Reflecting or Deflecting?

"You are not one of his disciples, are you?" the girl at the door asked Peter. He replied, "I am not." "Didn't I see you with him…?” Again Peter denied it… (from John 18:17, 26-27)

When Peter denied Jesus, he was not only betraying his friend and Lord, he was betraying his own identity. For the last three years Peter had been walking with Jesus. Think of what a transforming life this had been for him: watching miracles and even taking part in them, hearing Jesus’ teachings, learning to pray and to love and to know God and to be known by God in a deeply personal way (remember that Jesus called him “the Rock”). To breathe the free air. To put it another way, he had become Jesus’ disciple, apprenticing himself after Him, learning of this new way of being in the world and of relating to God. The girl who approached Peter in the courtyard asked him whether or not he was one of Jesus’ disciples. His flat out denial betrayed his own identity. It effectively refuted all that he had learned and come to in the previous three years. All the life he had come to evaporated in that renunciation. He relinquished the new name God had given him. Turning from Jesus, he also turned from his own honor, his integrity, his character, his uniqueness, his seity. His own individuality God had given him.

This, of course, was nothing new for Jesus. Moses had done something similar after Mount Sinai. God had, per his request, shown him His glory. He had passed by him, and the experience left Moses's face shining, his whole body and spirit radiant, alive, awake, alert, aroused. It may have been a bit like a man just coming from a sexual experience with his beloved, his face and lips flush, his eyes open wide, his breathing heavy. Moses was beaming, gleaming, blazing, resplendent, like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion (Psalm 19:5). He then carried down the stone tablets and was unaware that his face was radiant like this. And he scared the people to death.

"When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the LORD. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, his face was radiant, and they were afraid to come near him..." (from Exodus 33:29-30).

Even Aaron was terrified. And so you know what Moses did? He hid his face. He intimidated the Israelites by his having been so intimate with the Lord, and it must have frightened and embarrassed Moses, and so he hid it. By hiding himself, he hid the glory from the people that most needed it. He shrunk back and hid his association with the Lord God, just like Peter.

Nelson Mandela could have been speaking to the both of them when he said that “your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.”

He could have been speaking to me, too. “We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us,” Mandela continues.

Oh, yeah? We were? I suppose His glory is the gift He has given to his closest friends throughout history, a gift that He gives to us still. Recently my wife and I spent time with a local community of believers where we were asked to share something personal that God seems to be up to in our lives. I shrank back. I spoke, but only superficially, a rock skipping off the surface rather than going to the depths. Why? Because I think I am embarrassed of my place with God, of His intimacy with me. Perhaps I hide because I am in disbelief that He would have me in this way, fuddled and bashful that anyone would notice that I’ve just been with the Lord God, and afraid that others would reject me for it out of fear and intimidation.

But that is not letting my light shine, as Jesus asked that I do.

“. . . And as we let our own light shine,” says Mandela, “we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”