Recently, a parishioner, sent me this passage from an essay of Marilynne Robinson's, reminiscing about attending church during her childhood in Idaho.  It’s called “Psalm Eight.”

From time to time, on the strength of the text, the minister will conclude something brave and absolute - You must forgive, or, If you think you have anything because you deserve it, you have forgotten the grace of God, or, No history or prospect of failure can excuse you from the obligation to try to do good. These are moments that do not occur in other settings,, and I am so far unregenerate that they never cease to impress me deeply. And it touches me that this honorable art of preaching is carried forward when there is so little regard for it among us now. But the most persuasive and forthright explication of that text [the Bible] is still theology. For me, at least, the text itself always remains almost entirely elusive. So I must come back to hear it again; in the old phrase, to have it opened for me again.

That seems to me to be what's required of your priest on Maundy Thursday more than any other day of our Christian observance - to say something brave and absolute. So here goes.

       There is a Gospel of Judas.  It didn’t make it into our Bible, but it survived two millennia  anyway.  Perhaps you remember when it was in the news a few years ago.  The release of one of the greatest discoveries in Christian archeology, translated into English, was written about and dramatized by National Geographic, and written about in op ed pieces in many many newspapers. 

       The Gospel of Judas – probably written early in the second century, is (among other things) an attempt to explain why he did it – to answer the question about why one of Jesus’ closest allies turned him in to the institutional authorities.  The answer in this particular Gospel is that Jesus wanted him to.  It is an attempt to trump the explanations that have gone before.  Some of you have heard me talk about my sense of one-upmanship in the Gospels of our Bible – how, if they are looked at in the generally-agreed upon order that they might have been written:  Mark, then Matthew, then Luke, then John, the stories get bigger and better with each iteration! Mark, for example, simply does not speculate on Judas’ motive for turning Jesus in.  In the Gospel of Mark, Judas went to the chief priests in order to betray Jesus and they were so pleased that they promised to give him money as a reward.  (Although there is no report of his receiving the money, or anything else about Judas after he greets Jesus in the garden and kisses him.)  Motives and consequences with regard to the betrayal were not important enough for Mark to write about.

       In the Gospel of Matthew, Judas goes to the chief priests and says, “what will you give me if I betray him to you?”  The answer of 30 pieces of silver seems to satisfy Judas enough to betray Jesus, but then Matthew reports that a remorseful Judas returned the money and hanged himself in utter despair when he learned that Jesus had been condemned to die.

The Gospels of Luke and John speculate that Judas conspired with the chief priests and officers of the temple police because Satan – the Adversary – had entered into Judas and made him do it.  In those two Gospels, Judas never actually kisses Jesus.  In Luke, Jesus stops him before the kiss, and in John, Jesus simply steps forward and identifies himself to the police who have come with Judas to find him.  Judas continues to stand with the police.  Those two Gospels don’t mention anything else about Judas, but in the Acts of the Apostles, the sequel book to Luke, Judas is later said to have bought a field with the proceeds from the betrayal and tells that he died on that field when his guts exploded.

       The Gospel of Judas says that in order for God to accomplish in Jesus what was meant to happen, Jesus needed Judas to facilitate because he was the brightest and best and most trustworthy.  It explains that Judas was given secret knowledge by Jesus and that he had passed on that secret knowledge to the true followers of Jesus.  That’s why Judas did it, this Gospel explains.

       For 20 years or so, I’ve been drawn to the idea that Jesus asked Judas to turn him in, since I watched Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, based on the book by the same title by Nikos Kazantzakis, written in 1960.  In it there is a very poignant scene where Jesus encourages Judas to be brave enough to turn him in.  Jesus apologizes to Judas saying, “I’m sorry, Judas, my brother, but it is necessary.”  Judas does not believe that death can ever be good.  Judas pleads with Jesus to change his mind and asks Jesus, “if you had to betray your master, would you do it?”  Jesus reflected for a long time.  Finally he said, “No, I do not think I would be able to.  That is why God pitied me and gave me the easier task:  to be crucified.”  It’s a very sympathetic look at one of the villains in the story of Jesus.

       “Why did Judas do it?” is an age-old question that has once again come to the fore with the wide distribution of the Gospel of Judas.  And I’m glad for a lot of reasons.  One is because I think that the question can help us reflect on why we who love Jesus, betray Jesus to the chief priests of our day – the gatekeepers to the institutions of religion.  We do it every day --if you can’t think of at least several ways that we do this, talk with me sometime about it and I’ll give you a starter list.

       So I am glad for a chance to wonder why Judas did it because I do not believe that we are well-served by a two-dimensional villain picture of Judas – a flat representation of a human being – that dismisses Judas by declaring him to be possessed by greed or possessed by the devil.  Those might be true, but they do not do justice to the whole person of Judas.  Judas loved Jesus and Jesus loved Judas – enough for him to be in the inner circle, learning with Jesus to teach and heal and feed and free, delivering God’s grace in the most unlikely places. 

       Jesus loved Judas enough to wash his feet, according to the Gospel of John, even as he was aware that Judas was going to turn him in.  Just after the passage we read tonight, Jesus says to Judas, “Do quickly what you are going to do.”  Whether Jesus wanted Judas to do it or not, Jesus loved him and there’s a poignant sense that getting it over with as fast as possible is the best approach.  Could we be brave enough to imagine that Judas might have had good intentions when he betrayed Jesus?

       Columnist Garry Wills has written, “The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding.  It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair.  [But] If that is all they are, then we may as well make Socrates our redeemer.  It is true that the tamed Gospels can be put to humanitarian purposes, and religious institutions have long done this, in defiance of what Jesus said in the Gospels.  Jesus was the victim of every institutional authority in his life and death.”¹ 

       One response to the scary, dark and demanding “good news” that honors Jesus is to wash one another’s feet.  I mean that literally and figuratively.  I mean humbly kneeling before another, and tenderly holding what is calloused, rough and ugly, what is tired and sore, and gently washing away whatever the accumulated grime (and then letting someone humbly kneel before us because we have accumulated plenty of grime as well, even though we try not to show it.)  That is what Jesus is telling us we ought to do for one another – and I’m sure he meant it both literally and figuratively.

       Sojourner’s founder, Jim Wallis, writes about how humility is something that we are often not so good at.  Like Jesus’ earliest followers, “we are the ones who know how other people are supposed to change.  We are the ones with the answers.  We are the ones who are doing it right”² (or at least we are doing the best we can and it’s the others who need to do better).  But in fact, Jesus has lovingly washed our feet, over and over again, probably with buckets of water filled with his tears.  If we spent more time following Jesus’ advice to wash one another’s feet, I think we would all have less time to be disloyal to the One who came into the world to show God’s love.