In Peter’s denial of Jesus, Peter fully understood the risk in that dangerous moment of being identified with Jesus. It was a risk he was not ready to take. In order to save his neck, he denied any connection to Jesus—three times! 

He denied it, saying, “I do not know or understand what you are talking about.

But again he denied it.

I do not know this man you are talking about 

(Mark 14:66-72; see Matthew 26:69-75, Luke 22:54-62, John 18:15-18, 35-27).

All four gospel accounts attest his denial. The reality in front of Peter was too dangerous. He lied to save his neck. Of course, his denials did not work for him, but for the moment he was safe.

As I thought about this narrative episode, I happened on to States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (2001) by Stanley Cohen. Cohen is concerned with the way, in our contemporary world, we find it easier or safer to deny the brutality that is so pervasive among us. He outlines a “sociology of denial” (xiii) and provides an inventory of modes of denial that run from lying to offering justification:

But we were immediately thrown into the politics of denial. The official and mainstream response was venomous: outright denial (it doesn’t happen); discrediting (the organization was biased, manipulated, or gullible); renaming (yes, something does happen, but it is not torture); and justification (anyway ‘it’ was morally justified) (xi). 

His book concerns the variety of strategies for avoiding the powerful reality of the world that is in front of us.

As you might expect, the long reach of connection between the narrative of Peter and the inventory of Cohen got me thinking about instances of denial in the Bible. I could readily think of the following, though you might think of other, better instances.

In the Old Testament, I cite denials around the harsh reality of the exile, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the deportation of leading inhabitants of the city.

1.   At the end of “First Isaiah,” the prophet Isaiah declares to King Hezekiah:

Days are coming when all that is in your house, and that which your ancestors have stored up until this day, shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left, says the Lord. Some of your own sons who are born to you shall be taken away; they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon (Isaiah 39:6-7).

The prophetic verdict is astonishing concerning the society and sons of the king. Hezekiah, however, does not flinch from the reality, but instead responds to the prophet with inexplicable equilibrium. He responds as though he had not heard:

The word of the Lord that you have spoken is good.” for he thought, “There will be peace and security in my days” (v. 8).

The king’s response is indeed an act of denial. He does not want to face the coming reality, even if it is a word from the Lord. He calculates that he can get by without acknowledgement of what the prophet has just said.

2.   The poem of Lamentations 1 is an elegy on the lips of the city of Jerusalem that is now laid waste by Babylon. In the midst of an extended expression of grief concerning its ruin, the city asks the other nations who pass by:

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?

Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow,

which was brought upon me,

which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger (Lamentations 1:12).

The subject is sorrow over unbearable loss. But the question is:

Is it nothing to you?

Does it matter to you? Have you noticed? It is always a comfort to have others notice our loss. Jerusalem hopes that the other nations would acknowledge its deathly loss. The nations, however, do not pause to answer.  In substance, nonetheless, their answer is, “No, your loss is nothing to us.”  The nations are able to deny the trouble in Jerusalem. The other peoples are indifferent to such violence and suffering beyond their own borders. These indifferent, unnoticing nations are typical of the way in which we turn away from violence that occurs elsewhere. They do not need to notice.

3.   A less pertinent but nonetheless interesting case is in Zephaniah 1:12. As social circumstances grew more ominous for Jerusalem in the Babylonian period (Zephaniah 1:10-11), the inhabitants of the city, so says the prophet, were complacent in their self-indulgence as they rested in their drink. They were in something of a stupor about their circumstance. They assumed that God would have no real say in their future. They imagined there was no jeopardy in which they lived. They were blind to every coming disaster:

Their wealth shall be plundered,

and their houses laid waste.

Though they build houses,

they shall not inhabit them;

though they plant vineyards,

they shall not drink wine from them (v. 13).

They live in denial because, as far as they could notice, these are “the good times.” The sum of these three texts (to which others can be readily added) is that the inhabitants of Jerusalem were taken by the reassuring ideology of temple and king, and could not imagine, in their narcotized condition, any trouble to come.

