And Peter
March 31, 2024
Easter Sunday
Pastor Mike
Mark 16:1-8
The stories found in the New Testament were told and written down in light of Jesus’ resurrection. When we open our Bibles to read from the Gospels or Acts or the letters of Paul, trust in Jesus’ victory over sin and death runs under all of them, like a great subterranean river. Occasionally, resurrection bubbles up and breaks through the surface, but even when it doesn’t appear to be there, it’s there, deep and mysterious and nourishing. The same storytellers who tell us what happened at the cross and the tomb, and who in no way minimize or skirt around the Jesus’ real anguish, also know that the cross and tomb did not have the last word. And they told the whole story of Jesus in that joy and in that hope.
But just as we, too, take for granted that Easter Sunday follows on the heels of Good Friday year after year, we can also forget that there was a time, brief as it may seem to us from this remove, when the resurrection was not a given. Stories like Mark 16 are about people who really did live through the passage from death to life, who experienced that aching Sabbath silence from sundown on the first day to sunup on the third. Jesus was gone, really gone – and it had happened so suddenly, so violently. Everything they had hoped for had fallen apart.
The women who went to the tomb on the first Easter morning cue us in to that original sense of defeat. They went to anoint Jesus’ body with spices and give it a proper burial. As purehearted and compassionate as their intentions were, they came as mourners, not believers. [pause] They even talked together about the difficulty of rolling the heavy stone away from the face of the tomb; they expected to find it firmly in place. Instead, they found the tomb open and a young man sitting upright where Jesus’ body should’ve been. They were terrified.
After listening to the words of the young man dressed in white, the women simply ran away. Mark puts it like this: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them” (16:8). The Greek words here that describe that condition are tromos and ekstasis, and you can just about hear our English equivalents in there: trauma, ecstasy. Mary, Mary, and Salome were so afraid that they trembled, so joyful that they were bewildered. That first experience of resurrection came as a complete shock.
There’s a lesson for us, if we just linger on that moment. Jesus wants us to experience his resurrection in an integrated way, with both head and heart. His rising is announced to us as a message, just like the young man announced it to the women. We hear resurrection preached, we read about it in the scriptures, we confess it in the creed. But resurrection is also something that we feel, a truth that pierces us clear down to our depths and stirs us up. In other words, we believe in resurrection and we are seized by it. Our bodies respond to the gospel as much as our minds, and our burning hearts and gut feelings and tingling skin can point us toward mystery and miracle just as well as our ideas. Faith is born when we hear with feeling.
And what is so terrible and amazing about resurrection?
“You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. …He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him” (Mark 16:6-7).
We come to what we think is the end of the story, and it turns out to be the real beginning. We come to a moment of cold closure and find that it is unexpectedly open and airy. Resurrection sends us back into a world that we think we knew, only to discover that we don’t know the world at all. For we live in a creation where the living presence of Christ goes before us and is waiting to meet us. Ours is a world haunted by the holy.
If we can let ourselves feel some of that original defeat and shock, then we can hear something peculiar in the young man’s words to the three women: “But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee.’”
‘Tell his disciples and Peter.’
…and Peter?
I have some questions about that.
Why were the disciples not there on Easter morning? Why did only the women come? Where had the rest of them gone off to?
And what’s even more curious is that Peter is singled out by name. Why? Wouldn’t he be implied in the word “disciples”? Why doesn’t the angel just say, ‘Go and tell his disciples,’ and leave it at that? Why should Peter get his own special announcement?
To answer these questions we have to go back through the story of Christ’s passion and bring together some details about the disciples and Peter.
When Jesus had his final meal with the disciples during the night that he was betrayed and arrested, he told them that he, their shepherd, would soon be struck down, and that they, his sheep, would be scattered (Mark 14:26-27). In his audacious way, Peter objected to how Jesus had lumped him in with the others. He argued with Jesus: “Even though all fall away, I will not.” And Jesus argued back: “Truly I tell you, this very night, you will deny me three times.” Peter still wouldn’t let it be: “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you,” he said. That’s pretty committed. Peter loved Jesus, and he believed he’d have the power to see his conviction through to the end, that he would be able to stand by Jesus even if it meant dying with him.
After the meal, Jesus took the disciples to the garden of Gethsemane where he planned to pray. He brought Peter, James, and John a little farther into the garden than the rest, and he asked them to stay awake with him and keep watch while he prayed. But they fell asleep. Three times, Jesus came and asked them to stay awake. Three times they slept. When Jesus found them sleeping the first time, he aimed his words at Peter: “[Peter], are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour? …The Spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Mark 14:37-38). Jesus knew that Peter was trying. Jesus also knew Peter’s weakness. Peter had put himself out there as the most steadfast disciple. Maybe for that reason he was the one who had to bear Jesus’ words.
After Jesus finished praying, Judas, who had betrayed him to the chief priests for payment, came into Gethsemane with an armed crowd. When the disciples realized that Jesus had no intention of fighting back against the mob, they “all deserted him and fled.” Jesus’ words proved true: the shepherd was struck, and the sheep scattered. But wait! One remained – Peter. He may have fled with the others at first, but he circled back, and he followed the crowd at a distance until they reached the chief priest’s palace. Peter, the last disciple standing, slipped into the courtyard and took his place by the fire.
Judas had handed Jesus over. Ten had run away. Peter alone had come so far.
