What a fitting passage we have for the first week of Lent. Judas and the band put together by the religious leaders of Jerusalem have just arrested our Lord, his disciples have scattered and now we are given the story of one of the leaders of the disciples and how he denies his Lord. And it isn't just one denial. He does it again and again. And that is what sin is. It's the denial of God and of who he is to us and for us. But what brings the change in Peter? What brings his tears of repentance? What brings them is the words of our Lord. This is just like our own life. Our own sin is a denial of our Lord and his words still bring us to repentance.

Transcript

Some of you might know the name Irwyn Ince. Irwyn is the national director for Mission to North America, which in the Presbyterian Church in America oversees planting church, disaster relief, ministry to native peoples and other really great ministries here in North America. Irwyn has one of the biggest smiles and is one of these guys that you just want to be around and always makes you feel so incredibly welcome. Irwyn wrote a book a fews years back title The Beautiful Community: Unity, Diversity and the Church at Its Best. It is a book worth your time and I’d encourage you to pick it up. In that book he gives this illustration about appearing a certain way in front of others: 

Performance-enhancing drugs are a major problem in the sporting world. Cycling, baseball, weightlifting, football—athletes at the highest levels need something to put them over the top or keep them in the game. Usually, Botox doesn’t make the list of PEDs. But that was the precise drug that prompted twelve disqualifications at an event in Saudi Arabia.

A dozen camels were disqualified from a camel beauty contest in January 2018. Their crime? Doping in the form of Botox injections. The purpose? So that they would appear more beautiful in the eyes of the judges. Of course, the camels didn’t inject themselves. A veterinarian obviously hired by the camels’ owners performed the plastic surgery.

The doctor was caught just days before the beauty contest.

In fact, the attempt to enhance the camels’ physical beauty wasn’t limited to the injections. Since smaller, delicate ears are also a standard of camel beauty, surgery was performed on their ears. You’re unlikely to ever come across a camel beauty pageant in America, but we know what it’s like to commodify beauty, to parade people across a stage and judge the value of their physical appearance. 

Changing who you are in front of certain people. That’s what the camels did and that’s sometimes what we are tempted to do. And in the context of Christian faith, it can be those times that are most tempting to deny our Lord.  

I mentioned last week some of the disciple Peter’s confessions of his faith. In Matthew 16:16 he says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”. In John 6:68 he says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.” Earlier in this very chapter of Luke 22 he said, “Lord, I am ready to go with you both to prison and to death”! He made some great statements of faith and some incredible promises. He certainly seemed to be the really vocal one among the disciples. Kent Hughes said this about Peter, “Peter was always talking. . . . Sometimes he only opened his mouth to change feet, at at other times his words were immortal.”   

Think about this though, Peter in this very chapter tells the Lord that he is willing to go to his death with him. Now, after Jesus has just been arrested, Peter has followed Jesus and those who arrested him to the High Priest’s house and now we have this story of Peter denying Jesus!  

Now, here’s the thing, all of those great confessions of faith and promises were in private. Or, maybe it is a little more accurate to say that all of those professions of faith and promises were made in the context of the community of faith, but when push came to shove, when the world about him was watching him, when the possibility that his faith might cost him something was at stake, he had very little to say for himself and nothing at all to say about Jesus! I mean, we have the most wordy, verbose, loquacious word-filled disciple now at almost an entire loss for words. All he can now say is that he doesn’t know Jesus! 

I want you to see this morning that the ways that the ways we are identified with Jesus are also often the ways that we deny Jesus.   

 Identifying with him, Denying him 

Peter is now in the middle of this courtyard of the High Priest’s house sitting down around a fire. Apparently there are a good many people in this courtyard warming themselves. We know from the gospel of John that at least some of them had been those who arrested Jesus in the garden, but this was obviously a crowd. 

Now listen to Peter’s first denial: 

⁵⁵ And when they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat down together, Peter sat down among them. ⁵⁶ Then a servant girl, seeing him as he sat in the light and looking closely at him, said, “This man also was with him.”

