The First Thing Jesus Did About the Denial Was Cook Breakfast

A man went to a thing on a Tuesday expecting to be spoken to.

He knew what he had done. Everybody in the room knew, or he assumed they did, which comes to the same thing. He had rehearsed his side of it in the car and had decided he would not defend himself, which he was quietly proud of, and which was also a way of controlling how the conversation would go.

Nobody said anything. Somebody took his coat. Somebody else said there was food and pointed at it.

He stood by the wall with a paper plate for about forty minutes waiting for it to start, and it did not start, and at some point he understood that it was not going to, and that was considerably harder to take than the lecture would have been.

He said afterward that he could have handled being told. What he had no idea what to do with was a chair and a plate of food.

Look at what the father does and does not say

Go back to the parable and count the words spent on the offense.

The son gets his admission out, and the father does not respond to it at all. He does not agree with it. He does not disagree with it. He turns to the servants:

But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry. (Luke 15:22-23, King James Version)

A robe, a ring, shoes, and dinner.

There is no conversation about where the money went. There is no term set, no probationary arrangement, no summary of what had been learned. The next thing that happens in the story is a meal.

That is God's own picture of Himself, told by Jesus, and He put food in it on purpose.

You are not walking toward a lecture, and there is none waiting anywhere in that story. Luke 15:22 spends its words on a robe and a calf rather than on the money, and it is the Spirit of God, John 14:26 called the Comforter, who lets a person actually sit down at a table they are braced to be sent away from.

He had it cooking before they got there

The clearest scene in the New Testament on this subject involves Peter, and it happens after the worst thing Peter ever did.

He had denied knowing Jesus three times, out loud, in a courtyard, standing at a fire.

Then, after the resurrection, the disciples come in off the water and this is what is waiting:

As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread... Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. (John 21:9,12)

It was already lit. The fish was already on it. He had made breakfast, on a beach, before they arrived.

And there is a detail in the Greek that John's first readers would have caught and that is worth knowing. The unusual word John uses for that charcoal fire appears in only one other place in his whole account: the courtyard where Peter stood warming himself while he denied Him (John 18:18).

Same kind of fire. Different outcome.

And notice the order. The conversation about love, the one everybody remembers, does not happen until verse 15. He fed him first. No part of the meal is contingent on the conversation, and the conversation itself, when it comes, is a question rather than an indictment.

You are not going to be dealt with before you are fed. John 21 puts the fire before the questions. It is His Spirit who makes an order like that believable to somebody who has spent weeks bracing.

What God sent a prophet who wanted to die

There is one more, and it is the plainest of all.

Elijah, after the biggest victory of his life, collapses under a juniper tree and asks God to let him die. He says it out loud: It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life (1 Kings 19:4).

Now read what is sent.

And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. And he looked, and, behold, there was a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse of water at his head. And he did eat and drink, and laid him down again. (1 Kings 19:5-6)

Food, water, and permission to go back to sleep.

Then the angel comes a second time, and there is a line in it that is one of the tenderest things in the Old Testament:

Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee. (1 Kings 19:7)

Not pull yourself together. Not a correction about the despair, which was factually wrong in several respects and which God does not argue with at that moment. Bread, water, sleep, bread again, and a sentence acknowledging that it is too much for him.

The conversation about what he had got wrong happens later, on a mountain, after he has eaten twice and slept.

You are being handed food and rest before you are handed instruction. 1 Kings 19:7 says arise and eat, because the journey is too great for thee. It is the Holy Spirit, Romans 8:26 helping our infirmities, who keeps a person from skipping to the part they think they deserve.

What Scripture says God enjoys

Two short verses, because this is the part most people have never been told.

He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. (Psalm 103:10)

And Micah, describing God's character:

Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity... he retaineth not his anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy. (Micah 7:18)

Delighteth in mercy. Not tolerates it. Not extends it reluctantly on application.

And Paul names what the kindness is actually for, which is the opposite of what everybody assumes:

Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance? (Romans 2:4)

The goodness is not the reward for turning. It is the thing that does the turning.

You are being met with kindness first because that is the mechanism and not the prize. Romans 2:4 says the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance, and it is the same Spirit, Titus 3:5 named in the renewing of the Holy Ghost, who makes goodness do in a person what a lecture never could.