Message by Pastor John Culp : August 31, 2008
“Rocky – Part 12”
Text – Matthew 26:69-75
Jack London was one of those colorful characters who lived fast and hard, and died young. He never saw his forty-first birthday. But in that brief career he did some remarkable writing. In fact he was one of the first Americans to earn a healthy income solely from his writing. Many of his novels and short stories were set in wild surroundings and involved the rugged side of things.
One that I read as a young man gripped me in such a way that it’s stayed with me ever since. I was drawn to think of it this week because of the great disconnect – intentional, I’m sure – between the tale itself and the title Mr. London gave it. While the story is essentially an 8,000-word punch in the stomach, the title suggests that what follows might well be some syrupy-sweet romance tale. It’s called “Love of Life.”
The story is set around 1905, when London wrote it, in the Arctic wilderness of northern Canada. It takes place in the late summertime. Two prospectors have found gold and are now trying to carry the precious dust out to civilization. As the story opens, one of them badly sprains an ankle crossing an icy stream. He calls out weakly to his partner who had been in the lead, but his colleague never turns around or even answers. No doubt he is aware of the urgency of their situation and will not be burdened with an injured teammate.
London never names the one left behind. He calls him simply “the man” – reminiscent of Adam, whose name in Hebrew means exactly that – no doubt to make him a universal figure. ‘The man’ knows at once that he is in trouble. He has a fearfully long way to go to safety, and now can move only slowly and with great pain. He is wracked with hunger, having eaten nothing for two days, and less than he really needed for long before that. He has no food, and no ammunition for the rifle he carries. He is, quite literally, starving, and will surely starve to death if he is unable to get out ahead of the fast-approaching, ferocious Arctic winter.
After many days – weeks, surely, of struggling on, he becomes aware of a new danger. A wolf has begun stalking him. Wolves normally hunt in packs, but this is a lone predator, clearly sick and apparently abandoned by the others because he – much like the man – has become too weak to keep up. The only question is which of them will succumb first. I’d like to share with you a couple of climactic paragraphs near the end of the tale.
[H]e could hear, slowly drawing near and nearer, the wheezing intake and output of the sick wolf's breath. It drew closer, ever closer, through an infinitude of time, and he did not move. It was at his ear. The harsh dry tongue grated like sandpaper against his cheek. His hands shot out – or at least he willed them to shoot out. The fingers were curved like talons, but they closed on empty air. Swiftness and certitude require strength, and the man had not this strength. The patience of the wolf was terrible. The man's patience was no less terrible. For half a day he lay motionless, fighting off unconsciousness and waiting for the thing that was to feed upon him and upon which he wished to feed. . . .
[H]e slipped slowly from some dream to the feel of the tongue along his hand. He waited. The fangs pressed softly; the pressure increased; the wolf was exerting its last strength in an effort to sink teeth in the food for which it had waited so long. But the man had waited long, and the lacerated hand closed on the jaw. Slowly, while the wolf struggled feebly and the hand clutched feebly, the other hand crept across to a grip. Five minutes later the whole weight of the man's body was on top of the wolf. The hands had not sufficient strength to choke the wolf, but the face of the man was pressed close to the throat of the wolf and the mouth of the man was full of hair. At the end of half an hour the man was aware of a warm trickle in his throat. It was not pleasant. It was like molten lead being forced into his stomach, and it was forced by his will alone. Later the man rolled over on his back and slept. . . (Jack London: Love of Life, ©1905; public domain)
I share that gut-wrenching story because of the point it makes so graphically: There is in all of us a force – a ‘love of life’ – that transcends scruple, intelligence, will, even consciousness. It turns out that that force lies at the very heart of the familiar story of Peter’s denial of his Lord. That force – for good or for evil – lies at the heart of every one of us.
because he was afraid to die with his Master –
a fear in which we all share richly.
What does God want to teach us through this gripping story from the life of Simon, the one Jesus gave the nickname Peter, ‘Rocky’?
Think with me first about Peter’s denials.
Now there were any number of reasons that this was a thoroughly despicable thing for Rocky to have done. In the first place, he was especially close to Jesus. The twelve disciples represent an inner circle among the hundreds of Jesus’ followers. And it’s quite clear from the Gospels that Peter (along with Andrew, James and John) was one of the select few even within that small group of the Twelve. It’s entirely possible that Peter was in fact Jesus’ closest friend on earth, making his denial all the more terrible.
