God’s Word for You

Mark 14:72 The rooster crowed

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, March 4, 2024

72 Just then the rooster crowed a second time. And Peter remembered that Jesus had said to him, “Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times.”  And he broke down and wept.

The courtyard of Caiaphas was a strange pulpit. Peter thought it was a dangerous one, and he wriggled away by denying Jesus. But nobody laid a hand on Peter. Just a few months before this, the past October, quite a few people from the household of Caiaphas as also many of his guards had listened to Jesus at the Feast of Tabernacles. At that time some of them wondered, “Have the authorities concluded that he is the Christ?” (John 7:26), and John says that “many in the crowd put their faith in him” (John 7:31). And on the last day of that festival, many of them concluded: “Surely this man is the Prophet” (John 7:40). And when the guards who were sent to arrest him on that day came back empty-handed, Caiaphas said, “Why didn’t you bring him in?” But they answered, “No one ever spoke the way this man does” (John 7:45-46). When we remember these things, it becomes easier to imagine why they left Peter alone. It also opens our eyes as to their attitude about Peter. We should not be too quick to say that they were out to get him, even though he surely thought that they were. He was heaping up a pile of sins (Gerhard lists nine), but it may well have been for nothing. Many of the Jews in Caiaphas’ household, relatives, servants, slaves, and soldiers, were beginning to believe Jesus’ words. The very last statement in John’s Gospel before Jesus’ ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was: “Many of the Jews were going over to Jesus and putting their faith in him” (John 12:11).

So on the one hand, we must conclude, as we have already said, that Jesus’ words still protected Peter: “Let these men go.” But on the other hand, this very group in the courtyard might not have been so much a hostile crowd as it was a potential congregation for the Apostle.

Therefore Peter’s denial may have hurt the tender fledgeling faith of some, or many, or even all of the people in this courtyard. This little congregation was perhaps listening for a voice, a word of encouragement, an explanation of Jesus’ divinity and the promise of the forgiveness of sins. But instead all they received on this night was a disciple of Jesus who caved in, who denied him. “His foremost disciple denies him; why should they then continue further to rely on him?” (Gerhard).

Mark lists two elements of Peter’s realization of his sin. First, the rooster crowing. Second, Peter finally remembering Jesus’ words. Luke adds a third element: While Peter was in the middle of one of these verbal denials (the last one), the rooster crowed, and that at that moment “the Lord turned and looked at Peter” (Luke 22:61). We can speculate until the cows come home about what the geography of the palace was like, but it won’t matter. Even if we had the whole building right in front of us, intact and kept in perfect condition for two thousands years without so much as an ashtray out of place since that night, without more information from the four Evangelists we can’t know whether Jesus was up on a balcony, out on a terrace, moving through a covered cloister from one building to another, or just what was going on. I have watched pastors do all sorts of contortions and gymnastics in the pulpit to show just what might have been going on, but to their credit they (I hope I can say “we” here) rely on the text, and put more emphasis on the Look that Jesus gave than to the turn that he made.

So, breaking down and weeping bitterly, what can we say about Peter’s faith? This is a passage that writes a big red X through many false teachings about faith and repentance. So let’s at least give this a brief look.

1, Human strength and human free will are entirely useless for sustaining us in God’s grace and for protecting us from sin. Not only did Peter abandon Jesus along with the rest of the Apostles, but he also came back and denied him, cursing himself and swearing up and down that he didn’t even know Jesus.

2, Through the gospel, the Holy Spirit fills the sinner’s heart with the saving knowledge of God’s grace through Christ. Otherwise, all sinners remain “a people living in darkness” (Matthew 4:16) “and living in the shadow of death” (Luke 1:79).

3, Since Scripture clearly calls the preaching of the gospel the means of enlightenment (2 Corinthians 4:6; 1 Peter 1:18-19), the Bible itself rejects the views of some (the Quakers, the mystics, and the pantheists) who claim that the Holy Spirit produces a new knowledge of God in a person’s soul apart from the Word and without the Word of God. “This is the root of fanaticism: Spirit without Word” (Hoenecke).

4, However, although the Word is always a powerful means of enlightenment, it can happen that enlightenment does not in actuality follow the Word, particularly not as complete, but that it first begins later on without repetition of hearing and reading, but comes through the memory of the Word that was heard before. This is where our verse, Mark 14:72, comes in, as well as passages like Luke 24:9, “Then they (the Emmaus disciples) remembered his words.”

One of our theologians says: “The power of illuminating (bringing one dead in sins to life in faith), with which the divine Word is furnished, is not absolutely bound to the acts of hearing, reading, or contemplating, but the Word of God heard, read, passed over, and kept in the soul, is always strong with its power of illuminating” (David Hollaz).

To be “enlightened” in the Scriptural sense means that the Holy Spirit brought me out of the darkness of unbelief into the light of faith, so that now I see all the gifts God gives me in Christ, especially, as we confess in the Creed, “The forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” Jesus explains: “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). And again Jesus said to Paul in the vision outside Damascus: “I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 26:17-18).

So, Peter’s fall into denial and unbelief here in the courtyard of the high priest teaches, along with other passages, these two important points about faith, and how we come to faith, even after a person may have fallen away from that faith.

First: Enlightenment (being brought to faith or to repentance) can be resisted. Man can resist, and in his stubborn opposition, he is certainly not enlightened even if he has clearly heard the Gospel and even memorized its words (John 1:9,11). If a man rejects the Gospel, even a man who once was saved, he cannot bring himself back again (Hebrews 6:4). But later, the Gospel can indeed bring him back.

Second: Enlightenment is bound to the orderly means and requires that one let the Word as it is served by the servants of the Word work on him as he prays about the word (Ephesians 1:16-18), contemplates the word (John 5:39) and as his spirit and mind are afflicted with a severe inner struggle (Psalm 119:71). We often refer to these three things by their Latin names (for as Rev. Mark Jeske once quipped in 1997 at a meeting where I was present, “Why use English if Latin will do?”): oratio, meditatio, and tentatio.

If we remember Luke’s words, that Jesus turned and looked at Peter at this moment of the crowing rooster, then we see the divine mercy of God in all its beauty. For here, Jesus forgets the mocking words of the court in which he stands, and uses a happenstance of architecture, either as he is able to see Peter from a balcony, or a collonade, or as he is being forced to walk from one place to another, and he turns and looks at Peter with friendly eyes. There is one who betrayed him, but whom he still loves. There is a man he knows and calls a friend, whose sins he is going to suffer for, and has already begun to suffer.

And so we remember in this action that our Lord Jesus demonstrates that he didn’t only come to win redemption through his blood and his precious merits, but he also shows that faith in him works in our heart so that his suffering and death will not be lost on us, but so that we are brought to genuine repentance as we are sorry and then as we are lifted up through faith in him and faith in his blood. As one Christian said, “Those whom Christ looks upon, weep over their sins.”

Paul speaks for so very many of us when he says: “I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe and receive eternal life” (1 Timothy 1:16). God grant all of us grace to repent.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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