“The Trouble with Judas” – June 2, 2013
Text: Matthew 26
(selected verses) and Matthew 27:1-5
One of the
many things they don’t teach you in seminary is how to gracefully ask someone
to take the role of Judas in the Passion Narrative during Holy Week.
As a pastor I always cringe at the
idea that I have to call up someone and ask them: “Will you be Judas?” without wondering if they are thinking that maybe I am secretly thinking: “you’re perfect
for the part.”
I have
gotten around this dilemma many times by casting the most unlikely people as
Judas (or at least asking the ones I know won’t take it personally): John Ames read the part of Judas this past
Holy Week and in previous years I have asked that “saint” of the church, none
other than the Rev. Jules Scheidel, to play Judas. NO ONE is in danger of confusing the two!
But in all honesty,
who among us wants to be known as “Judas”?
Over the past two thousand years his name has become synonymous with human
betrayal, greed, evil. [i]
If we’re
going to get compared with a disciple, we may identify with “doubting Thomas,”
or “impetuous Peter” – not so bad. But
Judas the betrayer?
Of the 22
times that Judas Iscariot is mentioned by name in the gospels, most often his
name is followed by some description such as:
“Judas Iscariot, the one who would betray him” or “Judas Iscariot, the
traitor” or as the King James Version has him:
“Judas Iscariot, the son of perdition.”
Judas
doesn’t start out as a traitor of course. Although we actually know very little about
him. We don’t know his background (other than being the son of a man named
Simon). And while there is lots of speculation about what “Iscariot” means
(whether it identified his home village, or indicated some now-lost explanation
for his profession), the fact is the meaning of the word “Iscariot” is lost in
time.
So we don’t know where he’s from,
what he was doing before he started following Jesus, or even how he first
encountered Jesus to begin with, or what it was Judas might have heard or seen
in Jesus that would motivate him to “leave everything behind” as all the
disciples did when they followed Jesus.
We know none of that.
Judas is
simply “one of the Twelve” – as the gospels describe him (when they aren’t
calling him “traitor”.
As “one of
the Twelve,” there is nothing in the gospels until the end that would indicate
that Judas was anything other than an obedient disciple of Jesus Christ. Like the other eleven, he was called by
Jesus, commissioned to preach and heal and given authority to “cast out
demons.”[ii] And from everything the gospels tell us all
of the 12 were successful, including Judas.
And the rest must have trusted him, because they made him the treasurer.
So what
happened?
Maybe that
is why Judas got more votes than either Herod the Great or Pontius Pilate in
this first week of the Summer Bible Challenge.
We want to
understand what happened.
Did Jesus
just make a mistake and choose the wrong disciple?
Or did
Judas simply do it for the money?
Maybe he
was a “spy” who had been working for the authorities for a long time to find a
way to trap Jesus.
Or maybe Judas
felt Jesus’ message was off track and Judas really was angry about money wasted that could have been given to the
poor.
Or maybe, as
in the Gnostic “Gospel of Judas” – written in perhaps the 4th
century – Judas was asked by Jesus to hand him over to the authorities so that
in dying Jesus could be freed from the prison of his own flesh.[iii]
Or maybe Judas was simply afraid
for his own life and if Jesus and the rest were all going down, maybe Judas had
found a way out for himself.
All of
these have been proposed at one time or another as reasons why Judas betrayed
Jesus, although the gospels themselves give no such clear clues to Judas’s
motivation other than to suggest it was to “fulfill Scripture” – an explanation
that is often how the gospel writers tried to understand things which had
happened.
In the end, all we know is that one
of the twelve, named Judas, handed Jesus over to the authorities who then arranged
for Jesus to be condemned to death.
Judas then died a sudden, violent death (exactly how is not certain
which is why there are 2 different explanations in Scripture).
And finally, according to the
gospels, Judas’s name is associated with a place near Jerusalem called “the
Field or Acreage of Blood.”[iv]
Twenty centuries of speculation
later and we are no closer to understanding Judas.
Or maybe it’s that 20 centuries
later, we are no closer to understanding ourselves and understanding our own
ability to betray, to forget, to fail. [v]
History …
and society … are not kind to those who betray those who are closest to
them. We know for ourselves that when
the bonds of trust that bind us are broken, they are very difficult to
repair. Betrayal can destroy families, marriages,
communities, and churches, even nations.
And yet, if
we are honest with ourselves we all know that we have the capacity to betray –
something even the other disciples may have felt themselves when Jesus claimed
that one of the Twelve would betray him.
