An Early Morning Chill Mark 14:53-72

On the island of Islay, just off the West coast of Scotland
there is a church that is absolutely round.
It’s called, the Round Church.
It was built that way islanders say so that there would be no corners
in which the Devil can hide.

I’m guessing that in the predawn hours there in that rectangular courtyard
just outside Caiaphas house
it must have seemed to Peter that there were plenty of places
for Old Scratch to find cover.
The evil of that place must have been palpable
as Peter sat within earshot of the open windows
listening to the outrageous accusations and false testimonies
spewed out by the so-called holiest men of Jerusalem.
As he hunched over the fire, keeping to the shadows
he could keep away the chill of the early morning mist
but nothing could take away the chill of fear and confusion he felt inside.

It had all turned so quickly.
Just two days earlier they had been on top of the world!
There on the Mount of Olives Jesus had sent for a donkey!
He never rode a donkey.
He hadn’t ridden a donkey in the three years Peter had known him!
It was Nathaniel, their biblical scholar, who realized it first.
He quoted the prophet Zechariah,
"Behold, your king shall come to you, humble and riding on a donkey."

So Jesus sent for a donkey and then, with the twelve of them following behind.
Jesus rode that donkey down the Mount of Olives
as pilgrims on their way into Jerusalem for the Passover feast caught the spirit.
Whether it was out of playfulness or true devotion Peter couldn’t tell, but
those along the way began to spread their cloaks and tree branches in front of Jesus
and they took up the chant of "Hosanna"
and "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord."

Everything was so upbeat and positive until they stopped on the hillside
and Jesus’ mood suddenly darkened.
He climbed off the donkey and sat on a rock looking directly across the valley
at the holy temple.
He buried his face in his hands and his shoulders began to shake
and they noticed he was crying - sobbing in great heaving sobs.
Finally, he pulled himself together and he said out loud though to no one in particular
"If you had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!"

He sent Philip to take the donkey back to it’s owner
and Jesus and the others traveled on across the Kidron valley to the Temple mount.
They paid their half-shekel temple tax, took a ritual bath in the public baths
and then climbed the high steps, through the Hulda gate
and emerged from the tunnel in the court of the Gentiles.
That’s where Jesus lost it.
The merchants who sold doves for sacrifice
and the money changers who exchanged Jewish shekels for the Roman coins
the pilgrims brought with them
usually set up shop outside the temple mount.
But during Passover they had to add extra tables to take care of the crowds
so they set them up in the Court of the Gentiles.
It was a convenient spot, close to the temple yet under the portico out of the weather.
But for Jesus it must have seemed like the last straw,
an encroachment of the profane marketplace on the temple’s holy space.
He went nuts, turning over tables, kicking open cages.
He even fashioned a whip of sorts and started whipping the merchants,
driving them away.
Nobody got hurt, but you can bet they were plenty sore.
And you can bet word got back to Caiaphas, the high priest,
about the crazy county Rabbi and his band of Galilean hicks.
It wouldn’t have been so bad except that Jesus then went on to tell all within earshot
that the temple was going to be destroyed!
That not one stone would be left on top of another.
And in three days it would be built again, though not with human hands.

If there was one thing Jews in Jerusalem could not abide
it was a threat of any kind against the temple.
It was like crying "Fire" in a crowded theater or saying "Bomb" on an airplane.
The temple was a touchy subject in the extreme
because twice in Jesus’ lifetime under Roman occupation
the temple had been defiled.

The first time, just about the time Jesus was born,
King Herod the Great had erected an imperial eagle over the temple gate.
The eagle was a symbol of Rome and of the Roman god Jupiter
and Herod was trying to curry Rome’s favor.
But to the Jews it was a flagrant desecration of the temple space
and several Jewish students climbed up and chopped the eagle down.
Herod was enraged and rose up off of his deathbed to sentence the students
and their teachers to death.
Ensuing riots left 5000 Jews dead.

Thirty years later the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate,
in an impulse of patriotic devotion erected huge banners bearing Ceasar’s likeness
over the Roman garrison.
The problem was that the Roman garrison was just outside the temple mount
and the huge banners appeared to be hanging over the temple.

A crowd of Jews marched 50 miles to Cesarea, Pilate’s home base,
and demonstrated for five days outside his house.
Finally, Pilate told the Jews to go into the amphitheater
and he would answer their complaint.
Instead, Roman soldiers rushed in and surrounded the Jews.
Pilate must have thought they would try to fight their way out,
but instead they just fell to their knees, bared their necks,
and begged to be killed instead of allow their temple to be defiled.

