WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert 2/19/06

Mark 14:43-72 “Speaking the Truth”

The arrest and trial of Jesus, and the denials of Peter, set in stark relief the issue of telling the truth. Who tells it and who does not? Why or why not? What are the motives, the plans, the benefits? What is the truth about Jesus, and about being his disciple? What is it about Judas, Jesus, Caiaphas the High Priest, and Peter that makes them speak as they do? What value did they or do we put on truth?

1) Arrest

Jesus has been praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, waiting for his betrayer to return. Judas arrives with a group of Temple police and a mob that includes some Roman soldiers, armed with clubs and swords, and sent by the chief priests, scribes and elders.

Judas has arranged to identify Jesus with a kiss – a normal enough greeting – perhaps because it was dark, or perhaps because Jesus was unknown to the Temple police. He greets Jesus with apparent enthusiasm and respect: “Rabbi” – you can almost hear the false sincerity, the forced tone of his voice! But of course he is lying through his teeth: he is making a big front of normality, and choosing words that will seem right for the occasion. But his words deny his heart.

The contrast between the mob with swords in the night, and Jesus teaching openly and readily in the Temple each day, is striking, and is pointed out by Jesus. “Why did you not arrest me then?” It’s a truthful question, to which there is no possible public answer – there are simply things so disgraceful that they can only be done in the dark. Light is the friend of truth and the enemy of falsehood; liars do not want the light of truth to shine in on their activities. You can no doubt think of examples.

But the Eleven are quickly drawn into the darkness: one of them – Peter, we are told by John’s Gospel, not to our surprise – draws his own sword and slashes off the ear of the High Priest’s servant. Jesus rebukes him: “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword;” and he reaches out to heal the injured man. The Eleven flee, as does a young man who loses his garment – often taken to be the young Mark himself. Jesus merely goes quietly with his arrestors.

2) Trial

He is taken to the residence of Caiaphas and his father in law and former High Priest Annas, and despite the late hour – now well after midnight - a quorum of the Sanhedrin council is gathered. A hearing, perhaps an official trial – we can’t tell – begins, with witnesses who accuse Jesus of many things, but no two of them can agree (as required by Jewish law) on any chargeable offense.

An attempt is made to sway the majority of the council, who were Sadducees and placed great weight on the dignity and holiness of the Temple, by claiming that Jesus had threatened to destroy it. He had, of course, predicted its destruction, but that is quickly turned into the lie that he himself threatened to destroy it. So are words turned around by unscrupulous people to make their case.

The leaders of the Sanhedrin are frustrated: their intent is “to find evidence against Jesus,” but they are getting nowhere. Forget ideas of presumed innocence; they have made up their minds already, and are looking for evidence they can use to support their conclusion. It’s common among leaders with a low regard for the truth. Angered, the High Priest confronts Jesus: “Why don’t you answer these accusations?”

Would you? Jesus is too discerning to fall into that trap. He will not argue with false assertions, he will not dignify the liars by debating with them. So he stays silent. There are times when truth is held in such low regard, that it is better not to enter the conversation; times when it is better to say nothing than to let people twist your words to mean what they want you to say.

Finally the High Priest resorts to the direct question that goes to the heart of the complaint the leaders had against Jesus. It is probably an illegal attempt to get a defendant to incriminate himself. And it is phrased with all due deference to religious protocols and scruples: “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?” Notice the careful avoidance of using the name of God; the euphemism of “the Blessed One.” Here is a man for whom religious form matters, even though he is leading the council in a “search for evidence against Jesus so that they could kill him.”

His astonishment and shock are obvious when Jesus now gives a direct answer to this real question. Jesus speaks the truth, in the midst of lies about him. “I am.” There can be no more doubts – for the first time (except among the Twelve) Jesus acknowledges that he is the expected Messiah, the Christ, the “anointed one” sent by God. But there is more to this truth than Caiaphas is ready for: “You will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” Everyone knew what this echoed: the great vision in Daniel 7 of the “Ancient of Days” – God himself – gathering people around his throne and giving power and authority and an everlasting kingdom to “one like a son of man” who would sit at his right hand and come in the clouds of heaven to judge the earth!

Jesus claims to fulfill Daniel’s prophecy: he is one who sits at God’s right hand, he judges the world. If that is not a direct claim to divinity, it comes very close to it. There is no question that the High Priest finds it blasphemous. He tears his robe in sorrow and rage, and demands a verdict from the Sanhedrin. “He is worthy of death,” they all agree. Here is the irony, that they now blaspheme by condemning the Lord of life to death, counting him a demonic imposter! So much for truth. If you make up your mind ahead of time, it won’t matter what evidence you hear to the contrary. Some trial. There will be plenty more like it down through the years.

