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Tuesday In Holy Week
O God, by the passion of thy blessed Son didst make an instrument of shameful death to be unto us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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Tuesday In Holy Week
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A Sermon by
The Rev. Canon Carl Turner
✛
A Dazzling Darkness
Henry Vaughan said “There is in God, some say, a deep, but dazzling darkness.” (Poem, ‘The Night’)
I am always moved by that poignant passage towards the end of Luke’s Gospel when, after the arrest of Jesus, Peter stands in the courtyard of the High Priest warming himself by the fire. After twice denying him, another passer-by accuses him and Peter denies Jesus a third time. Luke writes: “At that moment, while he was still speaking, the cock crowed. The Lord turned and looked at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him, “Before the cock crows today, you will deny me three times.” And he went out and wept bitterly.”(Luke 22:60-62)
I wonder what went through Jesus’ mind as he turned and saw Peter standing there – so near and yet so far from him. In turn, the look that Jesus gives Peter crushes him and he flees the scene weeping bitterly.
Significantly, Peter is not mentioned again by name in the Passion narratives and only appears in the Gospels after the Resurrection. Apart from the mention of the Beloved Disciple in John’s Gospel, the disciples are remembered for their absence from the place of execution and the burial.
‘Jesus turned and looked at Peter’. There were no words – just a look in the darkness and with Peter hiding in the shadows. Did this now bring new and dreadful meaning to the words that Jesus had spoken to his disciples only a few hours before “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going.” (John 12:35). So Peter fled; if his eyesight had not been blurred by the tears then the darkness would have overwhelmed him; but either way, he was running in the darkness away from the one who had given him light.
This inner darkness which overwhelmed Peter is something many of us face in our lives. We, too, find ourselves at the crossroads of faith and disbelief – of hope and despair. Often this comes during times of huge personal trauma or testing and particularly when we watch the ones we love and care for cry out in agony or suffering. All of us have stories to tell but it is in the relationship of those stories to how we live the rest of our lives where the greatest presence of God can be felt. By integrating these dark and fearful episodes into our journeys of life we are able to be more whole, more settled, more fully human. Of course, we can choose to run like Peter and hide those moments of desolation in equally dark and secret places – and worse, we might be the kind of person who, after denying or burying such dark thoughts and memories finds time, alone, to bring them out in the safety of our personal space and stare at them with disbelief because they are as fresh and painful as the first time we met them…so they are buried again and become a dark place deep in our souls.
It is easy to think that if only we had more faith that all would be well. But even the saints have found their dark places to be overwhelming. St Thérèse of Lisieux, who died in her 20’s of Tuberculosis, wrote about such inner darkness and the temptation to succumb to it as un-redeemable:
“When, weary of being enveloped by nothing but darkness, I try to comfort and encourage myself with the thoughts of the eternal life to come, it only makes matters worse. The very darkness seems to echo the voices of those who do not believe, and mocks at me: “You dream of light and of a fragrant land; you dream that the creator of this loveliness will be your own for all eternity; you dream of escaping one day from these mists in which you languish! Dream on, welcome death; it will not bring you what you hope; it will bring an even darker night, the night of nothingness!”(Story of a soul, Chapter IX)
St Thérèse bravely puts into words what many of us dare not utter; for me, they paint a picture of the anguish of Peter on the night of the Lord’s betrayal and arrest and that look that pierced him to the quick.
You see, Peter had to enter into this darkness in order for him to discover the light that was hidden there. For the darkness of God is brighter than the cheap brightness of human fantasy that puts the self first above all others.
Was this a turning point for Peter? From the depths of his despair comes the realisation that he is all so human and fragile. What thoughts went through Jesus’ mind as he looked at him in the courtyard by the charcoal fire? Only a few days later, by another charcoal fire, Jesus would look intently at Peter again and ask his friend, “Do you love me?” Peter, looking intently at Jesus, his Risen Lord, would also see the marks of the nails and the spear – the wounds of love still fresh. Peter would see how fragile Jesus had made himself and begin at last to understand the emptying of God into his creation; finding the glory of God in the eternal freshness of the wounds of love.
Some words of the late Cardinal Basil Hume:
“As he hung on the Cross a new alliance was made between God and man. The Bridge-Builder was indeed bridging the gulf which separates man from God. He was making retribution for the enormity of the insult which sin is. He was; as Priest, offering himself as Victim in a new sacrifice which would seal in his blood the new Covenant with God. A new people of God was born. Peter wept and was saved. Judas? … Poor Judas” (Searching for God, Chapter 6, n.8)
