Insiders and Outsiders
Dear Friends,
Why did Peter deny Jesus? In John’s Gospel, when Jesus was arrested, Peter and John followed him to the high priest’s courtyard. John was known to the high priest, so he went inside. Peter only got in because John spoke to the girl on duty on his behalf. Once inside, she asked Peter if he was one of Jesus’ disciples, and he replied, “I am not.”
There’s something in all of us that longs to be on the inside: to be invited to the party, to be ‘in the know’, to be one of the ‘important people’, to have a seat at the table, to have tickets to the game. You’re a very rare person indeed if you really don’t care about such things. CS Lewis famously called it the desire to be part of ‘The Inner Ring’, and observed that people will do terrible things to get into it.
Was Peter afraid of being left outside? Isn’t that often why we ourselves deny Jesus, and do other things we know to be wrong? We’re afraid of being outsiders. Yet Jesus was, and is, the ultimate insider. He’s the Son of God! And he became a total outsider, when “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21, NIV). Why? Let’s put it like this: God made Jesus, the ultimate insider, to be a total outsider so that we, the real outsiders, could become insiders. I’ve no doubt that I would cope better with being an outsider to others if I really knew that, because of Jesus, I am an insider with God.
Chris Hobbs,
Vicar.