Peter in the Garden by Melinda Selmys

"Christ’s action in the Garden is radical. When Christ reaches out and heals the High Priest’s servant, He does not see Himself as healing the enemy. That’s our category, our perspective. He saw Himself as healing the ear of the beloved: He had come to give His life for this man, just as much as He had come to give it for Peter. This is where we find the scandal of the Cross in Gethsemane. I suspect it’s also part of the reason why Peter got into such a funk in the courtyard outside of the High Priest’s house. Peter was ready to die for Christ, and to die with Christ: he had declared this publicly, and he proved it when he stood to fight at Christ’s side. To conceive of Peter’s denial in the courtyard as an act of cowardice is to miss the psychological unity of the narrative: Peter denies Christ here because something happened to his courage between the moment when he drew his sword and the moment that he said “I do not know him.” These words have a particular poignancy if we consider that, in a sense, Peter may really have meant them. Not “I don’t know the man” in the sense of “I don’t know who he is,” but “I don’t know the man” in the sense that He is not who Peter thought. In Gethsemane Christ confronts his most ardent defender with a mystery that Peter cannot understand, and that he is not yet ready to accept. The mystery of a lover who is willing to lay down His life for the sake of those who persecute Him.

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So what does the story of Peter in Gethsemane teach us? First, that our way is not Christ’s way. We are to sheathe our swords. Specifically, we are to sheathe them in order to provide an opportunity for Christ to do His healing work. So long as we are fighting against the LGBTQ community, or for that matter any opposing group within the culture war, we are wounding their ears: we are preventing them from being able to hear the message of Christ’s love. Not that Christ’s love for the servant of the High Priest comes in the form of a word. Christ says nothing to this man. He heals him. It brings to mind a saying of Francis of Assissi “Preach the gospel everywhere, and if necessary use words.”


Second, that if we sheathe our swords there will be a terrible darkness. Why do we take up the sword, why fight the Culture Wars in the first place? For obvious reasons. We want to defend America. We want to defend Christianity. We want to defend our children. We want to defend our way of life. These are all things that we love, and we do not want to watch any of them get nailed to the Cross. We feel about the death of any of these things much as Peter felt when he took Jesus aside and rebuked him saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This shall never happen to You.” To which Christ replies “Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.”


When Peter sheaths his sword, and Christ tells him “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and He will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?” Peter is plunged into a state of spiritual darkness and confusion. Up until this point he had a solid identity: he was a follower of Christ. He thought he understood what that meant, and what it demanded of him. Now he doesn’t know what to do. His courage has come to nothing, his saviour has been taken away from him, his desire for martyrdom has been denied. He is asked about his Christian identity, and he is in no condition to give an answer for the faith that is in him. Instead, he says that he doesn’t know what the people in the courtyard are talking about, the cock crows, he realizes his denial, and he weeps.


This is a very accurate psychological portrait of what it looks like to stop fighting the Culture Wars. It’s hard. So long as you have that sword in your hand, you know who you are. You have an identity in Christ: an identity forged and tempered in violence. It doesn’t matter that the violence is the violence of a com-box war, or a letter writing campaign, or a series of articles. The pen, after all, is mightier than the sword. We can imagine Christ in the Culture Wars crying “Peter, sheathe your pen.” He who lives by the pen, shall die by the pen? If we look at the state of the Mass Media traditional Christianity certainly seems to be dying by the pen.

Third, Peter’s story teaches us that there will be faith beyond this darkness. It provides us with a way forward, a way to be Christian beyond the Culture Wars. “Feed my lambs. Take care of my sheep. Feed my sheep.” There’s an interesting detail here that you can miss in translation, which is that the first two times that Christ asks whether Peter loves him, he asks about agape, a form of love that is simultaneously more unconditional, but also less personal than philia. When Peter responds, he speaks of philia all three times. The third time that Christ asks, He rephrases the question in Peter’s terms and asks about philia, about the kind of love that we think of when we speak of intimate, personal friendship. It’s also interesting that Peter is hurt only this third time, when Christ throws his friendship, his affection into question.

So how do we feed Christ’s lambs, how do we tend His sheep? We start by listening. What are people in the LGBTQ community hungry for? What wounds do they need healed? What obstacles stand between them and the sheepfold? And then we remove those obstacles, and we heal those wounds, and we provide for those hungers.

This can be addressed to some degree in the abstract. We can talk about general patterns in terms of what LGBTQ Christians need from their parishes and from their faith communities. But the main thing that they need is love. Not just agape, but philia. Not just concern for their good, but comraderie, affection, friendship."

Read the rest here:  http://spiritualfriendship.org/2014/10/18/peter-in-the-garden-of-gethsemane/

Her testimony is CRAY CRAY.  seriously.