Transcript
Peter Denies Jesus
Richmond’s First Baptist
March 8, 2026
The Third Sunday of Lent
John 18:12-27
Now Simon Peter was standing and warming himself. They asked him, “You are not also one of his disciples, are you?” He denied it and said, “I am not.”
This morning I’d like to introduce you to your amygdala. That’s A-M-Y-G-D-A-L-A. Don’t worry; there won’t be a test; but I do want the two of you to get acquainted. The amygdala is a tiny, almond-shaped cluster of neurons deep inside your brain, and it has one primary job: to keep you alive.i It’s like a smoke detector. When it senses danger—a loud noise, a sudden movement, a threatening voice—it doesn’t stop to consult your theology or your moral commitments. It acts fast. Faster than conscious thought. It floods your body with adrenaline, quickens your pulse, tightens your muscles, and prepares you to fight, flee, or freeze. Long before your head can think and long before your heart can feel, your amygdala has already decided: Protect yourself. And most of the time, that little survival mechanism is a gift from God. But sometimes it takes us places we never meant to go.
I’m thinking about Peter.
In John 13 Jesus tells his disciples that he is going somewhere they cannot come and Peter asks, “Lord, where are you going?” Jesus answers, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now, but you will follow after.” Peter says, “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.” I picture Jesus turning and looking at Peter for a long moment before saying, “Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly, I tell you, before the cock crows you will have denied me three times.” And if I had been Peter I
would have decided in that very moment that no matter what happened, that wasn’t going to happen:
I wasn’t going to deny my Lord.
But you know the story. After supper Jesus and his disciples went out to the Garden of Gethsemane, where they always went. Judas Iscariot showed up with a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees. Jesus said, “Whom are you looking for?” and they said, “Jesus of Nazareth,” and when he said “I am he” they all fell to the ground. In that moment, apparently, Peter pulled out a sword, swung it, and slashed off the ear of a man named Malchus, a servant of the high priest. It’s as if he were trying to prove how brave he was, how committed to the cause, how ready to fight to the death for Jesus, but Jesus said, “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup the Father has given me?”
And then they led Jesus away to the home of Annas, the father-in-law of Caiphas, who was the high priest that year, and Peter and another disciple followed. Apparently the other disciple had connections; he knew the high priest and was able to get inside the courtyard. Once he did he talked to the woman guarding the gate and asked if his friend could come in, too. She looked at Peter and nodded, but as he was pushing past she said, “You aren’t one of this man’s disciples, are you?”
Before we hear Peter’s answer let’s acknowledge that he has just seen Jesus arrested, bound, and taken into custody; he himself has cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant; and now he’s going into the high priest’s courtyard as the known associate of an accused insurrectionist.
His amygdala would have been blazing.
So when this woman at the gate asks if he is one of Jesus’s disciples, Peter’s amygdala answers before he can. It realizes that association could lead to arrest, arrest
could lead to trial, and trial could lead to crucifixion. His amygdala races down that path instinctively, literally before Peter has time to think, and it answers for him in words he thought he would never utter:
“I am not.”
One of the nicknames for this phenomenon is the “Amygdala Hijack.” Like when a police officer commandeers your car so he can go after a criminal, the amygdala commandeers your body so it can save your life. It gets you to say things and do things you hadn’t even considered. It might even get you to deny your Lord.
Is there any way to override that response? Well, yes. As part of my research last week I learned that “in high-stress professions people train the body until a different response becomes automatic.”ii For example: “commercial pilots spend enormous amounts of time training for situations they hope will never happen. They do this in full-motion flight simulators that recreate emergencies with startling realism. Pilots repeatedly practice scenarios like: engine failure at takeoff, rapid cabin depressurization, electrical system failure, severe icing, hydraulic loss. These simulations are so realistic that pilots’ heart rates spike as if the emergency were real. Why do they do it? Because in a real crisis there is almost no time for careful reasoning. The body floods with adrenaline. Fine cognitive reasoning degrades. So pilots rely on trained procedures. The key phrase in aviation is this: You don’t rise to the level of your expectations. You fall to the level of your training. In other words, the body does what it has practiced.”iii
You may remember this news story: “A few years ago a commercial airliner took off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport and, just minutes into the flight, flew through a flock of geese. Both engines failed almost instantly. Suddenly the aircraft was gliding over the Hudson River with no power. Now imagine the pilot in that moment: alarms sounding, passengers behind him, only seconds to decide what to do. But the
remarkable thing is that the pilot did not panic. He did not freeze. He followed the training he had practiced over and over again in simulators. Step by step he worked the problem, and within a few minutes he had landed that airplane safely on the river. Later people called it a miracle. But the pilot, “Sully” Sullenberger, said, “We just did what we had trained to do.”iv
And that reminds me of something Jesus says in Mark, chapter 8. “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” I’ve thought for years that this was part of Jesus’s genius. He knows we’re afraid of death and so he confronts it head on. He asks us to volunteer to die. And then he invites us to get into the simulator: to practice denying ourselves, taking up our crosses, and following him until it becomes a learned response. It doesn’t mean we won’t be afraid; it only means that our fear won’t keep us from following. As a friend of mine says, “Courage is just doing it scared.”
And you can train yourself to do it scared, like Sully Sullenberger, who landed that airplane on the Hudson River. Like firefighters who rush into burning buildings. Like soldiers who charge up a hill under heavy machine-gun fire. The secret is to train, and train, and train until your training overpowers your amygdala, and that’s why I love Luke’s version of Jesus’s command. In Mark Jesus says, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” In Matthew he says the same thing. But in Luke he says, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me,” so that what was once heroic becomes a habit.
