Peter and James and John (Mark 9:2-9)

Peter and James and John get a front row seat to the grandeur of God. As with the crowd at Jesus’s baptism, they witness God claiming Christ as God’s son and see Christ placed in the context of the other great leaders and prophets, Moses and Elijah. Christ’s Transfiguration serves a declaration of Christ both serving an ancient role of prophet and doing it in an even bigger way as God’s beloved son. These three disciples get pulled along for the ride.

They also show up at Christ’s most human moment too. After the Last Supper, Jesus withdraws to the Garden of Gethsemane, literally a place where olives got crush, to do his own soul crushing. He takes along three friends, who turn out rather useless by continually falling asleep. These same three then witness Christ’s arrest. It’s once again, Peter and James and John.

Peter becomes the most famous. Christ declares him the rock on which the church gets built, and that comes to pass. Acts of Apostles dedicates a lot of airtime to Peter’s exploits – leading the church, boldly preaching, getting arrested, breaking out, and coming to understand the inclusion of the gentiles. Even after Luke stops recording, we have a fair amount of historical evidence that Peter goes on from Jerusalem to Rome, becoming the first Bishop of Rome, supposedly getting martyred hung on a cross upside down, and getting buried where St. Peter’s Basilica now stands. Excavations of the catacombs under the modern St. Peter’s Basilica found ancient graffiti stating, “Peter is here.” We don’t know, verifiably, which tomb, but the Galilean fisherman became a bold leader of a movement that continues unbroken to this day. Catholic, Orthodox, and Episcopalian ordinations can all trace themselves back, in a continuous lineage, to Peter the Rock.

James gets more easily forgotten, but the fault lies with Herod Agrippa, not the disciple. Luke writes much fewer words dedicated to James, but the one post Ascension scene that we do get packs a punch. In Acts 12, he gets violently martyred by Herod Agrippa.

About that time King Herod laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church. He had James, the brother of John, killed with the sword. After he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also. (This was during the festival of Unleavened Bread.) (Acts 12:1-3 NRSV)

James dies by the sword in perhaps a bid for popularity by the bloody and paranoid Herod Dynasty. He was the first of the 12 to die by martyrdom and only the second martyr, after Stephen, reported in Acts. As modern Christians, it doesn’t give us a ton to go on, but I think that it hints at a boldness in his ministry. Stephen got killed for turning into a public prophet. Peter and John only miraculous dodge imprisonment and death for their public preaching. To die by the sword of Herod might indicate that James’s ministry grew sufficiently prominent to draw Herod’s attention.

John grows into one of the Gospel’s most important proclaimers. John gets the distinction of being the only disciple there at the crucifixion and receiving from Christ the responsibility to care for Mary. As with Peter, the first half of Acts tells of his exploits preaching, getting arrested, and arguing before the council. However, a survey of the book titles of the New Testament reminds us that John too kept working long after Acts 28. Five books, the Gospel of John, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, and Revelation all bear his attribution. Scholars debate the particulars on this. Did John write every word? Or, did he train a school of theologians to write with one theological and literary voice? Either way, out of John’s work comes our best explanation of the big picture of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, a communication of the Good News in a Greek friendly wrapper, a declaration of the centrality of love in God’s work and the Christian life, and a picture of God’s final victory and our opportunity to share in that victory if we can just hang in there.

None of our texts give us any firm indication why Jesus took these three men up that mountain or into the garden with him. We know that Peter was Christ’s chosen rock. John was the disciple that Jesus loved. James was John’s brother and Jesus’s cousin. Did Jesus see their potential and thus give them extra opportunities like any good teacher with promising students? Did Jesus, as a fully human man, simply feel closer or more at home with these three men? Did Jesus know that to achieve what each was called to do that they’d need a clear view of the big picture?

While we don’t know why they ended up in these situations, I believe that we can see the impact that their experiences had on them. Peter and James and John ended up dedicating their lives to push forward the Gospel, and these three specifically had an outsized impact on the Church’s future. The totality of what they experienced propelled them into a ministry that dominated their remaining existence. They had a testimony that they felt compelled to share. They saw the most, and what they saw changed them. This, to me, gets at the definition of true faith: an encounter with God so compelling that it changes how you live. Peter and James and John had one of the clearest encounters with God of anyone in the New Testament, and we can trace the impact of that across the rest of their lives.