Peter Went Out and Wept, and Then He Came Back In

A man told me he takes a longer route to work to avoid driving past a building.

It adds eleven minutes. He has been doing it for six years. He said he did the arithmetic once, and then he stopped doing arithmetic about it, because the number was upsetting and it did not change anything.

It is not a church. I want to say that, because people assume it is, and this happens with all kinds of buildings. His is an office where something happened that everybody in it knows about.

He does not work there any more. Nothing would happen if he drove past. Nobody would see him. There is no scenario in which the eleven minutes are necessary, and he takes them anyway, every morning, and he told me he does not even think about it now, he simply turns left.

There is a man in the gospels who walked out of a courtyard in the worst hour of his life, and what I want to look at is where he is standing a few weeks later.

He goes out, and the text records it plainly

Here is the moment.

And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And Peter went out, and wept bitterly. (Luke 22:61-62, King James Version)

The Lord turned, and looked upon Peter. That is the detail that makes it unbearable. It happens in a courtyard with a fire and people standing around, and the look lands while he is still in the room.

And Peter went out. He leaves. Of course he does. Anybody would.

And the gospels do not tidy that up. Nobody writes that he immediately repented and returned. They record a man walking out of a building and crying outside it, and then they leave him there for the length of a weekend.

That is worth having, because it means Scripture is not embarrassed by the leaving. The leaving is in the account. Nobody edited it out to make the man look better.

You are not the first person to walk out of a building and stay out. Luke 22:62 records the going out and the weeping without one word of correction. It is the Spirit of God, Romans 8:26 helping our infirmities, who carries a person through the days that the gospels simply leave blank.

Where he is standing a few weeks later

Now hold that next to what happens later, because the distance is the whole point.

But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and said unto them, Ye men of Judaea, and all ye that dwell at Jerusalem, be this known unto you, and hearken to my words. (Acts 2:14)

Standing up. Lifted up his voice. In Jerusalem, in public, in the same city, in front of a crowd that included people who had been in the vicinity of a courtyard about seven weeks earlier.

He is not doing it quietly and he is not doing it somewhere else. He is doing it in the place, out loud, and the sermon he preaches is about the very events he ran from.

So the record contains both. A man who went out weeping, and the same man standing up in the same city with his voice raised, and about seven weeks between them.

You are looking at a distance that a man crossed in about seven weeks. Acts 2:14 has Peter standing up and lifting his voice in the same city he had run out of, and it is His Spirit, poured out in that same chapter, who is credited by the text with what changed in him.

What happened in between was a meal and three questions

Nothing in Peter's story suggests he talked himself back in. There is one recorded conversation and it happens over breakfast.

So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? (John 21:15)

Three times He asks, which everybody notices, and which matches the three denials.

But look at the setting. The fire is lit before he arrives. The food is cooking. Jesus does not raise it on the shore, or in the boat, or at any point before they have eaten.

And look at what Jesus does with each answer: He gives him a job. Feed my lambs. Feed my sheep. The restoration is not a discussion about the past, it is an assignment about the future, handed over at a beach with breakfast in front of them.

You are being handed an assignment rather than an examination. John 21:15 has the question asked after they had dined and answered with feed my lambs. It is the Holy Spirit, Acts 1:8 promising power after the Holy Ghost is come upon you, who supplies what a beach conversation only begins.

And if the building has become part of a heaviness that is bigger than a route to work, say it out loud to a person: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. Six years of turning left is a long time to be managing something alone.

The psalm about paths and the promise about roads

There is a line in the shepherd psalm about direction that is easy to read past.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. (Psalm 23:3)

He restoreth my soul. Restoring is a word about bringing something back to a former condition, and it is what a shepherd does with a sheep that has wandered off and got itself somewhere it cannot get out of.

And then: he leadeth me in the paths. The restoring and the leading are in the same verse, and the leading comes after. A restored person is put back on a road rather than left standing where they were found.

And Isaiah has a line about roads that is aimed at people who cannot see one:

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19)

I will even make a way. Not: I will show you the way you missed. Make, which is a construction word, in a place where there was not one.

You are being led on a road rather than left where you were found. Psalm 23:3 puts he restoreth my soul and he leadeth me in one verse. It is the same Spirit, Romans 8:14 saying as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God, who does the leading that verse describes.