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Is that it? Finished?


The third and last of my monologues for Holy week from the perspective of Simon Peter.


He was right… Everything he said would happen happened… And everything that I vowed I would do were only empty words… And I have cried myself empty in the time since…
After the confusion of last’s Passover meal, it at first felt like a relief to get out of that room and head across to Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives… We’d gone there before with him this week… it’s there that he talked about the troubled times to come when the temple would be torn down… But we didn’t expect our world, our hopes and dreams to be torn down in a similar way…
He went there to pray and had asked us to pray with him… but we were exhausted, and full of food and wine, and so we nodded off… three times he came to wake us up… And he was wound up in a way I had never seen him before… But the third time, while he was still speaking to us we saw a mob coming up, through the olive grove… there were temple guards among them and Judas was with them. He went over to Jesus to embrace and kiss him, but suddenly I realised what was happening… This was the betrayal that Jesus had talked about last night… So I pulled out my sword and attacked one of the men who were surrounding Jesus… To be truthful it’s a wonder I didn’t stab myself… I’m a fisherman not a swordsman… but I cut the man’s ear…
Jesus shouted, “Stop. No more of this! Anyone who lives by the sword will die by it. If my Father God had wanted to rescue me he would have sent an army of angels!” So we stood back and just let them take him…
They dragged him down to the High Priest’s house… And I followed along at a distance… when I got there word had clearly got round that something was brewing, because the courtyard outside the house was packed with people crowded round a fire… There was all sorts of gossip going on about what was happening… everyone loves pretending they have some inside information… though none made much sense…
I tried to stay in the shadows while listening in, but one young girl looked at me for a while and said: “I know you, you were with him!”
“I was not!” I said, but a few minutes later a man said, “You ARE one of them!”
“I’m not” I said.
But about an hour later someone else said “You were with him… you’re a Galilean.”
But I swore at him and said “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
And right on cue, the cock crowed, and at that very minute Jesus was being led out of the High Priest’s house to go dear knows where… and he looked me straight in the eye.
And I remembered… I remembered that just has Jesus had predicted Judas’ betrayal he predicted my denial… And suddenly I remembered what else he had predicted… his arrest, imprisonment and death… His broken body, his shed blood… Remember me, he said…
I had to get out of there… I have no idea who I knocked over in my haste to escape… I got outside and I cried… I can’t ever remember crying since I was a grown man… but boy did I make up for it… I cried and I cried and I cried…
Was I crying at my shame and embarrassment? My empty boasting or my cowardice. Was I crying for myself, or was I crying for him? I don’t know, I just cried…
Everything… Everything he had foretold had come true… Everything we had hoped for had come to nothing…
What will happen now? Will they come for us as they came for him?
Or is that it… Finished!?

Selah
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