Crisis and Vocation

Psalm 30

1 I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up and did not let my foes rejoice over me.

2 O Lord my God, I cried to you for help,    and you have healed me.

3 O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol,    restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.

4 Sing praises to the Lord, O you his faithful ones, and give thanks to his holy name.

5 For his anger is but for a moment;    his favor is for a lifetime.Weeping may linger for the night,    but joy comes with the morning.

6 As for me, I said in my prosperity,    “I shall never be moved.”

7 By your favor, O Lord,    you had established me as a strong mountain; you hid your face; I was dismayed.

8 To you, O Lord, I cried,    and to the Lord I made supplication:

9 “What profit is there in my death,    if I go down to the Pit?Will the dust praise you?    Will it tell of your faithfulness?

10 Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me!    O Lord, be my helper!”

11 You have turned my mourning into dancing;    you have taken off my sackcloth    and clothed me with joy,

12 so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.    O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.

John 21:15-19

15 When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” 16 A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” 17 He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. 18 Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow 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.” 19 (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”

We started the service by reading Psalm 30, a psalm which, like many, begins and ends with the praise of God but which in the middle takes a sudden detour into less cheerful territory.  Somehow verse 7 goes from, "By your favor, O Lord, you had established me as a strong mountain;” to “you hid your face; I was dismayed.” If you’re reading along this can seem like an aberration, and indeed soon enough we’re back to praising God, but this really feels like the core of the psalm, the occasion for writing it - that the psalmist feels as if God is hiding, as if the God who had previously been present is now absent.  Here we see (and hardly for the only time in the psalms) a statement of doubt and even despair bracketed by God’s praise.  These two things can go together.  In fact, to surround one’s doubt and despair with God’s praise is an attempt to overcome that doubt and despair, to overwhelm it by declaring a more fundamental reality.  This is, in fact, what we do we come to worship.  In a sense, we always fake it until we make it.  There’s nothing disingenuous about this.  

The psalm also addresses God in a manner that we might think inappropriate for good religious people: What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the Pit? Will the dust praise you?    Will it tell of your faithfulness?

It’s an appeal to God’s apparent self-interest, even God’s vanity: “If I’m dead I can’t praise you!”  The necessary logic of God’s creation is used to make the case against God: “You made us for your praise, right?  What kind of God creates us for your praise then permits our death thus extinguishing that praise?  Doesn’t make sense”. It’s worth noting that the premise of eternal life, which we assume to be the core concern of faith, is actually not in play here.  The presumption is that death is the end.  But, that’s perhaps only because the psalmist could not see the full implications of the argument he was making: “If God really did create us for God’s praise, then surely God could and must lift us up to sing God’s praises, not for a lifetime, but forever.  How could it be otherwise?  

We might take some solace that, even as we gather here to sing God’s praises, that God often seems more absent that present, that the life of faith passes through seasons of doubt and despair - or even that doubt and despair remain the ambient climate of the attempted life with God.  All of this is normal.  In fact, this is just one more way of framing the fundamental truth that we proclaim at Easter - and every Sunday - that the way to life passes through death, that crisis precedes abundance. 

Peter experienced a crisis.  On that night when Jesus and disciples celebrated the Passover in the upper room then went to the Garden to pray, and Judas appeared to betray Jesus, and the soldiers take him into custody, Peter encounters the harsh reality that this is going very differently than he’d imagined.  Peter, alone among the disciples, follows Jesus, but now at a distance, and full of fear.  He cannot be hopeful about how this will turn out.  So when he’s confronted by those who recognize him as a disciple of Jesus, he denies it - not once, but three times.   Everything is falling apart, and there’s no conceivable way for it to be put back together.  When Jesus was crucified and placed in the tomb, Peter was surely consumed by the very worst thoughts and feelings, including that he was fool for hoping in this man who’s life was a dead end.  Peter might well have felt like his life was at an end as well, that like the psalm said, “you hid your face; I was dismayed.”  

