trials, hiding in the shadows, hoping that he will go unnoticed. But he couldn’t avoid detection; he was a known associate of Jesus. “You were with Jesus the Galilean.” People began to point him out. “This man was with Jesus of Nazareth.” Whether he liked it or not, Peter was imbued with the spicy scent of Jesus, right down to his Galilean twang. “Your accent betrays you.”

            It seems to me that our accents should always betray us as followers of Jesus. “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone,” (Colossians 4:6).

But instead, there are a lot of us Christians who hope nobody ever finds out that we are “tainted” by our association with Jesus Christ, that nobody finds out we sneak into church on a Sunday. Our language is salty enough, but perhaps not in the way Colossians meant it. It doesn’t t mean we fill up our conversations with pious and meaningless religious clichés, but that we speak the language of Love at all times, in all circumstances, and no matter what else is happening around us, good or bad. “I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it through the Holy Spirit,” (Romans 9:1).

If you walk like a disciple, talk like a disciple and look like a disciple, you must be a disciple. But as we all know, Peter goes to great lengths to deny everything, or having anything to this with this Jesus character. From Nazareth, you say? Never been there.  He wouldn’t know Jesus if he fell over him. He’d swear on a stack of bibles that he never met this guy ever before, and, dammit, he wouldn’t know him from Adam.  

But then the rooster crows. Peter remembers.

It’s enough to make a grown man cry.

As for the broken window, it turned out my father was very understanding and no punishment occurred. That’s what I call grace.