(Originally published 3/24/14)
In the season of Lent the journey to penitence follows darker paths. We mentally replace our designer jeans and Aeropostale shirts with sackcloth. We replace makeup with a smear of black ash. We lower lights in our souls and give a more careful ear to the doleful strings arrangements in music, and, even though we know we should practice true repentance 365 days a year, we know the value in harkening to it now, while the religious world takes the time to think back on the sufferings of an innocent man who claimed to be God, was killed for it, and who rose from his own grave back to the living.
Along these darker paths we must tread in our Lenten journey we encounter one really infamous character – Judas Iscariot. We’ve all heard of him. He’s all over pop culture: Judas Priest (the band), “the kiss of death” (the expression), and so on. Everyone knows Judas is a name no child ever wants to be given. Even if you’re not a Christian, reading the account in the gospel biographies of the Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) where Jesus was betrayed by Judas will likely bring an indignant reaction. Because even if you yourself can’t acknowledge that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God, the Savior who was given to this world to take all mankind’s sins away, you can’t help but be disgusted with the treachery of one greedy man selling out another very good man.
Judas was a lot of things. From the Biblical account there are lots of spins to put on him. He objected to Mary Magdalene bestowing her precious perfume onto Jesus’ feet when he dined in her presence, selling his objection to the anointing as a plea for conservancy of goods for charitable profit – when in reality he just wanted to embezzle any such profits through his role as treasurer of Jesus’ band of disciples. He was greedy. He was kind of sleezy. He seemed often backhanded. We just don’t get the idea that he belonged and fit the mold of Jesus’ 12 main confidants and mentees. By the time you read of the plot Judas agreed to with the conniving religious leaders who wanted to get Jesus, you find yourself hoping an anvil will fall from the sky and smush Judas in the next chapter instead. And ultimately, after his abominable act of betrayal and ensuing onset of guilt during Jesus’ trial, when he returns his payment and then runs off and hangs himself, you almost feel a bit of relief…maybe a sense of comeuppance.
Maybe you don’t have that reaction with his story. Maybe you haven’t lived around this story your whole life, hearing about it from very young on, in Sunday School, and then studying it at more length through Christian circles, or hearing of it in cookie-cutter Lenten sermons that bemoan Judas’ despicable deeds and black heart. But I do. That’s the take I’ve always had on him.
And it’s so wrong of me.
Judas sold out Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. He allowed his Lord and savior to be hauled in for a blood-thirsty night of injustice, mockery, sucker-punches…and a next-day kangaroo court verdict, vicious flogging, and crucifixion. He allowed it because he couldn’t let the chance to make a few months’ wages worth pass him by.
Did you realize that I do it for far less payment than that, and I do it probably every day? It’s true….to my shame, it’s so true.
When I take that Sunday morning in bed because I’m so fatigued from a longer-than-usual work week in exchange for going to my church to worship and be around my fellow believers, I betray Him.
When I turn the other way and stay silent at work while a handful of coworkers converse mockingly about a Christian value, I betray Him.
When I entertain those thoughts about a female I see in public who’s dressed to kill, knowing that I have a wife who should be all my eyes can see and Jesus gave her specifically to me, I betray Him.
And when I hurt so badly over a heart-breaking event in my life, and I choose to run the other way for comfort, into the arms of rental movies, games, alcohol, or a shopping binge…..guess what – I betray Him.
Jesus was everything for Judas. Jesus is everything for me. His lack of physical, visible presence in my life in the 21st century does not get me off the hook for treating him like Judas did the real-life Savior, in the flesh, over two thousand years ago in that dark Palestinian garden.
Each of us has done this to Jesus. We know him, we say we love him…and maybe we even do. But is it only on a level that’s convenient to us? Is it only in doses that can be washed down when we’d rather chew on some personal vindication or instant gratification instead? When those critical moments come, when the armed guard is marching in and reality holds a blazing torch that casts ominous shadows on the menacing faces of choices we know we ought to make, to fight for Him rather than slink away…what do we do?
We smile at our Savior….we sidle up alongside him, knowing with every pace we take up to his side that He’s about to endure hell on earth, and then hell on the inside, from his tortured perch on the cross, and we say “Hello, Jesus.” The words leave our lips, and we follow it with a kiss, signaling for our comfort, our self-pity, our greed, our lust, our hunger for power or influence among mere men, or our arrogance to rush in and drag him away to be crucified in ignorance all over again.
We’re no better than Judas, brothers and sisters. I’m no better. You’re no better. It’s just that our price is different. It may not shine like silver. It may be subtler. It may have a different exchange rate because we live in a different world. But we too sell out our Savior every day and become Judases of our own.
There is one powerful difference, however. Although our hindsight of this infamous story serves to so often convince us that it’s so obvious that Judas was so terribly wrong for his treachery, it also provides the insight to know that his demise didn’t need to play out as it did. We have the privilege of knowing what Judas should have – that it’s NEVER TOO LATE to run back to Jesus and ask for pardon and mercy. We may betray him each day so badly that we send him all the way back to the courtyard, or even to the top of that hill where the nails are about to be pounded in…but in the last moment we can end it differently by repenting.
And when the treachery has come and gone and we kneel at the feet of the Lord, our dusty and shamed faces traced with tear streaks, we have the chance that Judas robbed himself of – to let Jesus reach down, even with his hands bound and barely able to speak from his bruised mouth, and tilt up our heads to see and hear him say, “I forgive you. This is why I bore all of this weight, my son…my daughter… This is why once, long ago, for all, I staggered and stumbled all the way to Calvary, and stretched myself across the beams, and accepted the searing pain of those nails in my flesh, and let my breaths run shallow and my life gasp out….This is why I stayed on that cross. I did it for you. I did it because God, my Father, never will betray you.”
May those thirty pieces of blood money silver stay in the pockets of the evil, and not venture into my wallet. Yet, when they do, because I have evil within me as well, may I look back up into the eyes of that determined Savior, and know in peace that’s so deep that his forgiveness is for me too…
For me…just another Judas. A forgiven and saved Judas.
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