But “his speech bewrayeth” him; he is noticed again as he had been before, and for the third time he denies. Whereupon the cock crows, and turning towards the arcade at the end of the court where the trial was going on, he meets our Lord's eyes fixed upon him. Then, for the first time, it strikes him that he has done wrong. It never occurred to Peter that in saying “I know not the man,” he was being disloyal to the Master he loved. He wanted to keep sight of his Master, and did not feel bound to speak the truth to a foe. No words are needed to shew him his fault. One look of our Lord settles the matter; it awakens the higher sense of truth, which had gone to sleep when the old instinct of the Oriental peasant, the habit of confronting authority with a flat denial, became dominant in Peter's breast. When the company of Apostles was scattered on their Master's apprehension, the strength they had drawn from association with Jesus vanished at once; and then Peter dropped from the moral level of a disciple of Christ into the Galilean fisherman he had been before. He had been used to regard officials of Herod, or any ruling power, as his natural enemies, to whom he was not bound to speak the truth, and to this, his old self, he came back now.
But though Peter's heart may have acquitted him of cowardly forsaking his Master,—though he knew that he would, if need were, have gone with him to prison and to death,—yet he felt that this [pg 436] denial was, in words—though only in words—a falling away from perfect loyalty; it made clear to him, as it may have been meant to do, the weakness of his character in the way of yielding to impulse, and awakened floods of self reproach. He went out and wept bitterly; but no trace appears afterwards of a loss of self respect, or of his feeling it possible that he could be in disgrace with his Master; in fact his part in his Master becomes all the greater, owing to his having needed that He should wash his feet.
These two miracles of instruction then, the prediction of Peter's denials and the withering of the fig tree, were an assurance to the disciples that our Lord still retained His superhuman power, and that whether He should drink of the cup or put it away, up to the last, rested entirely with Him. These powers of His could not be displayed to the people without hindrance to the accomplishment of that Baptism with which He “had to be baptised;” even the working of miracles of healing might so have moved the crowd that they would have risen in His defence.[330] The Apostles, however, were to be rendered sure that these powers remained what they had ever been and that they were, for them, in operation still; so that they might never doubt but that, amid all the apparent defeat, it was with the voluntary sufferer on the Cross that the real Victory—the moral Victory lay.
Chapter XIII. The Lessons Of The Resurrection.
When contemplating the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ, we have little attention to spare for the subordinate personages in the scene. The effects of these manifestations, in working changes in the hearts and minds of the witnesses, are put out of sight by the brilliancy and intrinsic grandeur of the manifestations themselves, and by the momentous character of their direct consequences, universally affecting mankind. But the transformation in temper, in views, and in habits of mind which converted the Apostles of the Gospels into the Apostles of the Acts—a transformation to me otherwise inexplicable—was consummated and clenched by the hours of hard trial and bitter anguish of that Sabbath day, when there was nothing to be done but to mourn and to wonder; as well as by the burst of gladness when the Risen Lord appeared to the eleven. Throughout all the Post-Resurrection [pg 438] interval, during which the Apostles felt that He was close by and might at any time appear—indeed that any stranger accosting them might turn out to be He—the changes which had been wrought were taking lasting hold.
The data for the history of that Passover season of a.d. 30 must have been furnished by the Apostles, yet we find in it scarcely any mention of themselves; all personal thought was driven from their minds; the narrators, like ourselves, had eyes for the Saviour alone.
From the hour of cockcrow on the Thursday night to the time when it “began to dawn toward the first day of the week” all that we hear of the Apostles, and that comes out incidentally, is that John stood at the foot of the Cross. There is not a word to explain their flight at Gethsemane, they do not tell us, that they stood in the crowd or followed to Golgotha; neither have we, what for my purpose would be invaluable, any word of how they passed that Sabbath day of enforced inaction, which—in accordance with our Lord's way of letting intervals of quiet alternate with times of stress and strain—followed on the violent perturbation and intense dismay of the Crucifixion.