Furthermore, Rocky deserted his Master in the hour of His greatest need. We’re tempted to condemn Peter as a coward in all this. In his defense, we should note that Peter at least had followed Jesus to the house of Caiphas, even if at a distance. As far as we can tell from the Gospel record, most or all of the rest had scattered as soon as Jesus was arrested. Parenthetically, we note as well that this story comes to us very likely because Peter himself told it often in the years following. That is a great testimony not only to the striking honesty of the Bible, but also to God’s ability to change us and use us even in our greatest weakness. (William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. 2, page 345) Still, the whole story makes it abundantly clear that Peter denied his dear friend Jesus right at the point where He needed him the most.
Then of course there were the loud protestations Peter himself had made just hours earlier when Jesus had predicted this denial. Jan spoke of these last week. Peter had said: “Even if everyone else deserts you, I will never desert you” (Matthew 26:33 NLT).
Those words make his denial all the more blameworthy. No doubt they made it that much more painful for Peter himself.
But there is really a more fundamental reason than all that why Peter’s denials are quite literally damnable. It has to do with a real defining principle concerning what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Jesus simply calls us to die. Matthew (10:38; 16:24), Mark (8:34; 10:21) and Luke (9:23) all record Jesus clearly and repeatedly teaching that if we want to be His followers, we must take up crosses of our own.
Now over the centuries we’ve glorified – even sanitized – the cross so much that we may need to remind ourselves that the cross was one of the most efficient (not to mention one of the most brutal) machines for killing people ever devised by man. To take up a cross is to go down a road that will lead, sooner rather than later, to death. And that is precisely the road down which Jesus sends all who would be His disciples.
There is a supreme irony here. It turns out that the very death which Jesus commands us is nothing less than life itself. The Bible often expresses the conflict between right and wrong, good and evil, as a choice, even a battle between life and death. For example, in today’s Old Testament lesson, here’s how Moses sums up the teachings he had laid before Israel: “This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God . . . For the LORD is your life . . .” (Deuteronomy 30:19-20 NIV)
Jesus makes it crystal clear, however: To find that precious life requires us to go through the door of death. In order to be His disciples, you and I have to die to ourselves.
But there’s a problem with all that: We have this unshakable love of life.
Peter had it. That’s clearly why he denied his dear friend. As he stood out there in the courtyard of Caiphas’ house, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where all this was heading. Only hours (perhaps even minutes) before, he had seen the mob drag Jesus away from the Garden of Gethsemane. And just in case Peter couldn’t have connected the dots, there had been at least three times (Matthew 16:21; 17:22-23; 20:17-19) that Jesus had explicitly predicted He was going to die in this way.
Whatever else was true about Rocky, he was clearly no fool. He knew where Jesus was headed in all this. He knew that if he were to be connected at all with Jesus, he would very possibly soon die himself as well.
But Peter had this profound love of life. We all have it. That sense of self-preservation is hard-wired into every one of us. In fact, it’s so tightly woven into the very fabric of who we are that we’re often no more aware of it than the fish is of the water in which it spends all its days. It’s just assumed that our love of life is the foundation of our entire existence, the axiomatic basis on which we make all our decisions.
Jesus, of course, flies square into the face of all that. He willingly lays down His own life in faithful obedience to the will of His Father. And He commands all who would follow Him to do exactly the same.
But Peter is not yet ready to obey that foundational but exceedingly difficult command. So he denies his Lord. And the fact of the matter is that every last one of us would almost certainly have done exactly the same thing.
So what about our denials?
Maybe you’ve heard the one about the new pastor at the little church in the country. He wanted to institute some changes in the church’s liturgy, but the folks in the pews were not too crazy about the idea. For a couple of weeks he’d had been explaining: “I’ll say, ‘The Lord be with you,’ and you’ll reply, ‘And also with you,’ then I’ll say, ‘Let us pray.’
Finally the Sunday came when they were to start the new liturgy. But wouldn’t you know it: at the point in the service when all this was to happen, the preacher had some trouble. The people could see him fumbling with something, but they couldn’t hear him saying anything. Finally there was a loud POP, and they heard him say, “There’s something wrong with this microphone.”
And they replied right on cue, “And also with you.”
(Lowell D. Streiker, An Encyclopedia of Humor, page 9.)
Friends, there’s something wrong with each of us, and it cuts far deeper than mere electronics or any new liturgy. What’s wrong with us is that our profound love of life makes us unwilling to lay down the lives Jesus demands from us.
