Some thoughts on Judas

Today we read the first of the four passion accounts. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been reading the bible each day, but finally coming to this moment – the climactic one of the whole book – today I found extraordinarily compelling, even moving. And the figure of Judas I found especially compelling and moving.

Judas as a character has always bothered me. To some extent, he always seemed like sort of a pawn in a game way above his paygrade (if I might mix some metaphors). I mean, somebody had to betray Jesus. This is a necessary part of the story, and the way Matthew tells it, Judas isn’t really a rascal or a scoundrel, just a guy who makes a mistake and is maybe taken advantage of by some powerful folks.

The Capture of Christ, Caravaggio, 1598

Indeed, the story we’re given in Matthew renders Judas with some sympathy. Jesus is letting himself be anointed with expensive oils and by a strange woman (this would appear to break a sexual taboo at least, and should raise some fairly reasonable questions – as it does here for the disciples – about Jesus’ previous teachings with regard to the poor), so Judas thinks maybe the temple priests (sort of like today’s bishops) should have a talk with Jesus, straighten him out a bit. Then it all spirals out of control and Judas realizes the priests wanted to do more than just talk.

Judas repents (this is what we’re supposed to do when we wrong God and each other, right?) and rejects the spoils of his betrayal. And lest we believe this was all Judas’ fault, the gospel reminds us that Jesus’s death is not his or Pilate’s (recall the Roman governor’s handwashing) or anyone else’s fault. It is our own. None of us is any more or less guilty of this death than Judas. Judas plays a role more directly in the historical event than we could, but Jesus didn’t die because of Judas Iscariot. Jesus died because of us. We occasion Christ’s sacrifice, whether we betray him directly or not.

I guess where Judas goes most wrong is that, once he’s repented and the priests rebuff him, he despairs and kills himself. He has done too bad a thing, he concludes, he has committed too grievous and terrible a crime to be forgiven. But of course, he can be. God’s love is greater than even the greatest sin. Perhaps Judas’ final mistake was of the same sort as his first: he didn’t fully reckon the love of Christ, he didn’t have enough faith in who and what this man was. He believed his capacity to betray Christ could exceed Christ’s capacity to forgive. So he killed himself for lack of faith, not for depth of sin.

We are all in Judas’ place. Christ goes to the cross for us. Our sins are as deep and grievous as Judas’. But God’s love is deeper still, and this is what the sign of Christ’s betrayal and death remind us.

See you in the gospel of Mark,

Matt

The mercy of stoning

We’re getting into some pretty important stuff in the Good Book. Since last week, Israel has been liberated from Egypt and today we have the ten commandments. These are related events, mind you. The offering of the law, which begins with these ten commandments, is part of a covenant – a sort of solemn contract or sacred agreement – between God and Israel. In fact, the word typically used in Hebrew here (‘berit’) is also used to describe treaties between nations. So this is sort of a legal arrangement between God and Israel, albeit a sacred one. “I did for you (by getting you out of Egypt); now here’s what you can do for me. You can keep this law.” The escape from Egypt has been completed (though the settling of Canaan won’t happen for a while), and so Israel and God are talking terms. And this language will continue throughout the Old Testament. God will often say to Israel through prophets, “because you failed to keep my law, the following bad things are going to happen” or we’ll read that this or that king of Israel failed to keep a covenant and then bad stuff will happen to Israel. When Israel breaks the agreement by disobeying the law, by violating the terms they’ve agreed to, then God isn’t obliged to uphold his end of the bargain either. And often, in the Old Testament, God doesn’t.

I give you these fifteen . . . ten. Make that ten commandments!

Like many of our modern legal documents, there’s a lot of fine print here. The ten commandments are a handy summary, but today and in many of our days to come, we’re going to spend a lot of time reading detailed accounts of the specific subtleties and minute variants of the law that God and Israel are agreeing to. For the modern reader, much of this can appear quite cruel and ruthless. “And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death” (Exodus 21:17) is one example of a pretty rough rule. There wouldn’t be many teenagers running around if we observed this one real close these days. And, especially in this chapter, death is a pretty common form of punishment for all manner of misbehavior.

But if you try to imagine the world four or five thousand years ago, it’s pretty progressive stuff. To the people who first heard and read this law, there was a radical sense of equality in this. Why? Think of how these things are framed: if any man kills another . . . if a man kidnaps another . . . if a man marries, etc. This law makes no distinction of class. The laws don’t read, “If a king injures a plumber,” or “if a powerful man plunks a poor one.” These laws apply to any and every man, all the same. For example, in Egypt, Pharaoh pretty much did whatever he wanted. The law didn’t apply to him. Or rather, he was the law itself. Whatever he said was it. But in the young, not yet established nation of Israel, all were subject to the law, powerful and poor alike. If a judge or a priest or a powerful man committed a crime, he was on the hook for it. The law applied equally to all.

