No Help For It

Luke 22:54-69

61 ⁶¹ The Lord turned and looked straight at Kefa (Peter)

This is the scene in the courtyard when Peter denies knowing Jesus. At the moment the rooster crowed, Jesus turned and looked pointedly at him. (That is exactly what the Greek says: “emblepō”—to direct a glance, to look searchingly or significantly, at a person.)

Then Peter went outside and ‘wept bitterly’ (klaiō pikrōs). (Pikrōs means ‘salty’, ‘bitter’, ‘brackish’, ‘harsh’.)

I saw it very clearly in my mind’s eye, as though I were looking through a small clear lens at something that seemed so far away—although it was really very, very near:  Jesus turning in the firelight to look at Peter in such a penetrating way.

I saw the whole courtyard laid out before me. Something struck me as if I hadn’t known it before:  that Peter must have been quite close for Jesus to be able to hear what he said, over there by the fire. I’m thinking the high priest’s house looked something like this:

I envisioned Jesus standing in front of the main door into the living area of the house while Peter, behind him, had slipped into the shadows at the edge of the circle of firelight in the courtyard. The door from the street into the courtyard was probably only an archway, without a solid door that could be opened or closed. Looking at the scale of the people in the drawing, that courtyard was probably pretty crowded, and maybe even a bit noisy. Still, Jesus was standing right there. Peter was probably not more than twenty feet away from him.

Luke says that Jesus was held there until day came, and that the temple guards made fun of him and beat him. I imagine that, after going with the guards to the Mount of Olives to arrest Jesus and see him securely in custody, the high priest would have left Jesus in the courtyard under guard while he went into the house to wash up, change clothes, and maybe catch a little sleep, before dragging Jesus over in the morning to the Sanhedrin, so he could stand before the kangaroo court.

I keep seeing that look. I know that expression. If there were little balloons overhead, they might say, “See? What did I tell you?” It’s the kind of pointed look that my mother used to give me, pulling her glasses down on her nose, and looking over the top of them; piercing me with her eyes from underneath her eyebrows. Only in this case, there was no humor in it. They were going to kill Jesus.

In the moment that Peter really understood that, there was nothing for him to do but go outside and leave Jesus behind. It was well and truly too late. There was no help for it.

This Advent has been like that, with so many things happening which call to mind that phrase: “There’s no help for it.” Death, illness, loss, leave-taking, all blended together with a generous helping of uncertainty, to make a bitter pill for us to swallow.

I thought, maybe it was Advent itself that had given me the lens that let me see so clearly into that scene in the courtyard, and that it was also Advent which had somehow given me the clarity to see into and beyond the bare bitterness of the words, “There’s no help for it.”

Finally, I want to share a poem by Malcolm Guite that someone posted today on Facebook, via Plough Quarterly:

Poem: A Lens

Malcolm Guite

That All, which always is all everywhere

                                                            —Donne

Not that we think he is confined to us,

Locked in the box of our religious rites,

Or curtained by these frail cathedral walls,

No church is broad or creed compendious

Enough. All thought’s a narrowing of sites.

Before him every definition fails,

Words fall and flutter into emptiness,

Like motes of dust within his spaciousness.

Not that we summon him, but that he lends

The very means whereby he might be known,

Till this opacity of stone on stone,

This trace of light and music on the air,

This sacred space itself becomes a lens

To sense his presence who is everywhere.