Sermon – April 18, 2010: Where You Do Not Wish to Go
Sermon for Sunday, April 18, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Where You Do Not Wish to Go
Psalm 30, Revelation 5: 11-14; John 21: 1-19
I was talking to a man–not a churchgoer, I’m not sure really how religious in a
conventional way, but a bright, well-read man. He’s older, and he said, “Doesn’t it say in the
Bible somewhere that “when you’re old, someone else will take you and make you go
where you don’t want to go?” I was a little surprised he knew the scripture, but who could
be surprised that he knew the feeling? This is from Jesus’ speech to Peter at the end of the
gospel of John, where Jesus tells Peter, “when you were younger, you used to fasten your
own belt and go where you wished. But when you are old, you will stretch out your hands,
and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.”
Then the author of the gospel tells us, (“he said this to indicate the kind of death by which he
would glorify God.”) ‘”After this,” the gospel goes on, “he said to him, “Follow me.”‘
The evangelist interprets Jesus’ remark for us as a foretelling of Peter’s own
crucifixion as a prisoner condemned by the Romans, to which he presumably would have
gone as bound. But the helplessness with which it is our common lot to meet death, the
sense that we arrive, at some point in our lives, at a place where we no longer are in charge
of our own destiny, but are given over to an unrelenting and unwelcome power which leads
us implacably away–that’s part of the consciousness of our mortality with which we live all
our lives. Different seasons of our life and different circumstances dictate how forcefully we
feel the weight of this knowledge, and various factors shape our response. Who can read
this scripture past the age of forty and not wince in sympathy with Peter, who has so many
things going for him but is being reminded that there’s a limit to how much time he’ll have to
live?
You can read this exchange between Jesus and Peter in different voices. Jesus can
sound stern and confrontational, or Jesus can sound gentle and sympathetic. You could
even read it in a way which would make Jesus’ remarks about Peter’s eventual death seem
full of regret. Jesus may mourn the very fact of mortality, Jesus may be even more pained
than Peter is about the inevitability of death. The tears which Jesus wept at the tomb of
Lazarus may support reading Jesus this way, as foretelling Peter’s eventual demise not in
the voice of a commanding officer willing to sacrifice his troops, but in the attitude of anyone
heartbroken about the prospect of separation, and loss, and anyone’s losing the reassuring
routine of continued existence, anyone’s having to resign living and relinquish being.
However we are to hear the unspoken, the affective part of Jesus’ speech to Peter,
the words are clear enough. Peter won’t always be free to go where he wants, and in fact at
some point won’t be able to prevent being taken where he does not wish to go. That’s the
way it is, and even with that being the way it is–or perhaps especially because that’s the
way it is, Jesus is telling him to follow him.
We know how Peter’s life turns out. He goes from having been one of the
fishermen whom Jesus recruited on the shores of the Sea of Galilee–strong, certainly, able
to command respect– Jesus made him his lieutenant, the first among equals of the
disciples–but just a man working out his destiny in a backwater of the empire. That’s who
he starts out as, and he becomes the head of the new church at Rome, and leads that
church long enough and ably enough that it gets established as preeminent among the
fledgling centers of Christianity worldwide. Peter is martyred. Peter is arrested and
condemned and killed, and if people really kept track of this successfully, you could get in a
plane and fly today to Rome, and tomorrow visit the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, the
church of St. Peter in chains, and see the manacles that were fastened to his outstretched
arms, see the links by which he was led to his execution. Through his life, and through his
death, as well, by the logic of God’s stirring up a new faith, he encouraged the spread of a
new way of understanding God and human beings and life and death, he had a hand in
changing the world.
It wasn’t his experience of this world that empowered him to dare what he dared and
do what he did. It wasn’t what he learned from his everyday existence which equipped him
to become an ambassador for Christ and a leader of a movement. It was his experience of
the Risen Christ which developed that potential in Peter, and the experience of the Risen
Christ counts, at least in part, on a confident acquaintance with the realm of the holy, with a
heavenly kingdom where Christ always is alive, and by which Christ’s followers live in this
world until they are joined to him after death.