Sort of. Not women, and not servants or slaves, not foreigners, all of whom have special circumstances described in detail here and elsewhere. But even the sense that all men (though just men) had equality before the law was a pretty big step back then. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot: if you’re a homeless beggar and a prince knocks out your tooth, this law says that prince owes you a tooth back. That’s big stuff. There are the roots of a real sense of human equality in this. They may be only roots of course, but perhaps when we think of the law this way, it makes more sense later on when we hear Jesus tell us that he fulfills rather than abolishes this law. By overturning “the eye for an eye” statute we read earlier in Matthew, Jesus fulfills a sort of legal and moral progressivism that the law of the Old Testament initiates.

Happy reading,

Matt

What’s in a name?

Naming has a special relevance in the early books of the Old Testament, and developing an awareness of what’s at stake in naming might help you understand some of these stories a little better. A good way to start would be to think of the creation story, in which God brings all the creatures before Adam to be named, and where Adam is given dominion over all those creatures. There’s a sense in the Old Testament that the one who names has power or authority over the one named. And although this custom doesn’t translate exactly into our own modern culture, we can make some sense of it. We don’t choose our own names, for example; our parents or guardians name us, because in that infant state they have guardianship over us.

This presents some problems in the Old Testament for the name of God. If to name something is to claim authority over it, then naming God becomes a tricky proposition. How could we humans claim naming authority over God? Indeed, even to this day, the name that was just revealed to Moses in our reading today, the so-called tetragrammaton (which means ‘the four letters’) of YHWH remains an unsayable word for Orthodox Jews. When reading the bible and encountering those four letters, YHWH, Orthodox Jews will not pronounce the name, they will simply say, ‘the Lord.’ We cannot name God.

This anxiety over naming God isn’t a concern at first, mind you: early on in the Old Testament, in the first chapters of Genesis, God tends to be referred to as ‘El,’ or as some variant of that. ‘El’ happens to have been the name of the highest God in most of the religions of the middle east at the time. The Canaanites, Babylonians, and other local peoples/competitors of the Israelites named God ‘El,’ and so did the Israelites at first, too. But things get tricky later. Think of Jacob wrestling with the angel/God back in the book of Genesis. Once they’ve stalemated, the angel asks, ‘what is your name?’ And Jacob replies, ‘Jacob.’ Then the angel gives Jacob a new name, Israel. Jacob tries to return the favor, saying, ‘what is your name?’ But the angel/God will not be named, and refuses to reveal any name, offering Jacob a blessing instead.

 Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, Alexander Louis Leloir, 1865

This is the same thing that Moses encounters in today’s reading. The Israelites in Egypt have lived for years without worship of their God, the God of their ancestor Jacob. And this God is revealed to Moses in the burning bush. So Moses asks a reasonable question: ‘What name shall I give the people?’ In other words, whom should they thank, to whom should they pray, whom should they worship? Who is their God? And the voice gives a name that’s not a name, those four letters that did not then nor do they now constitute a legible word: YHWH.

Charlton Heston doing his best impression of Moses.

YHWH is derived from the Hebrew verb ‘to be,’ so it’s linked to the statement we hear the voice say: I am that I am. This God cannot be named anymore than existence can be named. Indeed, this God just is ‘is-ness,’ so to speak.

I was talking with some friends the other day. They, like us, have small children, and we were talking about the ironic difficulty of deciding upon a name for our kids. Because, to a certain degree, all the thought that goes into baby naming is needless. For example, one of the main troubles we had with a lot of our nominated names was that someone in our life – an uncle, an old friend, the child of a colleague, etc. – had ‘already taken’ the name. There’s a great episode of Seinfeld in which George wants to hold onto the name ‘Seven’ as a baby name and goes to ridiculous lengths to keep a couple from stealing it before he has the chance to use it.

But when your child is born, all that evaporates. Because it doesn’t matter how many other John Smith’s there are in the world, when your child is born, if that’s his name, it belongs entirely to him. The child doesn’t belong to the name, the name belongs to the child. No matter how common that name may be, it immediately acquires an immeasurable uniqueness, because forever after there is no other John Smith like this one. Love does that, it makes the ordinary extraordinary.

Our little Sam, for example, isn’t any other Sam. There is no Sam like him, he has transformed those three little letters which we thought were just a name into something precious and particular. God isn’t named anything, God just is. But love works the same way with God. God just is, but God makes the ordinary is-ness of everyday life extraordinary because it all comes from love.

Enjoy the story of Moses,

Matt

Begats redux

Nemo has hit, and it appears to have lived up to its hype. We still have power here at Creighton House, but I know it’s spotty around Falmouth. Lots of our friends around town have lost power and heat, and we’ve invited some over to our place to share the warmth on this blustery day. So it may be that you won’t or can’t read this post soon; or probably, you wouldn’t get to it for a few days anyway. But whatever the case, to all the Barnabas Bible Challengers: stay warm and safe!