All of their own anxieties surfaced as they rushed to ask him: “Is it I, Lord?” “Is it I?” “Surely it is not I, Lord!”
The
betrayal of Judas seems so stark and cruel:
after all, Judas sat at that last supper with Jesus and took the bread
and wine from him – then went out and betrayed him for 30 pieces of
silver. According to John’s gospel Judas
had his feet washed by Jesus and yet only hours later betrayed him to the
Romans with a kiss.
On the other hand, the rest of the
disciples were convinced that they
would never betray him, yet it took only a few hours until the disciples began
to fail him.
Running away when he was arrested.
No one went to defend him when he
was on trial.
Peter denied 3 times he even knew
Jesus.
And when Jesus had been crucified
and he died on the cross, not one of those other eleven who were the closest to
him would even go to prepare his body for burial.
In the end,
all of them failed.
That too is
the lesson of Holy Week: that sooner or
later every disciple will betray Jesus.
Even us.
And in the end, for me, as I look
at Judas, the lesson is not about the inevitability of events that God has
somehow already determined, but for me the lesson of Judas it is about who we are as human beings with our
inevitable capacity for both love and betrayal, for success and failure, our
willingness to follow Jesus but all of the ways in which we don’t.
As someone
said about us: “We will betray Jesus in the workplace [or at school … or maybe even
among our friends] when it will cost too much to think like a Christian, and in
our homes [we will betray Jesus] when the anger is so great that we hurt those
who trust us, and [we will betray him] in the sacred commitments we make that
we simply cannot keep. We will betray
Jesus by our indifference to the poor, by our refusal to turn the other cheek
to our enemies, and by the deaf ears we turn to [Jesus’ call to live our lives
to the glory of God and not to the glory of ourselves.]”[vi]
So in the
end, maybe the question is, as it was for Judas, what will we do with our
betrayal?
The trouble
with Judas may be that he saw no other way. The gospels tell us that after
Judas realized what he had done, he felt remorse and “repented.” The word “repent” simply means “to
turn.” But when Judas repented, he
didn’t turn to the one who could have offered him forgiveness. Judas was not
there at the cross to hear Jesus say, “Father, forgive them.” But he turned
instead to the ones who had paid him the “blood money” to begin with – he turned
to where there was no forgiveness to be found – and so he found none.
Peter and
the other disciples, on the other hand, in their grief, lived with the
awareness of their own betrayal and cowardice, lived with the guilt and remorse
until the day they encountered the risen Savior, the only One who could offer
them forgiveness – and new life.
In the
world according to Judas, it is a world where there is no forgiveness. The trouble with Judas is that in his world,
there is only our sin and brokenness and all of our vain efforts to make things
right on our own, with no way out. He had forgotten or never understood that
there is and can be and will be another way.
Because in the world of Jesus,
crucifixion ends in resurrection. Betrayal and failure is met with forgiveness.
And in the gospel of Christ, there is
always grace and God’s unfailing love and mercy that is fresh as the morning
and as sure as the sunrise[vii]
… making all things new, creating a new ending to our lives.
So where will we turn?
[i] To the shame of our Christian tradition Judas became a
central focus for anti-Semitism as he became the image of everything and anyone
opposed to the Christian Church.
[iii] More information on the Gospel of Judas can be found
at: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2006/05/judas-gospel/cockburn-text.html This ancient 3rd or 4th century Egyptian
text is from the “Gnostic” tradition. The word Gnosis derives from Greek
and connotes "knowledge" or the "act of knowing". In the
first century of the Christian era the term “Gnostic” came to denote a
heterodox segment of the diverse new Christian community. Among early followers
of Christ it appears there were groups who delineated themselves from the
greater household of the Church by claiming not simply a belief in Christ and
his message, but a "special witness" or revelatory experience of the
divine. It was this experience or gnosis that set the true follower of
Christ apart, so the Gnostics claimed. [from www.gnosis.org] By the 5th
century, orthodox Christianity had declared Gnosticism a “heresy.” A manuscript
of “The Gospel of Judas” surfaced in about 1978 and has since been
authenticated, translated and published in 2006 – although the translations are
continuing to be revised. This
apocryphal Gospel had been known about in history, but no copy had ever been
seen. The National Geographic magazine
has helped to provide the funding for its restoration and translation. There
have been some scholarly disputes with the National Geographic that they have
mistranslated some sections and sensationalized the contents.
[v] I am indebted for these insights from an article in
the Christian Century (February 27-March 6, 2002, p.21) by Craig Barnes entitled “The Judas Chromosome.”
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