 Now, I want you to think back to me to Luke chapter 5. There at the beginning of that chapter Jesus had a large crowd following him and he got into Peter’s fishing boat and taught the crowd from the boat. After he taught the crowd, he told Peter to go fishing, but Peter explained that they had tried all night and didn’t catch anything. But they went out because Jesus had told them to and they caught such a large amount of fish that the nets were breaking, they filled two boats and the boats nearly sank! Peter then falls down at Jesus’ feet and says, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man!” But Jesus tells his, “from now on you will be catching men”. And that section ends, “they left everything and followed him.”  

They left everyone and followed Jesus.  

Peter, has entirely found his life with Jesus. He had left the former way of life that gave him a sense of purpose and meaning and he followed Jesus. His life was now about Jesus. If there was one thing now that marked out who he was, what his identity was, it was Jesus.  

This little servant girl is now looking at Peter, looking closely at Peter, examining him (maybe she had been around the Temple that week with the High Priest and seen Jesus teaching and his disciples with him). And she says “You and Jesus were together”! And you could have thought, well, yeah, Peter identified his life so much with Jesus that he left the other things that identified him to be with Jesus. Verse ⁵⁷ But he denied it, saying, “Woman, I do not know him.”  

And I just want us to hear this for a moment, where is your identity? Or more specifically, don’t you find, at times, that there is a great temptation to find that your main identity is not that you are with him, but something else. I mean, this is for your Christians listening, isn’t it a temptation to find your life somewhere else? The fire that you first had when you heard Jesus call to follow him has diminished and there real possibility that people will think you are crazy for having Jesus as the person that gives the greatest meaning and purpose to your life and so you say that you’re just not that into him. Maybe you are involved in serving in a church, but really sharing about Jesus being your life?! 

Peter once identified completely with Jesus and now that has become his denial. “You were with him!” “I do not know him.” 

Identifying with his people, Denying his people 

Another way that we see that the ways we identify with Jesus are also the ways we deny him are by the ways we identify with his people and then deny them. 

So, as I said, there is probably this crowd that is in this courtyard trying to warm themselves during the night and into the early morning by this fire. And so various people may be coming through, some of whom, like the servant girl maybe spent their time in and around the Temple, but maybe others had been part of the procession of Palm Sunday that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem on the donkey. Either way, verse 58 tells us there were others that recognized Peter and this time it wasn’t just that they recognized that he was with Jesus, but that he was a part of Jesus people.  

Look at verse 58: 

⁵⁸ And a little later someone else saw him and said, “You also are one of them.” But Peter said, “Man, I am not.” 

You also are one of them! Part of belonging to Jesus is belonging to his body. And part of what we find in the Bible is the body of Christ is really different, it’s really broad. I mentioned last week how wonderfully diverse the body of Christ is and how God is at work in his world in so many different kind of places and through so many different kinds of people. 1 Corinthians is a book that tells us about a lot of the conflict and division that takes place in the diverse body of Christ. In chapter 12 it talks about how some are feet and some are eyes and some are hands, but that they are all connected, collectively to the head. They may look different, but they are all part of the one family of God.  

Peter now is being called out as belonging to these people who follow Jesus. And part of the great gift of following Jesus is belonging to his body, and part of our temptation of denying Jesus is that we deny that we belong to his people. Maybe they really look like we want them to look. Maybe they aren’t really as welcoming as we want them to be. Maybe they fight and bring one another to court and have they favorite pastors and teachers that are a little different from one another just like in 1 Corinthians and so we say, just like Peter did, “No, I am not!”  

Again, the very thing that so often brings us life, the community of the body of Christ, can be the very thing that invites our denial of Jesus. 

So, like Peter we are tempted to deny that our identity is in Jesus and we are tempted to find that our identity is in the people of Jesus, his body, also, like Peter, we are tempted to deny the way of Jesus.  