This is the logic behind the classical Christian disciplines. Through the centuries faithful Christians have trained their souls through the practice of prayer, worship, confession, generosity, fasting, and silence. They have done these things so consistently
that they have become habits, and as those habits become more deeply ingrained they become instinct. To put it another way, these disciplines are not primarily about earning God’s favor. They are about rewiring reflexes. Over time they shape what the body and soul do automatically. So, if taking up the cross—volunteering to die—becomes a daily discipline, then you are not surprised in the moment. When someone says, “You aren’t one of this man’s disciples are you?” You say, “You bet your sweet bippy.”v
But Peter doesn’t do that. He hasn’t trained himself to respond that way. He wants to. He promises Jesus, “I will lay down my life for you.” But in the moment all those good intentions are hijacked by an anxious amygdala. And even though he hears himself deny Jesus, something he promised he would never do, he does it again only moments later.
He’s standing there, warming himself by a charcoal fire in the high priest’s courtyard. The others who are there, some of the household slaves and the police who arrested Jesus, can see his face in the firelight. Someone finally says, “You’re not one of his disciples, are you?” And Peter says, “No, I’m not.” But then one of the slaves of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, says, “Didn’t I see you in the Garden with him?” Again, Peter denies it, and in that moment the cock crows.
John doesn’t tell us how Peter responded, but the other evangelists do. In Mark 14:72 we hear that Peter, “broke down and wept.” In Matthew 26:75 we hear that he, “went out and wept bitterly.” In Luke 22:60 the cock crows and in that moment the Lord turns and looks at Peter. It’s heartbreaking! But as one commentator puts it, “That look did not land on a scheming betrayer, but on a terrified friend.” In spite of his failure, Jesus loved Peter. And in spite of his failure—or maybe because of it—I love Peter, too. His story give me hope for my own discipleship.
He was so impulsive! I have the feeling that he wasn’t led by his head or even by his heart so much as by his gut. He did what felt right in here. When Jesus said, “Follow me” Peter would have been the first to drop his net and fall in line. Later, when Jesus comes to the disciples walking on water, Peter says, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Jesus says, “Come,” and Peter actually takes a few slippery steps before he starts sinking down. On the Mount of Transfiguration, when everyone else is dumbstruck by the radiant appearance of Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, Peter says, “Lord, it’s good that we’re here! Let us build three shelters!” In the Garden of Gethsemane he cuts off someone’s ear, in the high priest’s courtyard he denies his Lord, and on one memorable morning on the Sea of Galilee—he jumps out of a boat.
Let’s pause there for a moment.
This story doesn’t actually take place until after Easter, after Jesus has risen from the dead, but I don’t think I can end Peter’s story without it. It’s from John 21, and it begins with the notice that Peter and some of the other disciples are back in Galilee, where they started. Peter says, “I’m going fishing,” which suggests that he is going back to his old way of life. You know what happens: Peter and the other disciples fish all night without catching anything. But then some stranger calls out from the shore, tells them to cast their nets on the other side, and when they do they catch so many fish they can’t pull them in.
One of the disciples, the one Jesus loved, says, “It is the Lord!” and Peter, who has stripped down for work, puts on his clothes and jumps overboard. That sounds just like him. But when he gets to shore he finds not only Jesus, but also a fire made with charcoal (anthrakia)—it’s the only other time in the New Testament that word is mentioned—and the smell of the smoke takes him right back to that night in the high priest’s courtyard. You may have experienced something similar. According to the
experts, “Smell is a powerful trigger for emotional, vivid, and deep-seated memories because the olfactory system is directly connected to the brain’s emotional and memory centers, the amygdala and the hippocampus.”vi As the disciples joined Jesus for breakfast that morning Peter may have been experiencing PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—and Jesus may have noticed.
Because after breakfast he invites Peter to go for a walk, and when it’s just the two of them he says, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” And Peter says, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus says, “Feed my lambs.” And then he asks him a second time: “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He says, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus says, “Tend my sheep.” And then he asks for the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” And it hurts Peter’s feelings. He says, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.” And Jesus says, “Feed my sheep.”
Psychologists have a name for this: they call it “exposure therapy.” The basic idea is simple: fear shrinks when the brain repeatedly encounters the feared situation without catastrophe. So Jesus gets Peter in a place where he can smell the smoke of a charcoal fire. The smell alone is enough to take him back to that night when he denied his Lord three times. But this time Jesus is walking beside him, asking him, “Simon, Son of John, do you love me?” and giving him the chance to give the right answer not once, but three times. Peter doesn’t know it, but he’s in the flight simulator, he’s in that same crisis situation, but this time he is giving the right answer instead of the wrong one until his amygdala has been re-wired. The next time someone asks him, “You aren’t this man’s disciple, are you?” what do you think he’s going to say?
Psychologists call this “fear extinction,” and let’s pause for a moment to imagine that. What if you could do it? What if you could deny yourself and take up your cross every day until your fear of death became extinct? What if you could live your life
without that fear? What if you could profess your faith without that fear? What if you could follow Jesus without that fear? As I said, it’s part of his genius that he asks us to confront that fear head on, and then keep on confronting it until we re-train our instincts and re-wire our amygdalas. Jesus seems to believe that if we could only get over our fear of death we might actually start living.
Imagine that.
—Jim Somerville © 2026