And yet Peter clung to some kind of hope, arriving at the tomb to find it empty, then gathering with the other disciples only to have Jesus suddenly appear before them in a locked room.  Peter had never expected to be face to face with Jesus again.  Mixed in with the joy must’ve been regret and shame for denying Jesus just as he’d predicted.

What might’ve Peter wanted from Jesus in that moment?  Would he have preferred Jesus pretended like he forgot about it?  Or like it was no big deal?   Whatever Peter’s preferences, Jesus addressed Peter’s denial directly, but implicitly.   He asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?”, and three times, following Peter’s affirmation, Jesus tells Peter to feed/care for his lambs/sheep.  The text tells us that Peter is hurt that Jesus asks the third time; whether his hurst because it reminds him of his own denial or whether it calls into question Jesus’ trust in Peter - or both - we don’t know.  But it’s uncomfortable moment, for sure.  

Why does Jesus put Peter through this?  Is it like a parent imposing a consequence in order to teach a child the severity of their actions?  It is a gentle form of punishment?  Does he just need Peter to know that he’s hurt?  Why keep Peter on the hook?   It’s always been more or less common for humanity to run from or to hide our failures, but then they always follow us, the past making a home in the present.  Jesus instead brings Peter’s failure out in the open, exactly because he has not given up on Peter, forcing him to confront his past failure so that he might repent, recommit, and receive a vocation to continue the work Jesus has begun.   Jesus has already forgiven Peter, but he makes Peter to pass through this penitential moment not for punishment, but for restoration.  As painful as it may have been, Jesus brings Peter out of the past into a new future.  

Jesus gives Peter a gift, and in that light we might all consider the possibility that our failures haunt us because we have not confronted them, have not received forgiveness and restoration, we cannot imagine that Jesus calls us into his work despite of our failures, even because we are failed yet forgiven people.  We perhaps doubt that the past can be overcome and/or that the future might be different.  

Another observation about this passage.  I’m fairly sure this is the only instance in the New Testament of someone saying that s/he loves Jesus.  Although many of us have grown accustomed to saying and especially singing that we love God/Jesus and thinking  that this is somehow the essence of what God desires from us, the reality is that the New Testament gives us little encouragement in this direction, either by instruction or example.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that Scripture discourages us from saying that we love God exactly because we are always prone to mistake words for actions (words are actions for God alone) and thus to convince ourselves that we love God when our lives indicate otherwise.  Peter denied Jesus these three times and thus three times Jesus asked Peter, “do you love me?”  But the point of the question is not to elicit an affirmative response but rather to say to Peter, “If you actually love me then you will feed my sheep”.  You will love me by loving those whom I love, you will love by following my example, not just in word but in deed.   Peter finds himself back where we began, with Jesus saying, “follow me”.  

Imagine that Jesus had only asked Peter the question, “do you love me?” without the command that followed.  And imagine that Peter had continued to say he loved Jesus without really continuing the work Jesus began.  Perhaps he could’ve made a kind of peace with that, lived a reasonably contented life, but I imagine that, in his more honest moments, he would’ve been haunted by the suspicion that he either didn’t actually believe or that he was still stuck in his denial.  Which is to say that Peter would’ve found himself in roughly the situation that I imagine many of us find ourselves in.  We are confronted Sunday after Sunday with the risen Christ and yet we find ourselves haunted by the suspicion that we either don’t really believe this stuff, or that, if we do, then our lives deny the truth of what we profess with our mouths.  And in that place we  can easily feel stuck, or worse, dismayed at God’s absence.  

The way through (but maybe not out of) the crisis for, the Psalmist, for Peter, and for us, is simply to carry on living as if God is, in fact, present, as if God were worthy of praise, as if Christ really is risen from the dead.  What Jesus really wanted from Peter is what he wants from us: not just to say that we love him, and not just to convince ourselves that we believe and/or feel the right things.  As he said to Peter, so would Jesus say to us: “Feed my sheep”.