Peter’s New Reality

I had a guy come up to me yesterday, after a teaching I did, asking me about some things that at first seemed kind of cut and dry. He is studying with a girl who has absolutely no church background, and she had a lot of questions. This girl doesn’t know what 728b means, or the difference between Obadiah and Amos, & she would think Balaam’s donkey was the screenplay for Shrek.

And she is asking some great questions.

One of those questions came up when she was reading through the gospels. She came to the part where Jesus washed the disciples feet, and she wondered why Jesus had gone all Dr. Scholls on everybody. And my friend didn’t have an answer.

Sure he’d heard all the sermons before. He’d even seen people wash other people’s feet in memory of this. But if you think about it. What would your answer be. Why does Jesus do this?

It doesn’t take long for the book of Genesis to begin to tell us how our story is unravelling. We go from a garden to a war zone in just a matter of a chapter. And things really start to get prickly when Genesis introduces us to Lamech (which is French for the Mech).

When we first meet Lamech in the Bible he’s singing. He’s singing about how he was willing to kill anyone who had messed with him, and that if anyone else messed with him he’d kill them seventy-seven times.

You know what that’s called? Overkill.

Lamech’s song makes him the Tupac of the Old Testament.  What he’s saying is that he will escalate any conflict that people direct his way. And if you were to ask Lamech, I’m sure he would have had plenty of justification for his logic. He’s not really a violent prone man, he’s just taking preventative measures. But the truth is Lamech’s way of life is contagious. His tune is catchy and before long everybody living like this. Watching out for themselves, sacrificing others for their own gain. And if you doubt this, take a moment and read Genesis 38.

Told you.

But toward the end of Genesis, there is a story that goes against the grain of the rest of the book. It’s a story about a man named Joseph who’s got   the kind of family issues that make the Jackson 5 look like the Partridge Family. His brothers a few decades earlier sold him into slavery, and through God redemptive purposes, Joseph is now in charge of Egyptian imports/exports at a time when the whole world is depending on them. He is given a chance to save the world. And he comes through.

But every hero has their origin, and Joseph’s dysfunctional family comes back to haunt him. However, this time Joseph’s in the position of power. And he uses it in a way that would make Lamech proud. He organizes a dinner that came straight from the script of survivor, manipulating the brothers ignorance to his own gain. He frames his youngest brother, Benjamin, for stealing a silver cup and tells his brothers that he must be left behind to die.

But then something happens, something that Lamech couldn’t have seen coming. Judah, the oldest brother, does something that shocks everyone, maybe even himself. He offers himself in his younger brother’s place. And this starts a different trajectory for history.

Look at how John Ortberg says this:

“Up to this point in Genesis, there had not been the healing of a broken relationship through confession or repentance…In the accounts of brokenness of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau there is no record of true reconciliation. But now it will happen. For the first time in the Bible…we see the possibility of a substitionary act of suffering on behalf of someone to save someone else.”

And it works. Judah’s sacrifice does what no sword of Lamech could have done. It reconciles a breach that brute force cannot fix.

Which brings me back to Jesus.

It’s hard for Western Christians to realize just how powerful the Passover celebration was for the Jewish people under the oppression of Rome. They were after all celebrating a time in their history where God liberated them from another Empire. And they were waiting on tiptoe for him to do it again. Especially this time of year. It’s their 4th of July and as the Messiah, Jesus is expected to do something about it.

And everyone assumed, at this point, that Jesus would operate the way the rest of human history had acted. That he would choose the way of Lamech. That is to say no one expected Jesus to start washing feet, especially not this night.

This is why Peter, once more, corrects Jesus. Because this isn’t supposed to happen, Messiah’s don’t wash feet, particularly not right before they are going to save the people of God. Unless, foot washing is going to be in tune with the way He’s going to do it.

Think about what Jesus tells Peter next. He says, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.” What if Jesus is saying something really profound here? What if he’s letting us, as eavesdroppers on this intimate moment, in on something. That this isn’t your normal Kingdom, and He’s not your normal King.

This Kingdom isn’t going to continue on in line with Lamech. Jesus is offering a stunning new reality. And if Peter wants in on this he’s got to change the whole way He thinks about what God is up to.

Look at how Peter says this a few decades later:

For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers,but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect”

And now Peter has finally got it. That the other way, the one handed down from their forefathers, was empty. Where the power was really at was in the lamb laying down his life. Peter had finally learned the lesson that Judah had thousands of years before. He had learned that the servant is king and the King is a servant.

Church tradition says that Peter lived up to his new reality. He was crucified upside down at the hands of Rome, He died with his world turned upside down.

Which is of course, what Jesus had been trying to do all along.