Identifying with his way, Denying his way

So, some more time passes and another person comes up. Verse 59: ⁵⁹ And after an interval of about an hour still another insisted, saying, “Certainly this man also was with him, for he too is a Galilean.” 

This is kind of interesting. You all likely know that Galilee was in the north of Israel and Jerusalem was in the south, so even if there were a good amount of people that had travelled to Jerusalem for the Passover, there probably weren’t too many from up north in Galilee just because it would have been a farther journey. So, Peter would have maybe stood out. He would have looked a certain way, he would have talked a certain way.  

Think about it like this:

 If you call rubber bands gum bands and  if you call subs hoagies and  if you know what “yins” means and  if you know what a Mummer is and  if you know what dippy eggs are and if you drink wudder and if you have any idea how to pronounce Wilkes Barre then you have likely lived in Pennsylvania. 

And if you have been with Jesus you start to talk like him and look like him. You start to look at others with the dignity that he looked at them with. You start to care for the poor as though they really will inherit the kingdom of God and children as though the Kingdom of God really does belong to them and adulterers as though their sin doesn’t really have to define them and the socially estranged as though they really are worthy of you sitting down next to them at the well at mid-day and talking to them. You will start to find that your speech with be filled with thanksgiving instead of obscene language and crude joking.  And you know what will happen when you start to look and sound like Jesus, people will think that you were with him and a lot of people will not like that you no longer look like them!  

And again the very thing that has come to identify you will be the very thing that tempts you to deny him!  

Verse 60. ⁶⁰ But Peter said, “Man, I do not know what you are talking about.”  

What I am suggesting to you in all of this is that the very things that define our life with Jesus will be the very places where we are tempted to deny him.  

Think about this. What was abundantly clear in the garden of Eden was that God had provided for them more than they could possibly need, but he still wanted their trust and their faith that what he gives them is enough. Genesis chapter 1, verse 29 (the second thing God says to Adam and Eve) “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.   

And what is the impetus and the act by which they deny God and his goodness and his sufficiency? Well, it is taking and eating.   

And what do you do? The gifts that God gives you, your intellect, your humor, your social know-how, your friendship, so many of these very gifts of God become the ways by which we deny that Jesus is our identity.  

But just as God came seeking out Adam and Eve in the garden long ago, calling out “Where are you?”  

The turning point here happens not just when the cock crows, but when Jesus looked at Peter. Listen: 
⁶⁰ But Peter said, “Man, I do not know what you are talking about.” And immediately, while he was still speaking, the rooster crowed. ⁶¹ And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the saying of the Lord, how he had said to him, “Before the rooster crows today, you will deny me three times.” ⁶² And he went out and wept bitterly.  

Now the text doesn’t say the look that Jesus gave Peter, but I would bet that it was the same look that Jesus was so known for.  

In Luke 1:25 Elizabeth says that the Lord looked upon her and took away her reproach among people. 

Luke 1:48 Mary says that the Lord looked upon the humble estate of his servant. 

Luke 6:10 says that the Lord looked around and said to the man with the wither hand “Stretch out your hand” and he healed him.  

In Luke 7 Jesus sees the woman who’s son had died and it says that when he saw her he had compassion.  

In Luke 19 Jesus looked up into a sycamore tree and saw the rich tax collector Zacheus and told him he was gong to his house. 

Later on in Luke 19 he looks at Jerusalem and weeps over it. 

In Luke 20 Jesus looked upon the woman offering her two coins. 

And here in Luke 22 Jesus looks at Peter and Peter weeps. And I bet he weeps because he knows Jesus look. He know his compassion. He knows his care. He knows his grace. He knows his love. And so Peter weeps.  

The fact is friends, we were made to be gazed upon. We come out of the womb looking for our parents’ eyes, longing to be looked upon with love. So often we are camels that try to doll ourselves ourselves up for the approval of others and a lot of that leads to the denial of our Lord. But what you are made for and what will redeem you is the compassionate gaze of Jesus.