So, Jesus came into town at the height of the Passover festival
when the population of 100,000 typical inhabitants more than tripled,
he attacked the heart of the temple economic system,
and then he spoke of the temple itself being destroyed.
Nobody, not Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest, not Pilate, the Roman governor
could tolerate any such talk, especially during the intense, raucous Passover festival.
One ill-founded rumor, one wild accusation and the uneasy truce they enjoyed
could explode in their faces ending in a bloodbath nobody wanted.

Working off a tip from Judas, Caiaphas sent a small armed force
to pick Jesus up at Gethsemane, the old olive press at the foot of the Mt. of Olives.
They marched Jesus across the Kidron valley and up the winding path
to Caiaphas’ residence, a rambling stone house within site of the temple.
There they stood Jesus before a quickly assembled group of Jewish elite:
priests, elders and scribes.

In Mark’s account this group doesn’t seem to be an official judicial body,
just some of the movers and shakers
who had a vested interest in keeping the peace with Rome.
Besides, they were meeting at night which would have been illegal
had they been an official body.
Still, they called witnesses and encouraged anybody with any dirt on Jesus
to come forward and tesitfy.
Several people said they had heard Jesus threaten
to tear down the temple made with hands
and replace it in three days with a temple not made with hands.
But even Caiaphas couldn’t bring himself to take that crazy talk seriously.
So he baited Jesus, "Are you the Messiah, son of the Blessed One?"
Jesus, mindful of the trap, answered Caiaphas’s question with a question,
"Am I?"
Then he followed up with a cryptic quote from the book of Daniel
"You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power,
and coming with the clouds of heaven."
It wasn’t a clear cut response but Caiaphas and his buddies were through listening.
They charged Jesus with blasphemy and lowered him into a dry cistern
under Caiaphas’ house to stay until they could take him to Pilate.

In the meantime, Peter is outside in the courtyard, warming himself, listening.
He must have felt utterly powerless.
Just a few hours earlier he had promised Jesus he would never desert him,
and now there he was, lying low, just listening, frozen in place.
Then one of Caiaphas’s maids, outside on a cigarette break,
takes a long drag and looks at him closely,
"Hey, I seen you before." She says.
"You’re one of them fellows with that man from Nazareth, ain’tcha?"
Panicky Peter says, "I don’t know what you’re talking about."
Hearing his accent she moves in closer,
"Yeah, I’d know that accent anywhere. You’re from Galilee alright."
Then a security guard who’d been half asleep chimes in,
"Hey, that’s right, my girlfriend’s from Galilee and you sound just like her brother."

Caught in a lie, caught in grief, caught in fear, Peter reacts like any of us would
whose mind and body have kicked into pure survival mode.
He blurts out, "Look, I don’t know him, OK?
I swear on Jacob’s ladder, I DO NOT KNOW HIM."

We have looked back on Peter and pitied him for this moment of weakness.
Maybe you, like I, have given thanks that we’ve never faced this kind of moment,
never been forced to decide between imprisonment or betrayal.
But I wonder if maybe in the long run it’s not Peter who should pity us instead.
I say that, because, as heart wrenching as that moment must have been for him,
it was at least a moment of clarity.
As that last denial left his lips and the rooster crowed that second time
there was for Peter no pretense left to hide behind,
not positive spin to put on the situation to hide who he really was.

And who was he?
A vulnerable, exposed, human being who had been reminded in no uncertain terms that he is incapable of saving himself.
All his posturing, all his bravado, all his self-deception had fallen away
and he was laid bare.
But the truth is, though he couldn’t see it at the time,
Peter, standing there outside in the morning chill,
was one step ahead of Caiaphas standing inside in all his priestly robes.

Because Jesus was going to the cross
not as some kind of grotesque sacrifice to an angry God
but to fulfill what he had begun at his birth.
His full identification with all humanity,
not with the humanity with all the disguises that we put on every day,
but with humanity au natural - that, from the beginning, is God’s good creation

Peter didn’t know it, but as he began a new day in that courtyard,
humbled and exposed he was being made new.
It was as Paul wrote twenty years later,
"If anyone is in Christ that person is a new creation.
The old has passed away, behold the new has come."