You are His, You are His, You are His
A sermon brought forth from John 18:1-27 preached on March 27, 2022
No one knew what to do with Jesus. Neither Caiaphas, the high priest, nor Herod, nor Pilate. Take a look at the map below.
There are lines and arrows everywhere, in every direction. Trace them with your finger. On the night Jesus was betrayed, arrested, and tried, no one knew what to do with Him. It may be that Judas betrayed Jesus because he misunderstood who He was. Then back and forth the Roman soldiers dragged Jesus from the Garden of Gethsemane from one official to another—to Caiaphas’s house, then He was taken to the Antonia Fortress where He stood before Pontius Pilate. But Pilate had no idea what to make of Jesus, so he sent Him to Herod who sent Jesus back to Pilate. Jesus was dragged six ways from Sunday.
Did you know that the word Gethsamane means hard-pressed? It’s an olive grove. There were many who were hard-pressed that night. Jesus was just one of them.
It’s at Jesus’s second trip to Pilate at the Antonia Fortress that the lines stop. Fed up with the wavering and indecision of Herod and the High Priest, all the hedging of bets that night, Pilate threw down a declaration: this so-called King of the Jews was to be crucified. But it wasn’t just Judas and the important people of the day who had no clue what to do with Jesus that night. Peter—one of Jesus’s very own—didn’t know what to do with Jesus, either. Peter hid in plain sight in the courtyard of the high priest hoping he would blend in with the high priest servants and officials and whoever else huddled around a fire for warmth that evening.
Ah, do not warm yourselves at the world’s fires!
Do we know what to do with Jesus?
We can look at passages like this one and everything else that happens in that very first Holy Week and ask ourselves what all went wrong. How did it all go downhill so fast? We can look at what occurs that first Maundy Thursday evening as a string of choices and reactions that others take in response to Jesus’s actions. It’s very easy to look at all of it and see chaos, to conclude that Jesus ends up on a cross due to a series of unfortunate and altogether evil events. As far as the first three gospels tell it, that’s a possible interpretation. But not the fourth gospel. In John’s account, from the very beginning to the very end, Jesus is in control.
From the start, Jesus knows how it all will end, and everything that happens in between that first Christmas and that first Easter and beyond was made to happen just the way it did. Jesus knew what was in Judas’s and Peter’s hearts, and everyone else’s for that matter. He put them together.
John’s portrait is of a Jesus who is in charge, sovereign. He knows what’s coming, and He’s not surprised by any of it. In fact, He’s Lord over all of it. We do not find in John’s gospel a garden scene where Jesus sweats blood as He prays to God for a way out. In this fourth gospel, Jesus willingly and boldly accepts it all—without hesitation and without a bit of uncertainty, He gives up His life for His people.
Then come the questions. While Caiaphas and his father-in-law, Annas, interrogate Jesus, an unnamed woman interrogates Peter. Two interrogations happening at once; two spotlights: one pointed into the eyes of this Son of God, the other at those of His most outspoken disciple. Jesus, with His hands and feet bound, responds to his interrogators with the truth. The same cannot be said of Peter.
“Who are you?” the Roman soldiers coming to arrest Jesus ask Him. Then dragged in front of the court officials, Jesus answers the same question, though it’s asked in different ways. Jesus’s answer is the same: “I Am He”. Three times they ask Him. Jesus responds each time with the truth:
“I Am He. I Am He. I Am He.”
In the same moment that Jesus is being questioned in the High Priest’s court, Peter is just outside in the High Priest’s courtyard warming himself by a charcoal fire. A woman recognizes Him as one of Jesus’s disciples. “Aren’t you His?” She asks. “No, I’m not,” Peter replies.
“I am not. I am not. I am not.”
He answers three times. Jesus’s three Yeses and Peter’s three Nos are interwoven. Every time Jesus affirms His Christ identity, Peter echoes it by denying his Christ identity. This is courage and cowardice in dialogue with each other. I hope you can feel the tension of it all—the push and pull of Jesus’s threefold affirmation and Peter’s threefold denial. They’re happening all at once—one echoing the other. Jesus’s boldness and Peter’s cowardice are in conversation.
In his truth-telling, Jesus shows up and thus puts the goodness of God on display for all to see. In Peter’s denials, on the other hand, he tries to hide the same thing. “Put it away! Cover it up! Whatever you do, don’t affirm yourself as one of His!”
When the interrogation torches and lanterns point in our direction, what will we have to say? How will we react? Will we proclaim or cave? Declare with a Yes, or cave with a No? Jesus doesn’t have His identity in us; we are to find ours in His.
We are His. We are His. We are His.
Increasingly, people are defining themselves by what they are not. We have become those who seek our significance not by what we are for or what we believe, but by what or who we’re opposed to. We count ourselves good because someone else is bad, a bit like the Pharisee who prays outside the synagogue and aloud for everyone around him to hear,
“God, I thank You that I am not like other people—like this tax collector beside me?”
Bible scholar and teacher, Walter Brueggemann, suggests that, in so doing, we’re on the way to talking ourselves out of our humanity. God has more for us. There is no value in defining ourselves by what we are against. It only leads to spiritual bankruptcy.
In a moment huddled around that courtyard fire, Peter found that out.
“I am not. I am not. I am not.”
Then a rooster crowed.
Lent confronts us with all of this. We too live in this ever-unfolding story that God is still telling, and we tell it with both our words and our lives. Jesus is still saying “Yes, I Am He,” and His greatest joy is for us to do the same, to boldly declare with both voice and action, “Yes, I am His.”
There have been, and there will be times when we’re bold in doing so. There have been, and there will be times when we will fail to do so. This is what we do. Our faith wavers, and so does our courage. That sounds human to me.
Thanks be to God that Jesus’s Yes is louder than our No. Thanks be to God for Christ’s unwavering and unending courage and grace—especially in all those moments in our lives when we lack both. Thanks be to God for His unwavering and tireless pursuit of us even when we retreat into the darkness of our own lies. And in the end, it is God’s promise that each one of the world’s Nos will be turned into Yeses. God will do this because from the very beginning, before you even had a voice to speak up with, God declared that “You are His, You are His, You are His!”
All praise to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful! Alleluia! Amen.