Oh, we may know the principle well enough. We may be able to rattle off the Scriptures: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20 NKJV)
But there can be a painfully long way between reciting the verse and living the truth!
When we consider all this, we most readily think of those, like Peter himself, who have literally laid down their lives for Christ and His kingdom. There have of course been those untold thousands across the ages – even down to our own day – who have been handed the blazing torch of martyrdom, and have carried it boldly, right up to the end of their earthly course.
The fact of the matter is, however, that in the context in which God has placed us, it’s unlikely that He will call any of us to die in that sense.
But that doesn’t change for one second Christ’s command to us. Nor does it weaken at all the stiff resistance to that command posed by our great love of life. So how would Christ call you and me, here and now, to die to ourselves – and how do we refuse that call? How do we – like Peter – deny our Lord?
He calls you to give sacrificially of your time and money, your abilities and opportunities. But your love of life stands in the way of that call. It leads you to give only your ‘spare’ time, only the money you can afford, only the service that seems beneficial to you – when you give at all. And every time that happens, you refuse to die with your Lord. You deny Him.
He calls me to think more about my wife’s needs than about my wants. But my love of life makes me resist that call. It leads me to excuse all the times I hurt her, telling myself it’s no big deal: lots of other husbands do far worse to their wives. Every time – and there are many, many of them! – every time I give in to that selfishness; every time my life looks like I really do believe that it’s all about me, I refuse to die with Jesus. I deny Him.
He calls us in hundreds of ways across our days and weeks through the gentle tugging of the Holy Spirit at our hearts. But our love of life makes us resist many or most or even all of those calls. It leads us to turn a deaf ear to the impulse to do a small kindness for somebody in pain; to send a check to some worthwhile cause. It leads us to ignore the impulse to speak up, bearing witness for Christ when we encounter one who does not know His saving grace, or even one who would mock our King. And every time we pour cold water like that on the glowing embers of the Spirit’s voice in our hearts, like Peter we refuse to die to ourselves. We deny our Lord.
Jeffrey Ebert tells a compelling story that helps us greatly here. When he was five years old, long before air bags and even before the days of factory-installed seat belts, his family was driving home at night on a two-lane country road. Ebert was sitting on his mother’s lap when another car, driven by a drunk driver, swerved into their lane and hit them head-on.
Ebert had no memory of the collision itself. But he does recall the fear and confusion he felt as he saw himself literally covered with blood from head to toe. Then he learned that the blood wasn’t his at all, but his mother’s. In that split second when the two headlights glared into her eyes, she had instinctively pulled her son closer to her chest and curled her body around his. It was her body that had slammed against the dashboard, her head that shattered the windshield. It would take extensive surgery for Ebert’s mother to recover from the injuries she suffered because she took the impact of the crash so that her precious son wouldn’t have to. (Jeffrey Ebert in Fresh Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching [Baker], from the editors of Leadership.)
You know, the devil is the father of lies (John 8:44), but he is also endlessly resourceful. He can take even the truth, if that’s all he has to work with, and use it against us.
Fact: Because of his misguided love of life, Peter denied the Lord he loved.
Fact: Peter did that on this particular occasion, but you do it every day of your life.
Fact: So do I.
Now the enemy of our souls would love to use those undeniable truths to beat us down, to send us out of here today feeling guilty, worthless, overwhelmed and defeated.
Do you know what Jesus Christ – that great Lover of our souls – wants to do with those very same truths? He wants to use them to drive us down on our faces before Him, our cheeks wet with tears of wondering love, as we rejoice in the equally undeniable truth that in spite of our denials, He loves us! He wants to whisper in our ears so that we might shout from the housetops that, in a love greater even than that of mother for child, He has wrapped His strong arms around us as we move toward a certain collision with the very wrath of God. If we trust in Him, He has borne the full impact of that crash, the deadly weight of that wrath, so that, covered by His precious life’s blood, we can stand.
Jesus wants to send us out into the world, even as He once sent Peter himself, knowing that He has turned despair into hope; fear into unshakable courage, death into life.
Let us pray. Gracious God, we give You thanks and praise for the fact that Your beloved Son’s love for life did not prevent Him from obeying You, from going to the cross for us. Please forgive us, Lord Jesus, when our own love of life does stand in the way of our heeding Your call to take up crosses of our own. Please help us to not be defeated by our failures, the many times we deny You. Instead lead us, we pray, even as long ago You led Your servant Peter, to walk each day in the hope of the empty tomb, in the victory of Your conquering love. We ask it in Your strong name. Amen.