The Palm Sunday lessons record one of the most astounding and heartrending about-faces
anywhere in historical literature. Of course, it used to be that the Triumphal Entry reading was read
as the main text on Palm Sunday, and the Passion reading was saved for Good Friday. Sadly,
somewhere along the line it was decided that not enough people were attending Good Friday
services any more, so they compressed both accounts into the Palm Sunday readings. And now we
have a juxtaposition that’s made all the more dramatic by their being read so close together. For it
shows the fickle loyalties of human beings.
In our Liturgy of the Palms we have masses of people lining up to wave palm branches to welcome
this new hope, this one who might just be the Messiah who’ll deliver the Jews from the iron talons of
Rome. They spread their cloaks and palm branches on the road and shout themselves hoarse,
crying: “Hosanna! Save us now! Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord!” And then, a
mere five days later, many of the same people from this crowd would be shouting, “Crucify him!”
They were bitter and angry. Their misguided hopes had been dashed. This one who would deliver
them didn’t deliver what they’d expected. The Romans were still in charge, and their latest object of
hope was seized and savagely humiliated before their very eyes. They were expecting a man of
war, so they rejected the Prince of Peace. And they concluded that He had been just one more
false Messiah. One more pretender to the throne of David, who’d been nabbed by the Jewish
authorities and charged by the Romans with treason. Just as Jesus was to be killed outside His
beloved haven of Jerusalem, so they cast him, a fallen hero, from the haven of their hearts.
This account of people’s courtship with and rejection of Jesus is well known. But this morning I’d like
to bring this down to a little more personal level. I want to do this by looking at these events through
the eyes of one who was there, and in all likelihood was the chief reporter of this narrative to the
writer of St. Mark’s Gospel. His name was Peter.
I’ve said before that I have a special place in my heart for St. Peter. He was one who never
hesitated to speak his mind, often before his mind was fully engaged. Those of you who’ve known
me for any length of time will quickly realize that I can relate to this. He was a study in
contradictions: courage and fear, clarity and confusion, fierce loyalty and frightened equivocation.
Again, I can relate. By faith he walked on water, then he looked down, doubted and sank into the
waves before Jesus rescued him. He was the first to acknowledge that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son
of the living God.” Yet as we saw a few weeks ago, moments later he tried to interfere with Jesus to
prevent him from going to be crucified in Jerusalem. And we’ve just heard how he responded when
people accused him of associating him with the condemned Jesus.
Peter was probably the prime contributor of information for Mark’s Gospel. And his painful self-
disclosure is so candid that it almost has the air of a confession. First, he’s an eyewitness to the
glory of the triumphal entry. He sees the throngs of hopeful people eager to make Jesus king. The
degree of detail in Mark’s account makes you strongly suspect that Peter was one of the two
disciples sent by Jesus to retrieve the colt so He could ride into Jerusalem on its back. If so, again
here we have Peter obeying Jesus’ unusual command without question.
But if what Peter sees at the triumphal entry is unusual, it pales in comparison to the shocking
events of the next five days. For he witnesses Jesus directly confronting the hypocrisy and
corruption of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. He hears Jesus publicly telling parables that are
unmistakable arrows fired at their corrupt hearts. I can imagine Peter’s fiery blood being ignited as
He witnesses Jesus overturning the moneychangers’ tables and crying out against the desecration
of God’s holy temple. Perhaps he pumps his fist in the air and says, “Yes!!” and turns over a table
or two himself.
Peter hears, and is mystified as Jesus tells a brief parable predicting His own death and
resurrection—the one about the destroyed temple being rebuilt in three days. He doesn’t yet see
that in so doing Jesus proclaims Himself to be the new Israel—the faithful Israel that we become a
part of by joining His body. Then on Thursday Peter receives with the other disciples the sacrament
of Jesus’ body and blood—the bread and wine of Holy Communion, shortly after which Jesus is
betrayed by Judas Iscariot.
It’s at the conclusion of this dizzying five days that we find ourselves in St. Mark’s Passion Gospel.
For Thursday evening, after the Lord’s Supper, Jesus asks Peter, James, and John to accompany
Him to the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus probably retreated to this garden on the Mount of Olives
often whenever He was in Jerusalem. It was a place for Him to pray, to talk with His heavenly
Father. And this night He also craves human companionship from His friends.
The darkness is rising. The deep night of spiritual darkness is beginning even now to envelop Jesus
as He contemplates the fate that awaits him the next day. Those of you who saw The Passion of the
Christ were able to experience a little of the horror and stark loneliness that pressed down upon
Jesus’ spirit as Satan concentrated his forces on what he expected would be Jesus’ final demise. So
Jesus asks the three to stay awake near where He prays. He pours out His heart to the Father.