Some churches overemphasize the hidden dimension of religion, a world which can
only be glimpsed in mystic ecstasies or felt as spiritual possession, or trusted as the next
address beyond the grave. Critics of Christianity have lamented “pie in the sky when you
die” religion, dismissing belief in heaven as a symptom of abandoning the effort to improve
this world, or seriously engage its ills. Some churches, on the other hand, by emphasizing
moral duties and compassionate actions, by insisting upon discipleship as a life of service
and self-sacrifice, perhaps say too little about the reality into which Easter opened a
window; a place where death has no dominion, and God’s will is not constrained by human
failure or folly, but where love is vindicated and hope is justified.
Maybe because we mark Easter annually, and have it in our calendar as one more
recurring holiday, to take its turn for our attention in the cycle of the seasons, we lose the
sense of how much Easter changes everything. To some extent the whole of the Bible
tells its story conscious of this world’s playing out its events in the context of a divine creator
who oversees and interacts and instructs, so there’s always heaven in the picture. In the
New Testament, however, that inferred place of God’s dominion is the more present, and
the hope for resurrection, which Easter inaugurates in a new way, means that the faith of
Christians is that however God’s realm may be obscured by our worldly trials, or how
hidden to our frail perceptions, we shall at last know it, following Christ not only to the grave
but to Paradise: “Now as in a mirror dimly, but then face to face,” as Paul writes.
The vision of the Lamb of God’s eternal rule in the heavens from the book of
Revelation is just that–a vision, an otherworldly apprehension communicated by a dreamer.
It is nonetheless a core belief of Christ’s church, that beyond ordinary discerning God has
everything well in hand, through Christ. Easter and resurrection don’t only change the way
we meet the powers of this world, whose tactics of force and fraud are weakened by the
example of a humble victim overcoming them. Easter and resurrection don’t only change
the way we conceive our own natures, as though Christ’s having brought life and immortality
to light is simply a matter of discovering, to our astonishment, that we are not limited only to
the life we have in the body. This season of God’s triumph through Jesus also means that
the One whom the disciples called “Lord” because he was alive to guide and direct them is
now alive to guide and direct us, so that we may call him “Lord” not only as a title
appropriate for a deity, but as the proper term for someone to whom we give both
obedience and allegiance.
The gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke have a narrative structure and lots of stuff in
common, and it is generally believed it is because Matthew and Luke had Mark’s gospel
before them when they wrote. John, however, represents an alternate tradition, and a
distinct effort, so it is interesting when a story we know from the first tradition appears in
John. Sometimes it comes in a slightly different form.
That’s what happens in today’s gospel reading. Luke has Jesus urging the
unsuccessful fishermen to put down their nets once more the first time he meets Peter, and
the miraculous catch makes Peter fall to his knees and tell Jesus “I am a sinful man, depart
from me, O Lord!” Jesus doesn’t leave, but makes Peter his main disciple. In John’s
gospel this happens at the end of Peter’s fisherman days, after Jesus’ resurrection. Now
the miracle sets the stage for this encounter between Jesus and Peter by the charcoal fire
on the shore. The last time in John’s gospel that Peter stood by a charcoal fire, he denied
Jesus three times. This time Jesus asks Peter three times if Peter loves him. This grieves
Peter, but it is a restoration, it’s a way back. Peter insists the third time that he loves Jesus–
and that’s the setting of Jesus’ telling Peter that he will die. That was the thing which Peter
couldn’t face the first time, that was the obstacle, before, to Peter openly being Jesus’
person. Peter couldn’t face a helpless death. Now, with Easter behind them both, Jesus
thinks Peter is ready to accept both living as a person of Christ and dying as a person of
Christ.
“Feed my sheep,” the Good Shepherd tells his disciple. Take care of the people I
care for, is the message Jesus delivers to all who, now that Easter has come and gone, can
face the facts of life and death as illuminated by resurrection. Jesus doesn’t expect us to
embrace our end–he tells us it’s a way we do not wish to go–but Jesus expects us to live
up to our responsibilities as those who serve him, all the days of our lives, including the last.
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