3) Denial

And so we come to Peter – poor Peter! He has put away his sword, run away from the Garden, but then thinks better of it and follows Jesus to his trial. But as Mark carefully notes, Peter “followed at a distance.” It is a good way to get into trouble, following Jesus “at a distance” out of guilt!

As Jesus is taken in to be questioned, Peter stays in the courtyard of the High Priest’s house and warms himself by the fire on a cold Spring night. Questioned by a servant girl, he denies that he was with Jesus. As the tension grows, and Peter tries to move out of the courtyard, the girl sees him again and questions him loudly. But Peter has taken the wrong turn; he has lied once, now he must lie again, more forcibly. When a third time he is identified, presumably by his accent, as a Galilean, he now curses and angrily denies that he even “knows this man you are talking about.”

Perhaps the read the Sunday magazine article recently on lying? What the author called “distancing language” is a good sign of untruth. “I do not know this man you are talking about...” The article’s prime modern example was “I did not have sexual relations with that woman...” Peter is trapped in the web of his own denials, where one lie can only be covered up by a bigger one. Three times he denies being Jesus’ disciple, echoing, we suspect from Mark’s literary style, the three times he fell asleep in Gethsemane rather than pray with Jesus.

Poor Peter – the brave one who boasted “even if others desert you, I never will.” He did not know the power of fear; he did not know how readily he would lie to protect himself from what he perceived as danger. What if he had just said to the servant girl, “Yes, we’re down from Galilee for Passover. Yes, I know Jesus of Nazareth”? He would probably have come to no harm – there is no suggestion that anyone apart from Jesus was going to be arrested that night. Truth might have saved him; lies put him in shame and guilt and anguish.

4) Speaking The Truth

Truth is a precious thing; it can, as Jesus said elsewhere, “make you free.” Lies and denial will eventually entrap us, either in guilt and shame, or in more and worse lies, or in losing touch completely with reality and believing only the fantasies we tell ourselves.

We could all multiply examples, in public and in private lives. We live in a society where respect for the truth, where the difference between reality and fantasy, have all but disappeared. You see it in TV news and entertainment, which have now become the same thing. You see it in business, where corporations spin phony profits out of nowhere to impress stockholders – not to mention inflate the bonuses of CEOs. You see it in science, where breakthroughs in research turn out to be based on fabricated data. You see it in health care, where claims of the effectiveness of drugs or diets or procedures are hyped until they become the conventional wisdom, only to be proved unfounded by more careful studies. You see it in government, where policies on bombs or budgets are justified by “cherry-picking” evidence to support decisions that have already been made on other grounds which cannot be admitted in public.

Disregard for truth – in politics, in advertising, in finance – has a corrosive effect on the lives of ordinary people. Our former President escaped impeachment for perjury because most people thought that would be too great a punishment for lying about sex. After all, “everyone does that,” was the implied excuse. There is reason enough to suspect that it is common. Lying about money must come a close second – or maybe first? The “underground economy,” which runs on “off the books,” unreported, untaxed payments, is huge – perhaps as much as 1/3 the size of the “visible economy” by some estimates. How many of us, individuals or small businesses, will give a scrupulously accurate report of our income, expenses and deductions to the IRS or to New York State before April 15?

And if all this seems like “no big deal” to anyone any more, what does that say about us and our society? And what does it say about our Christian discipleship, if our standards of truth are no higher than anyone else’s? How many inventive ways have we found to “deny that we know Jesus”? When the heat is on, or even in everyday life, we too often – like Peter – “go with the flow” of denial, obfuscation, passing-the buck, exaggeration, white lies and outright falsehoods that are the stock-in-trade of a fallen world.

“Master... Rabbi, it is good to see you,” we say as we meet Jesus and kiss him on the cheek! But we have clubs and swords hidden under our cloaks. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” we say, when questioned about our faith or our lives. “I never heard of the man” we suggest, when we want the darkness to close over what we are doing.

Beware the culture of untruth. Beware hype of all kinds. Learn to spot liars. Speak truthfully to one another. Beware of “following Jesus at a distance” and “warming yourself by the fires” of his enemies. Learn from Jesus to be silent when trash is being talked, and to speak the truth when the truth is on the line.

Let us pray...