“Abba, Father, Dad, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want,
but what you want.”
In a nightmarish haze of oppression, he returns to Peter, James and John. But the three are
exhausted. They’ve fallen asleep. It could be that in some ineffable way they, too, were pressed
under the dark weight of that evening, and all they could do in response was to drift into fitful sleep.
And it’s Simon Peter to whom Jesus speaks: “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep awake
one hour? Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit is indeed
willing, but the flesh is weak.”
How painful it is to see ourselves in Peter at that moment. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
Have you ever said that to yourself? When we try to serve the Lord by being who He wants us to
be, and find ourselves failing. Giving in to the darkness that surrounds us. When we say those
unkind words we swore we would never again say. When we fall back into habitual sin, consciously
choosing to ignore His offer to be with us and offer us a way out of temptation. When we fail to keep
our promise to spend time with our loving Savior in prayer and worship. The spirit is willing, but the
flesh is weak.
Jesus returns to His anguished prayer and again comes back to his friends, who are asleep. But
now, the time has come. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Peter watches in
frantic horror as, in a blur of action Jesus is captured and bound. John’s Gospel tells us that it’s
Peter who draws the sword and cuts off the right ear of the high priest’s servant. But Peter’s fierce
loyalty soon wavers. At a distance he follows the hellish procession into the courtyard of the high
priest. The inquisition of Jesus proceeds. “Yes,” he says, “I am the Messiah; and you will see the
Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming with the clouds of heaven.” The
meeting erupts in a crescendo of rage and they begin to mock Him and spit on Him and pummel
Him.
Meanwhile, Peter’s in the dark courtyard, reeling, sick at heart, and terrified. A woman recognizes
him by the fire. “You were with Jesus, the man from Nazareth.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Somewhere a rooster crows. Peter hurries out to the
forecourt. The servant-girl sees him again. “This man is one of them.” From the shadows Peter
tries to repress a hunted look and replies, “I am not!” Another bystander says, “Hey, you have a
Galilean accent. You’ve got to be one of them!”
Peter curses emphatically. He says “I don’t know this man you’re talking about.” And the rooster
crows again. Then Peter remembers what Jesus had said to him, “Before the rooster crows twice,
you will deny me three times.” The dark whirlwind of despair and shame overwhelms him. He sits
down and weeps bitterly. In none of the four Gospels do we hear of Peter again until after the
Sabbath day. While Jesus is being tried, interrogated, beaten, flogged, marched through the narrow
streets of Jerusalem, and finally, left to die alone on a cross in the merciless Judean sun, Peter is
nowhere to be seen.
A single scene I have found to be worth a thousand words is from the miniseries Jesus of Nazareth.
In it the camera focuses on a steady rain falling outside a door of the room where, just hours before,
Jesus and His disciples had shared the Lord’s Supper. And you hear moaning and sobbing. Finally
you see the tortured face of Peter. He’s rocking back and forth on his knees, crying out in utter
desolation, “My God, O my god.” And I think this pretty well says it all. The one who was so
passionately loyal that he attacked the High Priest’s servant, has denied his Lord and his friend
three times, and Jesus now lies dead.
And here am I again. Having pledged my unflagging faithfulness to the One who loved me and tried
to teach me, my failings rise up and assail me with shame. Under the scorn of those who despise
Jesus and all He represents, at times I’ve fled to the shadows. My sins and my weakness are what
induced God to provide the Cross as the solution. We sing the hymn Ah, Holy Jesus. Verse two
laments, “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee? Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone
thee. ‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee: I crucified thee.” I don’t know about you, but when I
sing that I usually feel an ache in my heart and have a catch in my throat.
But my friends, it’s not over yet. I think most of you know that the story doesn’t end here. But just in
case, I’m going to give you a little preview of the rest of the story, as we’ll hear it this coming
Saturday at the Easter Vigil. Peter doesn’t live out his life in shattered hope. Despite his hour of
failure, something happens that utterly and permanently transforms him into a man of confidence
and joy. And it’s this same “something” that removes the ache from my own heart and replaces the
lump of shame in my throat with one of undying gratitude.
Please come this Saturday evening, and hear what it was that turned Peter from a conflicted,
impulsive man controlled by his own fears, to one of the great figures of history. For that same thing
is offered to each one of us here and now. I’ve been transformed by it. I pray the same for you.