I wanted to say another word about the ‘begats’, because we concluded today’s reading from Genesis with another flood of them. The bible – and the Old Testament in particular – is generally understood to be the story of the people Israel and their relationship with the God of Israel. The people who are writing this book are writing it to give an account of themselves. But they’re also giving an account of the people around them. That is, they can’t very well tell their own story without making some implications about the stories of others.

For example: think of the complicated and not altogether wholesome tale of Esau and Jacob that we’ve been following. Esau is Isaac’s firstborn, he is better loved by Isaac, but he gives up his birthright to the younger Jacob and is tricked out of his blessing by Jacob too. In other words, Esau was Isaac’s (and so Abraham’s) heir, but due to some carelessness of Esau’s and some craftiness of Jacob’s, that inheritance is transferred to Jacob, the second child, the late-comer.

Esau, we’re told in the last bevy of begats, is also called Edom, and gave birth to all the children of Edom. So here’s where it gets interesting for us. Remember, all these stories were written after Israel had come to power, after they had established their kingdom. When they came into the land of Canaan it wasn’t just an empty wilderness, it was peopled by all sort of other tribes that the people of Israel had to conquer in order to establish their kingdom. And once they were finished, they wrote these stories down. Edom was the name of one of the neighboring kingdoms. (The word “Edom” means “red” in Hebrew; recall Esau’s red hair.) Edom was a rival nation, right next door, in fact; they were one of the peoples the Israelites failed at first to conquer. Eventually, Israel did defeat Edom in war, and Edom became a vassal of Israel.

Isaac blessing Jacob, Govert Flinck, 1638

Notice how this follows the tale we’ve just heard: Edom/Esau had the land first; Israel/Jacob takes it eventually. What the bible story adds is justification: it may have been through trickery or force, but the blessing of the land belongs to Israel/Jacob, even if Edom/Esau had it first. The land belongs rightly, the story says, to Israel, so their conquest of Edom is justified.

When this part of the bible was written and redacted (redacted is a fancy word that sort of means ‘edited’; scholars believe that many different stories were collated and collected and cohered into single story and scholars call that process redaction), Israel had just concluded an age of conflict. Scholars believe they had gradually inhabited the land, assimilating themselves into other communities and assimilating other communities into their own. But as certain tribes consolidated power, they began to war and dominate each other. And as power finally consolidated around the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, these two kingdoms began to think and talk about the peoples they had conquered, and why they might have been justified in conquering them. When we get to the books of Kings and the books of Samuel, we’ll hear accounts of these conquests. But the justification for those conquests is all here in Genesis, the coming conquest is all foreshadowed here.

Take the name of anybody who does anything dastardly or disgusting or disreputable in the book of Genesis, look at that person’s offspring, and it’s a pretty safe bet those peoples will be conquered by the kingdom of Israel when we get to Kings and Samuel. Remember Ham who peers at his father Noah’s nakedness, and whom Noah curses for it? Well, Ham becomes the father of all the nations of Canaan, the land which Israel conquers. And this ancient curse justifies the taking of their land. Remember Moab and Ammon, the sons of Lot who were born of incest between Lot and his daughters? The Moabites and Ammonites were two tribes conquered by the Israelites later on. And this story gives us the ancient justification. Edom may have been born to Isaac first, but the land’s not his, it’s Israel’s. So Israel is justified in taking it by force. And then perhaps an example you already caught: Ishmael, whom Muslims would later claim as lineage, the firstborn but banished son of Abraham.

Sarah leading Hagar to Abraham, Matthias Stom, c. 1638

These begats are boring to us because we don’t hear these cues, we don’t realize the backstory. But for the people who were reading and listening to these stories when they first started being told, it all made perfect sense. Of course we slaughtered Moab; they’ve been cursed since their founding. Certainly we conquered Canaan; Noah said they would be subject to us. And yes, Edom may have been here first, but being first isn’t everything. The land belongs to Israel.

The relationship between Israel and the land of Canaan is long and complex and continues to have great significance even in our world today. Listen to the news for more than a few minutes if you don’t believe me. So I’m not taking a position here on whether and to what degree Israel has rights to the land of Canaan. If I’m feeling courageous perhaps I’ll state some of my positions on these things in a future post. But I think that I should at least call attention to the fact that these stories, sacred as they are, are human stories too, told by humans. If we read closely and with some background knowledge, we will quickly recognize all the typical traits of the human – the self-aggrandizement, the self-justification, the denial of culpability and the pride of power – popping up between the lines of this text at least as often as we come to discern the mystery of God there.

Happy reading,

Matt

The schedule

For those of your still looking for a schedule, or if your dog ate your schedule, or you spilled coffee on it, you can download a copy here.

Happy reading!

Matt