In this age we live in, no one gets a free pass.  Every great person must have some weakness, some chip that we can pry our fingers underneath to see their all to human underbelly. Behind every politician seeking to be great there must be a scandal.  John Kerry and his medals, President Bush and his alcoholism.  

Behind every great actor there must be weakness— “I heard Russel Crowe has an anger problem.”  Did you hear about Reese Witherspoon and her ex-boyfriends?”  We don’t mind people being great, just not too great.  “Martin Luther King had his affairs,” we whisper.  “Oh, I heard Ghandi refused to sleep with his wife” people say.  And so tales of imperfection are told, and with each one we gain a little bit of mastery, a little bit of an edge, a fingerhold under the otherwise impressive mass of these amazing lives.  

So it is in our world, and so it is in our expectation when it comes to the gospels.  Realizing it or not we look for the chinks in Jesus’ armor.  Perhaps on some deep level we long to find weakness that would keep us from being in abject inferiority when we’re confronted by the Divine figure of the Son of God, the Christ.  There is a part of us that would like to rebuke Jesus for an affair with Mary Magdalene (though there is no scriptural evidence for anything of the sort).  We would like to just know that Jesus had the smallest bit of a selfish moment, or that he exhibited some evidence of being weak to the point of even marginal sin.

You know how it is when you’re out in the yard digging a hole and you find a rock and you want to get around the edge of it to get leverage and master the stone?  Have you had this experience?  I did just last fall as I was putting in a new mailbox post at the Rectory.  I had picked the perfect spot and as I dug, lo and behold there was a huge stone only eight inches down.

I don’t want to over dramatize the event, but I am quite serious when I say that within about three seconds it became a power struggle between me and the rock.  Who was greater?  Whose “will” would prevail—the rock which intended not to be moved or me who intended to move the rock.

You know the drill or can imagine it.  What you do is seek around the edges of the rock trying to find an edge, something to get your fingers under to get the leverage you need.  If you can just find that edge you’ve won.

I tell you what—I never did find that edge, and the rock beat me that day.

And so it is with Christ. There is nothing there for us to get our fingers around.  Try as we might to find weakness in his person or weakness in the texts, there is none that can be found.  

Such was the case with Peter whose first great failure we read about this morning.  No doubt he told the story many times to those he trusted.  You can just imagine him sitting around a campfire decades after the resurrection when someone says, “Peter, tell us that one story again.”  And Peter says, “Oh yeah, I know the one you’re talking about—‘The day I tried to rebuke the Lord.’

 “I remember it sharp as morning,” he would have said.  “All was going so well, when suddenly in the span of a day the Lord’s teaching changed, and he started telling us that he would have to be betrayed and killed and then rise from death.  So I pulled him from the others,” Peter would say, “and said to him, ‘No Lord’ and I was about to say more, but he pulled back from me, pointed right to the fear that was in my heart and called it ‘Satan’—a rebellion against God—and then taught the others a lesson about the difference between God’s will and our wills, using me as an example.”  

 

In our sinfulness we, too,  often put up barriers between ourselves and Christ, and that is because both time and human nature make us uncomfortable with the vulnerability that comes with letting Jesus be Lord and Savior.  It makes us feel vulnerable to call him Savior.  It humbles us to kneel at his feet, to kneel at the foot of the cross and let him be our Lord and our God.

What keeps you from letting Jesus rule your life?  What keeps you from trusting Christ with your eternal soul?  What is it?  What weakness have you found in the Son of Man?  What rebuke would you level at the Son of God, because he doesn’t do things they way you think they ought to be done?

 

There is no chink in the person of Christ.  

 

After being bested, inspired and forgiven enough times by this figure Jesus, most people eventually choose to give over their faith to him, to eventually trust that from the beginning of the scriptures to the end, in his words and deeds, indeed in the texts themselves there are no edges, no failures to be found.  

The living Christ will never be rebuked for there is no sin there and no weakness for us to claim.  In the end we do better to look inward to where Christ resides in us, and rather than try to rebuke him, we ask that he reign, that through faith we might become temples of his Holy Spirit and members of his enduring body and blood.  

        Amen.