The moment of triumph approaches! Please don’t miss it!
anywhere in historical literature. Of course, it used to be that the Triumphal Entry reading was read
as the main text on Palm Sunday, and the Passion reading was saved for Good Friday. Sadly,
somewhere along the line it was decided that not enough people were attending Good Friday
services any more, so they compressed both accounts into the Palm Sunday readings. And now we
have a juxtaposition that’s made all the more dramatic by their being read so close together. For it
shows the fickle loyalties of human beings.
In our Liturgy of the Palms we have masses of people lining up to wave palm branches to welcome
this new hope, this one who might just be the Messiah who’ll deliver the Jews from the iron talons of
Rome. They spread their cloaks and palm branches on the road and shout themselves hoarse,
crying: “Hosanna! Save us now! Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord!” And then, a
mere five days later, many of the same people from this crowd would be shouting, “Crucify him!”
They were bitter and angry. Their misguided hopes had been dashed. This one who would deliver
them didn’t deliver what they’d expected. The Romans were still in charge, and their latest object of
hope was seized and savagely humiliated before their very eyes. They were expecting a man of
war, so they rejected the Prince of Peace. And they concluded that He had been just one more
false Messiah. One more pretender to the throne of David, who’d been nabbed by the Jewish
authorities and charged by the Romans with treason. Just as Jesus was to be killed outside His
beloved haven of Jerusalem, so they cast him, a fallen hero, from the haven of their hearts.
This account of people’s courtship with and rejection of Jesus is well known. But this morning I’d like
to bring this down to a little more personal level. I want to do this by looking at these events through
the eyes of one who was there, and in all likelihood was the chief reporter of this narrative to the
writer of St. Mark’s Gospel. His name was Peter.
I’ve said before that I have a special place in my heart for St. Peter. He was one who never
hesitated to speak his mind, often before his mind was fully engaged. Those of you who’ve known
me for any length of time will quickly realize that I can relate to this. He was a study in
contradictions: courage and fear, clarity and confusion, fierce loyalty and frightened equivocation.
Again, I can relate. By faith he walked on water, then he looked down, doubted and sank into the
waves before Jesus rescued him. He was the first to acknowledge that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son
of the living God.” Yet as we saw a few weeks ago, moments later he tried to interfere with Jesus to
prevent him from going to be crucified in Jerusalem. And we’ve just heard how he responded when
people accused him of associating him with the condemned Jesus.
Peter was probably the prime contributor of information for Mark’s Gospel. And his painful self-
disclosure is so candid that it almost has the air of a confession. First, he’s an eyewitness to the
glory of the triumphal entry. He sees the throngs of hopeful people eager to make Jesus king. The
degree of detail in Mark’s account makes you strongly suspect that Peter was one of the two
disciples sent by Jesus to retrieve the colt so He could ride into Jerusalem on its back. If so, again
here we have Peter obeying Jesus’ unusual command without question.
But if what Peter sees at the triumphal entry is unusual, it pales in comparison to the shocking
events of the next five days. For he witnesses Jesus directly confronting the hypocrisy and
corruption of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. He hears Jesus publicly telling parables that are
unmistakable arrows fired at their corrupt hearts. I can imagine Peter’s fiery blood being ignited as
He witnesses Jesus overturning the moneychangers’ tables and crying out against the desecration
of God’s holy temple. Perhaps he pumps his fist in the air and says, “Yes!!” and turns over a table
or two himself.
Peter hears, and is mystified as Jesus tells a brief parable predicting His own death and
resurrection—the one about the destroyed temple being rebuilt in three days. He doesn’t yet see
that in so doing Jesus proclaims Himself to be the new Israel—the faithful Israel that we become a
part of by joining His body. Then on Thursday Peter receives with the other disciples the sacrament
of Jesus’ body and blood—the bread and wine of Holy Communion, shortly after which Jesus is
betrayed by Judas Iscariot.
It’s at the conclusion of this dizzying five days that we find ourselves in St. Mark’s Passion Gospel.
For Thursday evening, after the Lord’s Supper, Jesus asks Peter, James, and John to accompany
Him to the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus probably retreated to this garden on the Mount of Olives
often whenever He was in Jerusalem. It was a place for Him to pray, to talk with His heavenly
Father. And this night He also craves human companionship from His friends.
The darkness is rising. The deep night of spiritual darkness is beginning even now to envelop Jesus
as He contemplates the fate that awaits him the next day. Those of you who saw The Passion of the
Christ were able to experience a little of the horror and stark loneliness that pressed down upon
Jesus’ spirit as Satan concentrated his forces on what he expected would be Jesus’ final demise. So
Jesus asks the three to stay awake near where He prays. He pours out His heart to the Father.
