There Are No Disciples Here

Tonight is the night we tell the truth of what happens when God comes to earth.  It is the night in which we look into the darkness, squinting our eyes, wondering what God has to say in the face of death, in the face of sin, in the face of what it means to be frail and human. Tonight is the night we finally are silenced in all of our efforts to explain away the darkness and to bear it in stark silence as we strain to hear God’s voice. It seems so far away from us, two thousand years ago, having little to say to a world that still remains so painful and dark at times, in a world where death seems more real than life.

            Coming as though for a criminal, the soldiers are armed with weapons and lanterns, carrying their lights as they seek to extinguish the light of the world. Though they’re looking for Jesus, each of the disciples were wondering whether they had done something, searching, hunting for anything that could have precipitated these events, like pulling over sure the flashing lights in your rearview mirror are meant for you, only to watch them speed by. “Whom are you looking for?” Jesus asks the soldiers. Peter clutches his sword more tightly, ready to fight, ready to win, ready to go to the death, but only the kind of death that Peter can imagine – the death in which each person dies only for him or herself. In Peter’s world – in our world – we each bear our own sin, we each bear our own death, we each lug around our pains and hurts and sorrows in our loneliness and fear.

            Peter, primed to strike, responds to violence with violence. Echoing in his head are Jesus’ words: “You won’t come with me to death, Peter; you’re going to betray me. Peter, you can’t come.” “But Lord, why can’t I come? I will follow you even unto death.” “No, Peter.” This is not a kingdom in which might makes right, in which the strong win. This is not a kingdom that receives a friendly reception in this world. This is the kingdom that exposes our world for what it is, exposing the darkness that lies at the core of a world that begs for a savior and crucifies him as soon as it realizes the savior won’t save us in the way we wants to be saved. “No Peter, you can’t come with me.”

            “I am. If it is me whom you are looking for, let these people go.” Tonight is the night that Jesus releases his disciples into the darkness, into the confusion of a world that would sooner extinguish the light than recognize and believe that God’s kingdom does not look like the kingdom of our world. Tonight is the night in which there are no disciples, no followers, no people sitting at Jesus’ feet saying, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here” because it is not good to be here. It is scary to be here, sitting in the darkness, wishing that we had some recourse, some other way to be saved than a crucified savior. Tonight, the Light of the World enters the Hour of Darkness, with the Darkness hell-bent on vengeance. “Let these men go,” Jesus says, and the disciples – the sheep – are scattered. “I am not this man’s disciple…” Peter’s three-fold denial matching Jesus’ three-fold I AM, the release of the disciples embodied in Peter’s “I do not know the man.” Our denials are matched by Jesus’ acknowledgement of who he is, the truth of who Christ is continuing to confront us and our world.

            Jesus releases his disciples, sending them into the darkness as Jesus himself meets the darkness. “Let these people go,” Jesus says. But nobody speaks up for Jesus: “Don’t release this Jesus; release for us Barabbas instead.” Give us back the one whom we understand, the one who responds to violence with violence, the one who seeks to take back what is his by force if necessary. Crucify this one, who releases us before we can incriminate ourselves, whose kingdom we don’t understand. Let us have the darkness, because we cannot bear the light. And, in a response that stops the darkness in its tracks, the light of the world takes on and bears the darkness, so alien to his kingdom, bearing the violence and fear of darkness on the cross.

            Tonight Jesus has no disciples, and so we follow at a distance, living in the world in which it seems darkness always wins. Jesus – for all that those who look on can tell – capitulates to darkness, a failed savior, a botched ploy for messiahship, a king’s fraud exposed in his powerlessness. Because this is the only way that God can get our attention, we who understand darkness and failure so well. The only way that Jesus can finally put an end to the Hour of Darkness - by bearing it in his body, hung on an instrument of torture and the symbol of power over those who would claim a kingdom so foreign to our world.

            “It is finished,” Jesus says, but it is not finished in the way that the world thinks it is finished. Jesus is not finished, but the darkness has met its match because the one thing the darkness cannot understand is someone who would bear it in order to set others free. Tonight, the light of the world hangs on the cross, in order to tell the power of darkness that it does not and cannot have the final word. Tonight, the power of darkness – in its height of power – is undone because Jesus refuses to allow us to remain in the Hour of Darkness, but releases us and takes it onto himself. What is truth? The truth is that this is what the world does when God comes in human form; the truth is that the world cannot bear the Light because it is too exposing, too freeing, too scandalous for us to understand, and so Jesus bears the darkness we think we understand. And in so doing, Jesus is for us the savior who actually saves us, not in the way we want to be saved, but in the only way that can save us from the Darkness which has the audacity to try to quench the Light of the World.