Seventh Sunday after Easter – 28 May 2006
St. Paul Lutheran Church, ABQ NM – The Rev. Hal Nilsson
Acts 1, John 17
There are names that evoke an immediate, even visceral reaction: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden. Or for that reaction among Norwegians of my age or older, mention the name Quisling. History is replete, of course, with such names: Nero, Attila the Hun, Ivan the Terrible. Each in his time was guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity. Each used his power capriciously to strike fear into the hearts of his people. Each left behind misery and destruction and death. Each has been called the embodiment of evil.
I daresay that in Christian history, Judas has been in this company. Judas, Jesus’ betrayer. Judas, the apostle who delivered Jesus into the hands of the crowd—into the hands of soldiers, says John’s gospel. Judas, the catalyst who caused the death of the Savior. Through the centuries Judas Iscariot has been pitied and vilified.
Somewhat by coincidence, there is a convergence of attention on Judas these days. Our first reading from Acts recounts the replacement of Judas in the circle of the apostles, a reading that incidentally omits verses that describe his tragic and ignominious death. The gospel reading in which Jesus prays for his followers—then and now—has a provocative comment about Judas, a phrase that gives one pause: He is described as “the one destined to be lost.” In addition to the biblical material, you’ve perhaps seen the publicity surrounding the recently discovered Gospel of Judas. National Geographic aired a special about the writing a few weeks ago (which the adult forum will view and discuss starting next Sunday), and has published a couple of books to accompany the TV documentary. While its earnings will nowhere rival the Da Vinci Code’s, National Geographic obviously intends to profit from this story.
Although the ancient church leader Irenaeus took issue with a Gospel of Judas in 180 AD, a papyrus manuscript of this writing was found only around 1978 in Egypt. It further crumbled for years in a safe deposit box in New York, and underwent restoration and translation in Geneva only in the last five years. The Gospel of Judas makes the rather stunning claim that Judas’ betrayal was not a bad thing, it was a good thing. Moreover, Jesus not only approves of it, but urges Judas to carry it out.
Well, the convergence raises all kinds of questions—about good and evil, about responsibility and accountability, about free-will and determinism, even about what it means to be human. Did Judas act from his own initiative, or was he “destined” to betray Jesus? Was he a misguided, tragic figure, or strangely, even a hero? Underlying all this, we have to ask, of course, where we fit in the matrix of evil. As M. Scott Peck said in the introduction to his People of the Lie, his book that analyzed human evil, this is a dangerous subject.1 To probe the dark side of the human condition is unsettling, even frightening. But if faith gives us the confidence to do anything, it is to peer deeply into the dark, for indeed, the light shines in the darkness.
Actually, the gospels of the New Testament are not uniform in the way they present Judas. He is, of course, one of the twelve that Jesus invited to be in his inner circle. Mark, the first of the gospels to be written, attributes no particular motive to Judas. He is not promised any money for his defection until after he’s made the decision to do it. He is described simply the one who “handed over” Jesus. It is in Mark that we first hear Jesus say at the last supper that one of those eating with him will betray him. He goes on to say that this is all happening according to a plan, but woe to the person carries out the act. It would have been better if that person had never been born.
Matthew makes Judas out to be more perverse. Here money is his motive. “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” he asks the chief priests. And although he’s put his plan into action, he comes back for the supper and, when Jesus says one there will betray him, Judas brazenly asks, “Surely not I, Rabbi?” In contrast, Matthew’s Jesus is gentle and generous with Judas. In the garden Jesus says, “Friend, what are you doing here?” There’s not a hint of sarcasm or judgment in that word “friend.” And it is Matthew’s gospel that tells us that the next day, in his remorse, Judas threw the money back at the priests and went out and hanged himself.
Luke adds more detail to this picture. In this gospel, Judas betrays Jesus not because he was greedy, but because Satan had entered into him. This fits with Luke’s notion that the devil left Jesus for a season now to return, and through one of the twelve, Satan will now bring the conflict between God and Satan to a decisive stage. Also in Luke, Jesus knows his betrayer is present at the last supper, but he doesn’t expose that person during the meal. Instead, a dispute breaks out during the meal about who is the greatest. Maybe it’s Luke’s way of saying that the act of betrayal isn’t restricted to one person alone. We need to add today’s first reading to Luke’s picture, because Luke and Acts come from the same author. Scripture was fulfilled through the deeds of Judas, Peter says in his speech, which implies that Judas wasn’t entirely free to act or not. The verses left out of the reading on your bulletin say that Judas expressed no remorse. He took the money, bought a small farm, and died on that land from an intestinal rupture.
John’s gospel is usually thought to have been the last of the gospels to be written, probably near the end of the first century. John may well reflect some of the attitudes and controversies that Christians dealt with at that time. At any rate Judas comes across in the fourth gospel as an even more sinister, evil character. Early on in the story, long before Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, Jesus says of Judas that “he is of the devil.” It is in this gospel that Judas is identified as the disciples’ greedy treasurer who embezzled money from their common fund. (Shades of the court decisions last week.) And then in today’s reading we have the line that Judas was destined to be lost, or as it reads in the Greek, “not one of them was lost except the son of destruction [or perdition] who must be lost, for scripture has to be fulfilled.” In the arrest scene in the garden that happens soon thereafter, Judas comes across as an actor merely playing his part. (I have to say up front that I am troubled by the notion that any person is predetermined to be evil, and that he or she has no say in the matter. That makes the Creator out to be a cruel, deceptive manipulator, and, frankly, I can’t believe in that kind of God.)