While Jesus was in the house being interrogated, a servant girl of the chief priest approached Peter in the courtyard, looked carefully at him, and said, “You – you were with Jesus.” Peter felt he was in real trouble. Should he get caught there, it’d be over for him. He quickly brushed her back, saying he didn’t know or understand what she was talking about. But she asked him again, and again he denied it. Others took notice, and a small crowd pressed him further: “You speak like a northerner, like a Galilean. You are one of Jesus’ people.”
Overwhelmed, scared, and defensive, Peter began to call down curses upon himself and practically shouted, “I do not know the man.” And there it was, a direct denial of his affiliation with Jesus, his love for Jesus, the new identity and vocation he had been given by Jesus. Peter denied it all with curses. He denied it with a vow. It was deep and binding speech.
The rooster crowed. Peter remembered Jesus’ prediction of his three-fold denial. Surely Peter felt that he had done something ultimate, something unforgiveable, that he had crossed over to the point of no return. Perhaps what shattered him in that moment was a sudden memory of something Jesus had once said in a sermon, back when the future of the ministry seemed bright and full of possibility. Jesus had said, “Everyone who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny” (Matt. 10:32-33). Crushed, Peter “broke down and wept” (Mark 14:72). And until the women arrive at the tomb on Easter morning, that’s the last we hear of Peter. A broken and brokenhearted man.
Go, tell my disciples… Well, we know why they weren’t there on Easter. Judas had cut himself loose and the rest of them had run away.
…and go tell Peter. I think we’re close to answering our questions about Peter, too. I want to bring in Luke’s Gospel here because he really puts a fine point on Peter’s unique position in the story. In Luke’s version of the Last Supper, Jesus has a conversation with Peter in which he says to him, “[Peter], listen! Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers” (Luke 22:31-32).
Jesus foresaw Peter’s cascade of failures. Jesus knew that Peter would be spiritually tested. But he also foresaw the unique gift that Peter, the Rock of the Church, would be able to give to strengthen his brothers after he had come back from those failures. So Jesus prayed for him, and his faith. Which means when Peter fell asleep in the garden, Jesus’ prayer was deeper than that sleep. And when Peter denied knowing Jesus in the courtyard, Jesus’ prayer was more definitive than that denial. At the moment when the rooster crowed and Peter’s shame engulfed him, Luke tells us that “the Lord turned and looked at Peter” (22:61) – turned and beheld him, as if to say, ‘You are going to lose sight of me for a little while, but I will not lose sight of you.’
I think Peter was singled out in the Easter story not because he a leader or a spokesman for the other disciples, but because he was somewhere else. I don’t think he was with the other ten. And even if he was with them physically, he was somewhere totally different spiritually. Peter had gone with Jesus the furthest, and he’d had the harshest failure. He had denied knowing his teacher and friend and Lord. In his own eyes, Peter had disqualified himself as a disciple. Why should he be included with the rest? So the women had to go find the ten who ran away, and then they had to go find Peter, the one who denied. “Go find the many,” the angel tells the women. “Then go find the one.” And Peter! Make sure you go get Peter.
Friends, the mercy, the terror, the joy of Easter is that even if you fall asleep when Jesus has asked you to stay awake, he will rise from the dead and send someone to come and find you;
—and even if you run away from him, he will still rise from the dead and send someone to come and find you;
—and even if you should deny him, and say you don’t know him, and with curses and vows lock yourself in a story of your own weakness and unworthiness, he will still rise from the dead and send someone to come and find you.
He is the good shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to go and bring home the one. No matter how far you might feel from all of this, no matter how forgotten you might believe you are, someone is running after you! A messenger sent by God. A person with firsthand knowledge of the living Christ. God has put your name on another’s heart, and they are running, like the women, to catch up with you.
And Peter! And me! And you.
So this Easter morning, I ask you: Are you hearing a name? Are you hearing a name?
It might be your own. I think there’s room in the “and Peter” for any of us to hear our own names. Is someone calling to you?
Or are you hearing some other name, the name of someone God loves and desires and forgives – someone who believes the story’s all over for them, that for a thousand possible reasons they are no longer disciple material, but whom God has not for one moment forgotten.
Are you hearing the call to run and find and tell?
Are you hearing the call to be found?
Mark gives us this first picture of the Easter Church. A community of those who seek and those who are sought; those who have run away, and those who are running after the ones who ran away.
If you are hearing a name this morning, perhaps with some trembling and bewilderment, and you need strength for the work of seeking, or you need courage for the work of being found, in a moment I’m going to ask you to stand. I will ask you to stand in response to that word and that feeling, so that you can receive prayer. And then I’m going to ask those of you sitting around any who stand to rise and lay hands on them in a posture of solidarity and blessing. And then I’ll pray for us.
Mark’s Easter story ends with the women initially overwhelmed by their fear. And we know from the other Gospels that Peter had to work through some stuff once he actually met the risen Christ in Galilee.
You’re either taking the risk of going to tell someone that God is looking for them, or the risk of slowing down long enough for someone to catch up with you. The story isn’t over by any means, but this is the beginning that God is making.
So, if you’re hearing a name this morning – whether it be your own or another’s – I invite you now to stand for prayer.
[Prayer]
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
***
Benediction
And Peter! There is always one more. There is always one more life… the forgotten, the poor, the hungry, the despised, the cast