God’s Word for You

Mark 14:66-71 Peter’s denial

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, March 3, 2024

66 And as Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the servant girls of the high priest went by. 67 She considered Peter as she saw him warming himself, and she said, “You also were with the Nazarene, Jesus.” 68 But he denied it, saying, “I don’t know or understand what you mean.” He went out into the gateway, and a rooster crowed.  69 The servant girl noticed him again him and began to say to the bystanders, “This man is one of them.” 70 But again he denied it. And after a little while the bystanders again said to Peter, “You really are one of them, for you are a Galilean.” 71 But he began to curse himself and to swear, “I do not know this man you’re talking about.”

Peter was confronted by a variety of people in the courtyard of the palace. Matthew and Mark focus on this serving-girl, one of the slaves of Caiaphas. There is also here a whole group of bystanders who recognize Peter as a Galilean. In John’s account, one of Peter’s accusers is a man who was related to the servant whose ear Peter had cut off (John 18:26). In Luke’s account, the serving-girl confronts Peter, and so do two men, both of whom Peter addresses as “man” (anthrope, Luke 22:58 and 22:60). One of them could have been the relative of the man Peter attacked, the one John mentions. That’s at least three or four separate individuals and the group of bystanders. So Peter could find hardly a moment’s rest in this group. But why was he there? Did pride draw him? It was probably his promise not to deny Jesus. He had said, “Even if all fall away, I will not” (Mark 14:29).

It was a problem that Peter was there at all. He was putting himself into danger. Did he think that the guards who were there wouldn’t recognize him? “He apparently doesn’t expect to be recognized,” Professor Deutschlander writes, “That’s incredibly foolish of him: temple police are there who have been dragged out in the night and are now being kept up way past time because of Jesus. They cannot help but be in a bad mood. These are the same temple police who had come out to arrest Jesus. They would have seen Peter in his attempt to cut off the head of a temple servant” (Your Kingdom Come p. 508-509).

Peter put himself into a crowd of people who were, on this night, enemies. A few days before they were nothing but strangers in the city, but now it was different. Now Jesus was on trial, and Jesus’ associates would be considered suspicious. And then the words of the group began to pop up, like the first bubbles in a pan as it begins to seethe and boil: He was with him. He is one of them. He is a Galilean. What was he going to say? Will he stand up for Jesus? With the crowd speaking the way that they were, what would it mean for Peter? He would be grabbed, unless he was very careful. If he were grabbed, he would be arrested at the very same time. As an associate, he would surely have been questioned, and probably he would have been beaten up, just to see if he gave up any more information. It was a problem for the disciple. “Like a muddied spring or a polluted well is a righteous man who gives way to the wicked” (Proverbs 25:26). It would have been better if Peter had just left, or if he had not come in the first place. “Do not set foot on the path of the wicked, or walk in the way of evil men” (Proverbs 4:14).

Matthew tells us that Peter’s Galilean accent gave him away. The various ways that people spoke, even in so small a place as Israel, had been a way of identifying certain northerners since the days of the judges and the “Shibboleth” test (Judges 12:6). I felt this pressure myself as a missionary when the people of the Cascade Mountains identified me as being from Minnesota by my accent (at the time I was a Wisconsinite with some Norwegian ancestry, but close enough).

It’s worth pointing out that this serving-girl that Mark tells us about, the first one who spoke with him, was “not a soldier, or the high priest, or an imposing matron who here questioned Peter,” but a serving-girl. At least at first, she didn’t seem to have any malicious intentions. Some of the Church Fathers (such as Theophilus) and others maintain that she was only asking the way a serving-girl would, out of sympathy. But the human heart is cowardly and sees enemies everywhere. Peter took her words as something dangerous.

In the middle of these accusations, a rooster crowed. It’s such an ordinary thing, an everyday thing, that Peter may not have noticed it the first time. But as the questions heated up, his language got salty. He cursed and he swore, and he kept it up.

He began to do something. The Greek verb erxato (ἤρξατο) means to begin to get started on something. It also hints that the person in question has been doing something else, but now there is a change. So Peter started to “anathematize” himself, or call down curses on himself. I suppose this is in the category of “I’ll be damned,” which is precisely and theologically the meaning of a curse. It can also mean to take a solemn oath (Acts 23:14), but there was nothing solemn about what Peter was doing. So continuing to curse himself, again and again, and to swear over and over, Peter fully and completely fell to denying Jesus. “I have no idea what you’re walking about. I don’t know him. I don’t even understand,” he said, “what this is even about.” Once he slips into the sin, he dives in head-first. “The heart is more deceitful than anything. It is beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).

Did the soldiers realize that Peter was lying and betraying his master? Why didn’t they grab him now, when everything was out in the open? The only answer that is possible is that the command of Jesus was still over them: “If you are looking for me, then let these men go” (John 18:8). The power of Christ’s words must not be forgotten, and his protection was still over Peter here in the courtyard of the high priest.

So we are left with the knowledge that we are the same as Peter. We deny our Lord in our thoughts when temptations catch fire in our heads and in our hearts, and the desire for things, or for status, or for gratification, or whatever it might be, floods up in our thinking and makes our heart’s objections choke and gag. Such things are “a temptation and a trap; many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction” (1 Timothy 6:9).

We deny him with our deeds, when we are led off by sinful friends into actions we regret, “taking part in wicked deeds with men who are evildoers” (Psalm 141:4). And we deny him with our words, which might not seem too bad to begin with, but which descend into terrible sins. “At the beginning a fool’s words are folly, but at the end they are wicked madness” (Ecclesiastes 10:13).

We keep reading the Scriptures, meditating on them, contemplating the windows of our churches and the message of the sermons, so that we will come to know that we ourselves are capable of terrible wickedness and sin. I am no better than Peter, but like Peter, my Savior forgave me by willingly giving his life on the cross. Truly Jesus is the Lamb of God, who came to take away the sin of the world!

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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