“Abba, Father, Dad, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want,
but what you want.”
In a nightmarish haze of oppression, he returns to Peter, James and John. But the three are
exhausted. They’ve fallen asleep. It could be that in some ineffable way they, too, were pressed
under the dark weight of that evening, and all they could do in response was to drift into fitful sleep.
And it’s Simon Peter to whom Jesus speaks: “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep awake
one hour? Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit is indeed
willing, but the flesh is weak.”
How painful it is to see ourselves in Peter at that moment. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
Have you ever said that to yourself? When we try to serve the Lord by being who He wants us to
be, and find ourselves failing. Giving in to the darkness that surrounds us. When we say those
unkind words we swore we would never again say. When we fall back into habitual sin, consciously
choosing to ignore His offer to be with us and offer us a way out of temptation. When we fail to keep
our promise to spend time with our loving Savior in prayer and worship. The spirit is willing, but the
flesh is weak.
Jesus returns to His anguished prayer and again comes back to his friends, who are asleep. But
now, the time has come. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Peter watches in
frantic horror as, in a blur of action Jesus is captured and bound. John’s Gospel tells us that it’s
Peter who draws the sword and cuts off the right ear of the high priest’s servant. But Peter’s fierce
loyalty soon wavers. At a distance he follows the hellish procession into the courtyard of the high
priest. The inquisition of Jesus proceeds. “Yes,” he says, “I am the Messiah; and you will see the
Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming with the clouds of heaven.” The
meeting erupts in a crescendo of rage and they begin to mock Him and spit on Him and pummel
Him.
Meanwhile, Peter’s in the dark courtyard, reeling, sick at heart, and terrified. A woman recognizes
him by the fire. “You were with Jesus, the man from Nazareth.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Somewhere a rooster crows. Peter hurries out to the
forecourt. The servant-girl sees him again. “This man is one of them.” From the shadows Peter
tries to repress a hunted look and replies, “I am not!” Another bystander says, “Hey, you have a
Galilean accent. You’ve got to be one of them!”
Peter curses emphatically. He says “I don’t know this man you’re talking about.” And the rooster
crows again. Then Peter remembers what Jesus had said to him, “Before the rooster crows twice,
you will deny me three times.” The dark whirlwind of despair and shame overwhelms him. He sits
down and weeps bitterly. In none of the four Gospels do we hear of Peter again until after the
Sabbath day. While Jesus is being tried, interrogated, beaten, flogged, marched through the narrow
streets of Jerusalem, and finally, left to die alone on a cross in the merciless Judean sun, Peter is
nowhere to be seen.
A single scene I have found to be worth a thousand words is from the miniseries Jesus of Nazareth.
In it the camera focuses on a steady rain falling outside a door of the room where, just hours before,
Jesus and His disciples had shared the Lord’s Supper. And you hear moaning and sobbing. Finally
you see the tortured face of Peter. He’s rocking back and forth on his knees, crying out in utter
desolation, “My God, O my god.” And I think this pretty well says it all. The one who was so
passionately loyal that he attacked the High Priest’s servant, has denied his Lord and his friend
three times, and Jesus now lies dead.
And here am I again. Having pledged my unflagging faithfulness to the One who loved me and tried
to teach me, my failings rise up and assail me with shame. Under the scorn of those who despise
Jesus and all He represents, at times I’ve fled to the shadows. My sins and my weakness are what
induced God to provide the Cross as the solution. We sing the hymn Ah, Holy Jesus. Verse two
laments, “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee? Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone
thee. ‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee: I crucified thee.” I don’t know about you, but when I
sing that I usually feel an ache in my heart and have a catch in my throat.
But my friends, it’s not over yet. I think most of you know that the story doesn’t end here. But just in
case, I’m going to give you a little preview of the rest of the story, as we’ll hear it this coming
Saturday at the Easter Vigil. Peter doesn’t live out his life in shattered hope. Despite his hour of
failure, something happens that utterly and permanently transforms him into a man of confidence
and joy. And it’s this same “something” that removes the ache from my own heart and replaces the
lump of shame in my throat with one of undying gratitude.
Please come this Saturday evening, and hear what it was that turned Peter from a conflicted,
impulsive man controlled by his own fears, to one of the great figures of history. For that same thing
is offered to each one of us here and now. I’ve been transformed by it. I pray the same for you.
The moment of triumph approaches! Please don’t miss it!
Through Peter's Eyes (Part 1)
Palm Sunday, 2009
Palm Sunday, 2009
April 5, 2009
Fr. Dan Tuton
Fr. Dan Tuton
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