Whatever the source of Judas’ character and motives, it didn’t take long for the church after the New Testament period to further vilify and demonize him. One writing from the second century has an even more gruesome and detailed account of his death. Another legend from that time claims that already in early childhood Judas was possessed by the devil. Yet another describes Jesus rebuking Judas in hell. Later Judas was used to fuel the fires of anti-Semitism. To this day in Germany you cannot name child Judas.2 There’s no question—Judas is a tragic figure. Whether he acted out of a well-intentioned but naïve notion that Jesus was a danger to society, or out of selfish greed, his betrayal set in motion the series of events that ended in Jesus’ death. Whether perversely evil or simply misguided, one cannot help but feel sad for him.
I wonder if one reason Judas has been so despised is that he symbolizes that in ourselves we don’t want to face. History is littered with examples of blaming others for the darkness we harbor within—be those others Jews, or Irish, or Poles, or Muslims, or immigrants. I suspect we are not universally convinced of the scriptural words we repeat in confession, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”3
Judas is an enigma, maybe not unlike the enigma that each of us is. As St. Paul put it so accurately, we do not do the good we want, but the evil we do not want is what we do. We are bound and free, trapped and yet accountable. We are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves, and yet bear responsibility for what we have done, and left undone. We live in this gray zone.
Even if it’s true that we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, you have to say that some sins have a much greater destructive impact than others. Think of Michael Astorga’s killing of Deputy McGrane in Tijeras a while back. As Reinhold Niebuhr once put it, there is “equality of sin and inequality of guilt.4” Nonetheless, God’s forgiveness is stronger than sin. Any sin. There is more mercy in God than there is evil in us. If there’s a sermon in all this, it is here. Grace is the first word in the vocabulary of this church. More than anything else, compassion marks the character of God. William Sloane Coffin, who died just a few weeks ago, put this fact in his typically colorful language: “God’s love is poured out universally from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet.5” So is it too much to suggest that whatever Judas did, he too was covered by Jesus’ prayer from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”? Not if I want to be hopeful. Not if I want to stand in this gracious understanding of the gospel we’ve inherited as Lutherans.
What, then, about the recently found Gospel of Judas? What kind of logic asserts that Judas’ complicity with the high priests was a good thing? I don’t want to short circuit the conversation Jim Bowman is leading on the next Sundays, but since I know that you won’t all be there, a few comments might not hurt.
The Gospel of Judas (which was not written by Judas) is a Gnostic writing. (The Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary are a couple of other ancient writings in this genre.) Gnosticism, from the word for “knowledge,” was a popular movement in the second century of Christianity. Gnostics believed there were two gods. Gnostics were hostile toward the God of the Old Testament, the creator God and thus the God of all materials things including the body. Physical existence is the realm of corruption and error brought into being by a malevolent creator. Salvation and truth are found by escaping from the body. This saving knowledge (gnosis) is revealed to the elect by the true God, the God of the New Testament. In this case the elect one, the one who is given special insight, is Judas. Only Judas understands; the other disciples are ignorant. He has spiritual knowledge the others lack.
By going to the authorities and paving the way to Jesus’ death on the cross, Judas is helping Jesus’ spirit escape from his body. That’s the likely explanation of one of the most interesting lines in the Gospel of Judas: Jesus secretly says, “You [Judas] will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” What is going to die is not the divine spark in Jesus but only his external body, “the man that clothes [him].” As the Gnostics saw it, Judas was helping Jesus reach a blessed state.6
The Gnostic approach to Christianity is interesting, and has had a certain minority following all through the centuries. But it did not become the normative, accepted viewpoint. Some claim that happened because “orthodox” leaders held the power and treated Gnostics in a heavy-handed, discriminatory way, destroying their writings, even killing their leaders in order to carry out a political agenda.
But there are more compelling reasons why the Christian faith took hold as we have received it through the Old and New Testaments, and the historic creeds and confessions. People of faith discerned that the creation is good, not evil. This world, teeming with life, is beautiful. It’s not to be escaped, but valued, and cared for. The God who created it is generous and compassionate, not malevolent. The story of the Son of God coming into this life, “deep in the flesh,” as Luther put it, shows that God walks with us in all our confusion, ambiguity and suffering. Finally, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus proclaim that it’s not what we know but what has been done for us that meets our need. You don’t have to go out and discover the ultimate meaning of your life. It’s offered to you and me, to all of humanity, not to a select few. In the final analysis, it was the absence of God’s unconditional grace and love that set gnosticism outside the boundary of normative Christianity.
In commenting on the Gospel of Judas, one wit asked who we should thank for our salvation, Judas or Jesus?7 I’ll take Jesus. And you?
1 Peck, M.D., M. Scott, People of the Lie. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1983
2 Noted by William Klassen in the National Geographic TV documentary.
3 1 John 1:8
4 Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Man. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941, 1964. Vol. 1, “Human Nature,” pp. 219ff.
5 Coffin, William Sloane, Credo. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, p. 6.
6 Material for the last two paragraphs is from “The Lost Judas,” a book review article by Luke Timothy Johnson, The Christian Century, May 16, 2006, pp. 34-36.
7 See “Is Judas Our Real Savior?” by Ted Peters, available from the website of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, www.plts.edu.