Scripture: John 18:12–27
Friends, the Good News is that Jesus faces impending doom and darkness with courage and candor.
John 18 tells one story from two perspectives: it goes back and forth between two stories, one of Jesus and the other of Peter. After the foot washing and last supper that we remembered in worship last week, the Roman guard shows up — tipped off by Judas Iscariot — and arrests Jesus. They have no specific charges. They see him as a rabble rouser whose time has come to answer for stirring up the hearts and minds of the people.
Jesus is arrested by Roman soldiers; the disciple Peter’s denies he is one of Jesus’s disciples; then Jesus is questioned about his ministry of the past three years; and finally Peter denies Jesus twice more, before the reading ends.
Jesus acts with unusual courage; Peter succumbs to secrecy and evasion.
But before we go to that distinction, I wanted to mark an occasion: Pam Trombley and Jennifer Lawton after worship last week reminded me that that this weekend marks one year of my ministry at Newman. What a year! I started on Ash Wednesday last year, we found out we were pregnant on Palm Sunday, and by Christmas our family had grown. In the church and in the world, a year of wonders, sorrows, challenges, and blessings. Weddings, funerals, and baptisms. I am happy to be part of this church. Churches and religious communities offer something important right now — collective purpose grounded in faith commitments. We take care of neighbor seriously, and rejecting war seriously, and providing for the hungry, the lost, the cold seriously — because Jesus did these things.
I preached on March 9, 2025 about how significant it was to start my in ministry on Ash Wednesday, how meaningful it was to serve people on the margins of the Christian tradition who couldn’t make it to traditional Ash Wednesday services, people who were hungry for spiritual connection and to be told that we are all finite beings, loved by God, and carrying more on our hearts than others can typically see.
What I didn’t preach about a year ago, partially because it was not an inspiring topic for a first sermon, was how cold I had been on that Ash Wednesday, standing out in the parking lot all day, offering people ashes with a frigid ashy thumb. Grace and I hadn’t moved from New Hampshire where we used to live — and all our belongings including coats and long underwear and thermal socks and handwarmers were still in New Hampshire, and so I came to Rhode Island in those first few days unprepared for the elements.
The cold leads us back into John — on this night of the story where Jesus is arrested and Peter distances himself from Jesus, the gospeler writes that everyone at the high priest’s residence “had made a charcoal fire because it was cold, and they were standing around it and warming themselves.”
As far as I can tell, this is the only time in any of the gospels when the temperature of an event is stated directly. Sometimes it’s implied that it is cold, like when Jesus walks on water on a stormy night; or we imagine it is hot at noon when Jesus asks for water from the Samaritan woman at the well. But here, the writer says it’s cold; it’s dark; it’s the middle of the night; people are not their best selves.
And so perhaps we can give Peter some slack as he shivers his way through the night, waiting to see what will happen to Jesus, that he brushes off with lies anyone who tries to connect him to Jesus as Jesus stands trial — that lie that he doesn’t even know the man. We can see that Peter is just trying to protect himself in a hostile environment by misrepresenting the truth to people who don’t seem to matter to the outcome of his story: he lies to a woman guarding a gate, and to groups of people who also appear to be powerless.
But what if he had trusted himself? If he had told them the truth? We know that Jesus had inspired a lot of people. Perhaps by protecting himself, Peter is also keeping a frigid people from coming to the warm light of Jesus through him. Perhaps they’re just looking for hope in a world where the powers that be are callused enough to try and kill people without a basis for their actions. Peter thinks his connection to Jesus does not matter to anyone else, but it does.
Peter in the courtyard and Peter at the fire exposes all of our troubles with vulnerability, even as we see Jesus finding power in his own vulnerability.
Jesus is taken to see Annas, who is a former official who still wields some soft power in society. Maybe like a Buddy Cianci of the 2000s and early teens — a leader no longer in office but still part of the conversation. Jesus refuses to play the game of Annas’s interrogation. As the former Roman governor fishes for information from Jesus, Jesus displays his courage and candor — his teaching has been public and in the open with thousands of witnesses. He says he has nothing to hide and feels no need to repeat himself. Jesus’s words enrages a temple guard, who hits him across the face.
Peter is out shivering in the courtyard during this exchange, feeling helpless. His vulnerable place in the dark and cold foreshadows the vulnerability the Jesus followers and the Jesus tradition will face after Jesus’s death in a world that has no restraint about using violence. Jesus models pacifism coupled with courage and straightforward candor.
And I think it does for us too. We are connected to something bigger than ourselves through our faith. We suffer when the world suffers, but we bring joy when there is joy to bring.
With candor and courage . . .
Amen.