As the Old Testament pivots around the exile, destruction, and displacement, so the New Testament pivots around the reality of Jesus. Here are three texts I thought of as practices of denial.

1.   In the parable of Matthew 25:31-46, the ones “on the left hand” were out of touch with reality. The claim of the parable is that “the king” (Jesus) is fully identified with and is present to the needy. The ones condemned in the parable failed to notice this identification, precisely because they had in purview a Messiah who would be triumphant, not one in solidarity with the vulnerable.  Thus their denial is declared, “We did not see you.” We did not notice your presence. We did not understand your linkage to the needy:

Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you? (v. 44).

That is, they denied the genuine identity of Jesus, and so they failed to perceive their true circumstance or their true interest.

2.   In the parable of Luke 10:25-37, neither the priest nor the Levite noticed a neighbor in need:

Now by chance a priest was going down the road; when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, he passed by on the other side (vv. 31-32).

In both cases, they saw the man left half dead. But they did not notice or acknowledge him. They easily and readily disregarded him and safely passed by. By contrast the Samaritan saw the suffering man and “was moved to pity” (v. 33). The priest and the Levite had no time to acknowledge, had no energy to care, and no capacity for compassion. The parable affirms “the one who showed him mercy” (v. 37). Denial is the withholding mercy (pity, compassion). Denial is the inability or unwillingness to have our lives disturbed or interrupted by the suffering of the neighbor.

3.   Perhaps the most interesting and important act of denial in the New Testament of which I can think is the response of Pilate, the Roman governor, who had Jesus standing before him– or rather, who stood before Jesus in the delicate narrative of the Fourth Gospel (John 18:28-19:16). There is ample reason to conclude that the governor knew at least that Jesus was a threat to his authority; or perhaps he knew more than that as he saw Jesus before him:

I find no case against him (19:4).

I find no case against him (19:6).

But in just that moment of judgment, the governor vacillated. He weighs in that moment the tension between what he sees and knows, and the mighty power and prestige of his office. And so he turns what he surely knows into an abdicating question:

What is truth (18:38)?

The governor knows the truth; that truth, however, collides with his power:

The confrontation between Jesus and Pilate underscores the great gulf between political realism and Realpolitik. Realpolitik is politics with an accent upon the primacy of power over truth. Political realism is politics with the accent on the primacy of truth over power (Paul Lehmann, The Transfiguration of Politics (1975), 56)

Pilate finally chose power and is willing to forego what he knows to be the truth of the matter.

In each of these six cases, it may well be that the truth is indeed known:

• Hezekiah hears reality from the prophet, but he cannot entertain it.

• The nations know about the loss in Jerusalem, but cannot acknowledge it.

• The listeners to the prophets know better, but cannot have their self-indulgence interrupted.

• The ones “on the left” know the truth about Jesus and the needy, but it is too expensive to make the connection.

• The priest and the Levite in the parable “saw” the needy man, but turned away without acknowledging his pain.

• The Roman governor knew, but could not admit it, for admission would entail the displacement of his own authority.

In each case, the protagonist chose to deny rather than to acknowledge. Each of the cases well fits into Cohen’s sociology of denial. These cases are worth our attention, because they provide glimpses and a mirror into our own propensity:

Not to bother—Hezekiah;

Not to notice—the nations;

Not to care—Jerusalem;

Not to acknowledge—those on the left;

Not to pause—the priest and the Levite;

Not to decide—the governor.

