Brad Sullivan
Palm Sunday
April 14, 2019
Emmanuel, Houston
Mark 14:3-9
Mark 14:1-2,
10-16
Bottom of the Ninth, and Judas Is at the
Mound
It’s the bottom of
the ninth, two outs, two strikes, one runner at first, and you’re ahead by one
run. You’re pitching, and all you have
to do is get one more strike, one more out, and you win the game. You throw the pitch, and crack! Homerun.
Two runs score. You lose. Many would say, “You lost the game,” as the
pitcher in the final moments. I say,
“It’s a team effort, and if the team had been further ahead at that point, the
team wouldn’t have lost.
I don’t usually do
sports analogies, so I hope I didn’t lose anyone there. The basic idea is, we’re pretty good at
picking out scapegoats, pointing fingers at “the one” who messed everything up,
and there is probably no easier scapegoat to pick on than Judas. He’s the one who betrayed Jesus. He’s the one who sold out his Rabbi, his
mentor, his friend. What’s that
about? He’s the one who messed
everything up for everybody, right?
Except of course, scapegoating
Judas? That doesn’t work, for a couple
of reasons. One, Jesus was supposed to
be betrayed, handed over to the authorities, and killed. That was the plan. He was to take our life and our death upon
himself so that we would be united in God even in death.
The other reason
scapegoating Judas doesn’t work is, we’re all in this human team together. We can’t really divorce ourselves from Judas’
betrayal of Jesus. Jesus says that he is
the vine and we are the branches. He
says that humanity is so connected to each other that we are one, and what
harms any one of us harms us all. So,
Judas’ betrayal is all of our betrayal.
Now, when exactly
did any of us see Jesus and betray him?
Well, as Jesus points out in Matthew 25, whenever we’ve betrayed any
human being, the least of human beings, we’ve betrayed Jesus.
Whew! Alright, dark enough for everyone as we start
Holy Week? We good?
The nutso thing
about betrayal is that there are so many ways and kinds of betrayal. Sometimes in a conflict, folks will turn
against the side they had been on and actively choose to join the other side
and fight against former allies. Maybe the betrayer is angry or disillusioned,
seeking revenge or lashing out.
Sometimes the betrayer isn’t trying to fight against his former allies,
but is simply trying to do the right thing, realizing the fight, or the cause,
or the manner of fighting wasn’t good.
The betrayer in this case isn’t angry and isn’t trying to harm his
former allies, and yet they feel no less betrayed.
Sometimes, there’s
no real conflict, and yet a person will be betrayed by another’s actions, even
though the betrayer had no idea he was doing anything against the other. A person does or says something seemingly
innocuous or well-intentioned to a friend and steps in a landmine. The friend feels betrayed by one who had no
idea or intention of betrayal.
Sometimes greed or
need or feeling alone and crushed down by the stresses and anxieties of life
leads to an act of betrayal. There’s no
intent to cause harm, only a desire for self preservation, self soothing, self
centeredness, and all awareness of the harm cause to others is muted, the
ability to even see beyond oneself is gone.
I reckon there are
those of us who can view the betrayer in each of these scenarios with greater
and lesser degrees of compassion. Towards
some we feel sympathy and even empathy.
Towards others, our ire is so great that we would find ourselves
betraying them, seeking or desiring some kind of vengeance or ill will toward
them. We’ve all got it, that anger or
hurt that can lash out at the person or group of people we see as a scapegoat,
as the one who blew it for everybody.
So what about
Judas? Where is he in this realm of
betrayers? Angry and vengeful? Convinced and convicted that he was doing the
right thing, that Jesus really was dangerous and needed to be stopped? Was Judas overcome by fear at the very real
threats to his own life and the lives of all Jesus’ followers? Was he overcome by fears of Rome, that they
might destroy Israel if Jesus was seen as some new revolutionary? Was he just greedy as John would suggest?
Ultimately, we have
no idea. We have different Gospel
writers giving different portrayals of Judas, each with greater and lesser
degrees of compassion towards him. Our
challenge with Judas is not to scapegoat him, but to see ourselves in him and
to see our acts of betrayal in his act of betrayal.
Why?
Because of what God
does with betrayal. God takes the
ugliness and death of betrayal and turns it into new life, into something
beautiful. We see God’s grace and love
in his response to betrayal through Jesus’ actions in Mark’s Gospel. Immediately after Judas betrays Jesus, Jesus
starts making dinner plans with his disciples.
He knows Judas betrayed him, and yet he doesn’t stop it. He doesn’t kick Judas out. He arranges his dinner plans like nothing has
happened and has Judas join him with the rest of the disciples for dinner like
nothing had happened. Judas was part of
the meal. Judas was part of the
body. Nothing changed that. As Paul wrote, “nothing can separate us from
the love of God in Jesus Christ.
We’ll see over the
coming week the beauty of what God does with betrayal, the promise of new life
that God sees in all of our betrayals.
We’ll see that God needs no scapegoat, and therefore neither do we. We don’t
need to blame the pitcher for losing the game. We take our wins and our losses together, and
we find we’re not even alone on the pitcher’s mound because we’re all in this
thing together. We are one, together in
each other and together in God, and God is greater than our betrayals, greater
than our losses and our victories.
Our challenge is to
believe that, to believe that God is greater than our losses and our victories,
to believe that God is greater than our many betrayals. Without God, we are left scapegoating each
other or left as the scapegoat; we’re left as the betrayer or the
betrayed. We know what that looks
like. It’s ugly and full of death.
With God, there is the
promise of new life, with and through betrayal, God gives grace and love,
transforming betrayal into something beautiful.
We don’t always know what that’s going to look like, so we trust, and
wait, and keep on returning to God and each other. We return over and over again and see what
beautiful new thing God is going to do.
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