Beloved Betrayers

A striking feature of this morning’s text, in which Jesus commands his disciples to love one another, is where John locates it: he puts it between two accounts of betrayal. Jesus speaks these words right after Judas goes out into the night on his mission to betray Jesus to arrest and death. And in the verses immediately following today’s lesson Jesus deflates an overconfident Peter: “before sunrise you will have denied me three times” (John 13.38b). In the dark of this night Jesus talks to his disciples of love and glory, yet he is surrounded by betrayal. His friends will not love him, they’ll abandon him and deny him. I suspect that to understand what Jesus means when he gives this new command we need to hear it against this background. Jesus commands us to love one another, not in some imaginary world where we are reliably loving and trustworthy, but in this world, where if there is to be love at all, it can be only in the face of broken trust, a way to live with those who fail us, wrong us, hurt us. Jesus knows that soon enough his disciples will know what Judas has done, and despise him for it. In a moment he’ll tell Peter that he’s not that different from Judas; he’ll betray Jesus too. It’s here that he tells them to love one another. Whatever love they can have for one another lies ahead, taking the form of forgiveness. The love Jesus commands cannot be separated from what he commands us to ask when we pray: Forgive our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

The central event of Ian McEwen’s novel Atonement occurs when precocious 13-year old Briony Tallis, acting in a confusion of motives clear not even to her, but not without jealousy and spite, tells a lie that effectively ruins the lives of her sister Cecilia and of Robbie Turner, a friend of the Tallis family with whom Cecilia is in love. The rest of the novel is a prolonged meditation on the final impossibility of making right a horrendous injustice, on the futile hope for forgiveness in the face of the unforgivable. Years later Briony, realizing the enormity of what she has done and her utter inability to repair the damage says: “The only conceivable solution would be for the past never to have happened” (272). Forgiveness can lie beyond our capacities despite our best intentions. Human beings can find themselves in the dark night where atonement cannot be made, where there is no possibility of love.

In another novel, Thomas Berger’s Changing the Past, the nondescript main character Walter Hunsicker is given the opportunity to live his life over again, to select a different and better life than the one he has lived up to now. He chooses, and tries out other lives: as a Donald Trump, as a great writer, as a famous comedian, as a talk radio psychologist and First Gentleman of the United States. Predictably, in the end he realizes he doesn’t want to erase the past; he wants to go back to his own life with its mistakes and sorrows and inescapable losses, to his own wife and to his son dying of AIDS: the past not undone but redeemed with forgiving love for them and the commitment to a shared future with them, come what may.

The God who comes to us in Jesus does not undo the past; he forgives it. He resurrects it. The betrayal, the doubt and anguish, the arrest and crucifixion are not undone. Death is not denied, but it is defeated; the tomb is empty, the disciples who betrayed and lost Jesus are found by him. Later in John’s Gospel (21.15-19) there’s that wonderful scene where the resurrected Jesus confronts Peter, but not as a triumphant victor ready to mete out vengeance on those who betrayed him. There is no recrimination, no judgment, no examination of past failure and shame, no attempt to make good; just the probing question: “Do you love me?” Jesus forgives Peter; that means he is inviting him to go forward with him into the new life his life, death and resurrection open for him. For forgiveness is not really about the past, but the future. To accept God’s forgiveness is to accept God’s completely unconditional and open-ended offer of a future with him, the life to come, the life already present as we love one another, forgiving as we are forgiven. To forgive someone is to choose a future with him, a future not dictated by past wrongs but opened up in love and freedom. We need to see ourselves in Peter: deniers but acknowledged, utterly forgiven, utterly beloved.

As the author of John’s gospel tells is in another place (1 John 4.8,16): God is love. To know the god of Jesus Christ crucified, the God who forgives and accepts us all, the God who rejects a future where our rejections of him get the last word, is to know God as he truly is. I often hear dissatisfaction with this: “Yes, but God is also just, and he can’t just forgive…forgiveness has to be somehow paid for…” There’s the ever-popular, but in my view profoundly mistaken, business about God having to appease some internal principle of justice. Of course God is just…but what is God’s justice? No moral principle, Greek and abstract, but the covenant righteousness of YHWH, God’s faithfulness, his implacable, indeed ruthless, and sometimes downright scary commitment to the people he loves. It’s not for the decorous or the faint of heart; God’s relentless pursuit of those he so passionately desires is strewn with the wreckage of the distractions and disloyalties that get in his way, the smashed idols of our illusory self-sufficiency and self-righteousness. God is just, but his justice is always in the service of his steadfast love. William Countryman puts it beautifully: “As far down into God as we shall ever be able to reach, we will find nothing but love. And in whatever is beneath that, in whatever abysses of God there are that we can never plumb, there is nothing but love” (Forgiven and Forgiving, p. 128).

In God’s world, nothing is lost and everything is redeemed. Nothing and no one, not the blowhard Peter, not the treacherous Judas, not you, not me sinks irredeemably, out of the reach of God in Christ. We’re all forgiven, we’re all called to love one another, forgiving as we are forgiven, drawn into, and carrying out, God’s work. Even Judas? There’s a long tradition, recently rendered in Hollywood film, of Judas as beyond redemption, forever cursed: a betrayal too great for even the crucified God to overcome. But there’s another tradition, admittedly on the margins, e.g. in some of the ancient Coptic churches, of Judas redeemed, the great betrayer brought back by greater love. That hope lives on in out of the way places, in, for example, James’ Wright’s poem “Saint Judas:”

When I went out to kill myself, I caught

A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.

Running to spare his suffering, I forgot

My name, my number, how my day began,

How soldiers milled around the garden stone

And sang amusing songs; how all that day

Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone

Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,

Stripped, kneed, and left to cry.  Dropping my rope

Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:

Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,

The kiss that ate my flesh.  Flayed without hope,

I held the man for nothing in my arms.

Even as Judas condemns himself, and tries to fling himself into the outer darkness, the Jesus he betrayed will not give up his grip, but draws him back into love and light. That seems to me the better story, the one that fits the scandalous truth of the cross of Christ. And I have to ask: are my denials of Jesus, my betrayals, my refusals of his love so different? Judas, no less than Peter, my brother under the skin? We need to see ourselves in Judas too: betrayers, yet defeated and brought home by forgiving love.

Jesus says people will know we belong to him by the way we love one another. I think a big part of this is being the community where forgiveness lives. Some of it seems too hard for human beings. A lot of it is pretty mundane. More often bearing in love one another’s infirmities of knowledge, judgment, belief and taste, than a matter of forgiving momentous iniquities. We’re commanded to be at the ready not to bother with the fact that we’re in the right, to betray justice, to be disloyal to all sorts of good and important things, always ready to abandon the all too legitimate claims of the past in order to keep open the hope of a redeemed future, ready to walk together out of the darkness into the light of a new world, the world the resurrected Jesus is bringing into being.

Amen.

Judas, by Kestutis Vasiliunas (woodcut, 1995)

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