Against the Current
Mark 14:50–72 & Lamentations 3:19–31 (MSG)
I’ll never forget the trouble, the utter lostness, the taste of ashes, the poison I’ve swallowed. I remember it all—oh, how well I remember—the feeling of hitting the bottom. But there’s one other thing I remember, and remembering, I keep a grip on hope.
— Lamentations 3:19–21
There’s something about watching a thing fall apart that you can’t look away from.
Peter knew he should have run. The others did. When the soldiers came and the torches lit up the garden and Jesus was led away in chains, every one of the disciples scattered — Mark tells us plainly, they all fled. But Peter couldn’t quite do it. He followed at a distance. Kept to the shadows. Slipped into the courtyard of the high priest and found a spot near the fire where he could watch and not be seen.
I think about that choice. It wasn’t courage exactly — if it were courage, he’d have stood up in the garden. But it wasn’t pure cowardice either. It was something more complicated: the pull of wanting to know how this ends. He loved Jesus. He had given three years of his life to this man. Whatever fear had sent him running was now in tension with something deeper, something that wouldn’t let him go all the way home, that kept dragging him back toward the edge of the firelight, close enough to see.
Meanwhile, inside, the chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were doing their work. They were looking for testimony that could justify putting Jesus to death, and what strikes me reading it is how much effort that required. False witnesses came forward. Accusations were made. None of them held. The stories didn’t match. Even with the power, the platform, and the institutional weight of the entire religious establishment behind them, the case kept falling apart.
In the end, blasphemy was the best they could do. When Jesus confirmed who he was — I am — that was enough. Not a crime committed. Not harm done. Just the statement of identity, the claim of who he was, and that became the thing they used to kill him.
The opposition to Jesus was never really about what he had done. It was about who he was and what that meant for everyone who had built their world around a different kind of power.
Outside, at the fire, Peter was still watching. Still waiting. And then he got recognized.
A servant girl looked at him and said: You were with him. And Peter said no. Then someone else: You’re one of them. No again. Then the bystanders pressed in — your accent gives you away, you’re a Galilean, you have to be one of his. And Peter, for the third time, denied it. Swore he didn’t know the man.
And right then, the rooster crowed.
Mark tells us Peter broke down and wept.
Jeremiah knows that place. I remember it all — oh, how well I remember — the feeling of hitting the bottom. That’s not a man writing from a safe distance about a difficult season. That’s someone in the rubble, recounting what the bottom feels like in the body — the taste of ashes, the poison swallowed, the utter lostness. Peter, weeping outside the high priest’s courtyard in the dark, is sitting in the same rubble. No triumphant verse. No quick recovery. Just the full weight of what he had done, and the rooster’s crow still ringing in his ears.
This is where both passages refuse to let us skip ahead. Because the temptation — in reading Scripture, in telling our own stories, in the way we construct our faith — is to move too quickly past the bottom. To treat the breaking as a detour on the way to the good part. But Jeremiah lingers there. Mark lingers there. And I think that’s intentional.
The bottom is not a footnote. It is, in many ways, the hinge.
The fear that had scattered the disciples in the garden had followed Peter into the courtyard and sat with him, patient, waiting for its moment. He had managed to get close enough to watch. He hadn’t been able to stay close enough to stay.
There’s something painful about the fact that Jesus had told him this would happen. Before the rooster crows twice, you will disown me three times. Peter had pushed back hard — Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you. And I believe he meant it. But intention and execution are two different things, and the distance between them is where most of discipleship actually lives.
The moment Peter was identified as someone who had been with Jesus, he was being asked — without the question ever being stated directly — to swim against the current. To be the one person in that courtyard standing apart from the direction the crowd was moving. The religious leaders had spoken. The soldiers had acted. The wheels of judgment were turning. And here was a fisherman from Galilee, standing at a fire, being asked by his presence alone to be other than all of that.
He couldn’t do it. The current took him.
Lamentations has a phrase for this moment that stops me every time I read it: Don’t run from trouble. Take it full-face. The “worst” is never the worst. Peter did the opposite. He moved toward the crowd, toward the warmth of acceptance, away from the cost of identification. He chose the easier belonging. And in doing so, he discovered something Jeremiah already knew — that running from the trouble doesn’t end the trouble. It just means you carry it in a different way, and eventually it finds you at a fire and asks you who you are.
Discipleship keeps asking us to go against the flow. Not because being contrary is a virtue. But because the direction the world tends to move — toward power, toward self-preservation, toward winning, toward protecting what’s ours — keeps running into direct conflict with the way Jesus lived and the things he said.
And sometimes — this is the part that catches me — the current runs inside communities of faith. Movements that carry the language of Christian values, the weight of tradition, the right vocabulary. And yet somewhere in the turn, something gets lost. The least of these get forgotten. The margins move further out. The people Jesus kept walking toward — the sick, the poor, the outsider, the one everyone else was stepping over — start to become invisible. The current looks orthodox. It feels like belonging. And before you know it, you’re warming yourself at someone else’s fire and saying I don’t know the man.
That’s the subtle danger. Not that we’ll obviously deny Jesus in the dark. But that we’ll align ourselves with a version of faith that is culturally comfortable, that keeps us near the warmth of the crowd, that uses the right words while quietly moving away from the people those words were always meant to serve.
I know that move. I recognize it in myself. The moment when standing in the harder place, or simply being seen as someone who belongs to Jesus — in all that actually means — would cost something I’m not sure I want to pay.
A rooster crows in those moments. And I either hear it or I don’t.
But here is where Jeremiah pulls me back from despair.
But there’s one other thing I remember, and remembering, I keep a grip on hope.
Not a triumphant turn. A grip. Something you hold onto with effort because part of you wants to let go. Because the weight is real, the lostness was real, the ashes were real. And still, underneath all of it — God’s loyal love couldn’t have run out. They’re created new every morning.
Peter wept. That matters. He heard the rooster and he knew what it meant and he didn’t try to explain it away. He broke. And that breaking, it turns out, was not the end of his discipleship but the deeper beginning of it. The moment everything else fell away and he was left with nothing polished, nothing to prove — just the raw fact of what he had done and the man he had denied and somehow, still, the love that wouldn’t let him go.
I’m sticking with God (I say it over and over). He’s all I’ve got left.
That’s Peter in the courtyard, even if he couldn’t say it yet. That’s the prayer underneath the weeping. And it’s the prayer that Jeremiah had learned to pray from inside his own rubble — not because the circumstances had improved, but because he remembered the one thing that doesn’t move.
Jeremiah tells us what the practice looks like on the other side of that remembering: Go off by yourself. Enter the silence. Bow in prayer. Don’t ask questions. Wait for hope to appear. That’s my 25 minutes before the shift starts. The coffee, the dark, the audio Bible, the quiet before the day picks up speed. It doesn’t feel like formation most mornings. It feels ordinary, sometimes even rote. But I think what I’m actually doing in those minutes is the same thing Jeremiah was doing in the rubble and Peter eventually learned to do in the years after the courtyard — I’m keeping a grip. Saying, one more time, He’s all I’ve got left. Choosing, however quietly, not to run.
The current is always running. The question is whether we notice which way it’s pulling us — in the world, in our culture, in the communities of faith we belong to — and whether we have enough honesty and enough practice to swim even slightly against it.
Most days, that’s the whole work.
Why? Because the Master won’t ever walk out and fail to return.
No. He won’t. That’s what makes it possible to stay.
Reflection Question
Peter broke down and wept — and that breaking became the deeper beginning of his formation. Is there a moment of honest reckoning in your own life you’ve been avoiding rather than letting it do its work in you?