So why do each of these subjects respond as each does? And why do we respond to suffering in denial? Perhaps,

• because we ourselves are implicated in the suffering, and cannot afford to recognize our involvement in it;

• because we have a vested interest in things as they are, and to acknowledge disrupts the way things are;

• because we do not want to be inconvenienced or disturbed by reality, or

• because if we notice, we will be summoned to care and to act; we prefer our passive acceptance of the world as the way we wish it were. Cohen summarizes our pervasive reality of denial:

There are also micro-cultures of denial within particular institutions. The “vital lies” sustained by families and the cover-ups within government bureaucracies, the police or the army are again neither personal nor the result of official instruction. The group censors itself, learns to keep silent about such matters whose open discussion would threaten its self-image. States maintain elaborate myths (such as the Israeli army’s “purity of arms,” which asserts that force is used only when morally justified for self-defense); organizations depend on forms of concerted ignorance, different levels of the system keeping themselves uninformed about what is happening elsewhere. Telling the truth is taboo; it is snitching, whistle blowing, giving comfort to the enemy (Cohen, 11).

To notice and acknowledge, as Cohen has it following Havel, is to “live outside the lie”:

• When the Hebrew slaves broke the denial of their status as slaves and noticed their own pain, they were required and motivated to depart Pharaoh’s Egypt, in order to live outside the lie in the wilderness.

• The people around Jesus were invited out of the lie of the empire into an alternative world that he called “the kingdom of God.” Entry into that alternative world meant to follow him in discipleship, and to reject the security provisions on offer from state religion and from the empire.

• And now we, in our shattered world, are summoned to notice and acknowledge the wholesale suffering evoked by capitalist, militarist, technological governance. We, in the orbit of Moses and Jesus, are invited to live outside the lie.

The work is to tell the truth that exposes the pain of the world we so readily deny:

The point of “consciousness raising” (feminist, political, human rights) is to combat the numbing effects of this type of denial. Assertions such as “I didn’t really know what happened to the Kurds in Iraq” call for radical changes in the media and political culture rather than tinkering with private, psychological mechanisms. We must make it difficult for people to say that they “don’t know.” Amnesty once prefaced a report with these words by Arthur Miller: “Amnesty, with its stream of documented reports from all over the world, is a daily, weekly, monthly, assault on denial” (Cohen, 11).

This summons to respond to denial is urgently important in our world. Miller’s phrase, “daily…assault on denial” is no doubt the urgent accent. In a socio-economic world committed to denial and cover up, the work of daily assault is an active, demanding obligation. To be sure, there are a host of such truth-telling efforts alongside that of Amnesty. These might include schools and universities, and some aspects of the media; this is so even if many schools and universities and much of the media collude in the denial. Among these agents of daily assault, it will be important that the church be engaged in that daily assault on denial, precisely because it is the truth, and only the truth, that can make us free. So imagine that the work entrusted to the church—along with allies—is the work of truth-telling that is invitation to a “more excellent way.” Imagine that a local congregation is a daily truth-teller that lives outside the lives of that truth that is hard to take and most unwelcome among us. The church has always two truths to tell at the same time:

1.   It may, along with many allies, tell the truth about the world in its pathological reality. That is not truth that is easy to hear, and it is not easy to tell.

2.   It may, in a singular way entrusted only to the church and the synagogue, tell the truth about the God of the gospel, who stands over against our world of violence and suffering, and who stands ready in generosity to offer us an alternative world of abundance.

We in the church often tell that second truth without telling the first truth. Or we may tell the first truth of the world, but only mumble about the second truth of the God of the gospel. Both truths must be told at the same time, neither without the other. It is the first truth that saves us from illusion; it is the second truth that saves us from despair.

Before he finishes, Cohen goes on to consider how to live in the truth apart from denial. He provides an inventory of strategies for truth-telling through which acknowledgement opposes denial

• self-knowledge;

• moral witness;

• blowing the whistle; and

• living outside the lie. (255)

That work is hard and long-running, and requires great, sustained intentionality. It is nonetheless the work upon which our future wellbeing depends. It is possible that the church can participate in that good work. Such participation, however, requires that the church give up its role of legitimating and blessing the more comfortable, comforting world of illusion into which we so easily fall. For the church to do the work means to rediscover what it means that the Lord of the church is indeed the crucified one whose work was to give himself away in compassion for the world. This self-giving of God perfectly contradicts the self-keeping that propels and funds most of our denial.