Adrienne Hickey
Brothers and Sisters,
When Peter first denies Christ, he has come to warm himself at a fire. It’s cold. The sky is probably thick with pre-industrial stars.
We’re afforded a rare character drama in this moment. The warming fire, the bitter tears.
Today—Good Friday—the lectionary asks us to read of Peter’s denials and the context of Jerusalem’s bureaucratic shuffling.
Send him to Caiaphus. Take him to Pilate. Get him over to Herod. No, send him back to Pilate.
Jesus’s condemnation, despite those primal stars overhead, is a modern paper-pushing trail of deferred accountability, of the impersonal obscuring the real.
And then Peter is asked, “Aren’t you with him?” Peter is gutted. “No.” He shivers.
It’s a devastating moment for him, who, moments before, declared to Jesus he would lay down his life before denying Christ.
Yet, even in his failure, Peter is more attuned to Christ than I. We have forgotten what it is to need a fire, to shiver. We have forgotten death, and we coast in our deathlessness. Perhaps, in part, it is because bureaucracy distances everyone from what is personal.
But I suspect a slyer evil at play. The world conspires to make us indifferent.
In an era of climate-controlled buildings, fast food, “hook-up” apps, on-demand food, on-demand entertainment, on-demand sex…there’s nothing to notice or be ashamed of. No cold, lonely repercussions to crash down on us. Just ordering lotus flower energy drinks and having the most primitive kind of satiety, totally and utterly safe and banal, swathed in a riskless existence.
“Practice safe life,” we preach. And what is left? Just a collision of bodies and the radical confidence of seizing exactly what we want, and not wanting anything that can’t be used up and discarded.
God has offered us a life full of risk and effort and suffering. Are we not meant to feel his generosity in the vibrant, unvirtual, tumultuous world of too hot, too cold, too hungry, too painful?
Lord, let me bleed when I stumble. Deny me the tepid life I so fastidiously curate for myself. Show me, again, Peter in his failure. Give me his grief, and, Lord, give me death.
Christ has died. Tilt me away from my triviality and toward his death. Let me weep, and let my tears be bitter.
Grace and peace,
—Adrienne
