Philippians 3:4b-14
Psalm 126
John 12:1-8
In the Flood myth, Noah the ark-builder had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japeth, Presumably, they helped their father build that ark, though after the flood, one son, Ham, would be cursed when he discovered his father drunk and naked. Slave-holding Christians took one line in this story, “lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers,†to justify their barbarity, claiming that the descendants of Ham became the modern day Africans, and therefore the Bible sanctioned slavery. Little did they know that we are all descended from Africans.
More recently, another man named Ham played a key role in the construction of an ark. Ken Ham, originally from Australia, but now living in the US, is paradoxically someone trained in science and a Creationist, responsible for both the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum, tourist attractions located in Kentucky. A fanatic in the heresy of selective literalism, he and his foundation promote fundamentalism with the help of generous tax subsidies.
His 510′ long ark is just one example of the age-old fascination with the Flood story. An image of Noah and the ark appears in a two-thousand year-old catacomb, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in Medieval miracle plays and in Benjamin Britten’s one-act opera “Noye’s Fludde.†The disgraced comedian Bill Cosby famously uttered the phrase “What’s a cubit?,†and Steve Carell played a modern day Noah, a congressman who didn’t exactly practice creation care, in “Evan Almighty.â€
But of all of these cultural references to the myth, only the 2014 Darren Aronofsky film makes mention of one of the Bible’s great mysteries. Among the challenges Russell Crowe, action-hero Noah, faces are beings described in the first four verses of Genesis 6:
When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose.
Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.â€
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
Noah’s Ark has been a Sunday School staple since Sunday Schools were invented at the turn of the 19th century, but I don’t think very many of them really discussed the “sons of God†going “in to the daughters of humans,†those daughters giving birth to a race of demi-gods. It is one of the many texts we skip because they make no sense, are nonsense, or are simply disgusting.
The Bible is full of mysteries, for miracle is mystery, but even accepting those miracles at face value, we are often left with unanswered questions and confusing narratives. One mystery that has periodically captured the attention of Christians is the character of Judas, at the center of today’s reading.
Our gospel, traditionally attributed to John the Disciple, is confusing. We begin with the anointing itself. There were multiple reasons for anointing, but the two most common in scripture are the anointing of a king, something we see in the story of Samuel and the young shepherd boy David, or the anointing of a body for burial. But the royal anointing is of the head, not of the feet. This leaves scholars to debate what the authors intended here assuming it is an authorial invention, or what Mary was thinking assuming it is historical fact, a recollection from the actual life and ministry of Jesus. Of course, he would be anointed again when Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus claimed and buried the body, the latter bringing a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloe.
Criticized by Judas in an exchange to which we will return, Jesus responds in a way that is completely out of keeping with the rest of his ministry. While he, and indeed the entire prophetic tradition of which he is a part, is concerned with the fate of the poor, the text portrays him as callous at best. We can write this off as ahistorical, written a generation later and seen through the lens of memory and belief, for the authors knew as they wrote that Jesus would soon be executed and anointed for burial. But maybe we don’t have to stretch things quite that far.
“The poor you will always have with you†is a reference to the Book of Deuteronomy. In the New Revised Standard Version, the full verse reads “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’â€
Immediately following are instructions around the jubilee year, the freeing of slaves, so Jesus is clearly referencing a text that is the opposite of passive and callous. While it is possible that the Gentile authors misused the text, it seems impossible that Jesus, so versed in the Hebrew scriptures, would do so. Far more likely, if this reflects historic memory, is that Jesus used the phrase to point to the larger teaching, just as he would quote the first line of the 22nd psalm from the cross.
In John’s gospel, the raising of Lazarus is a key turning point, so our passage concludes with the growing numbers around Jesus and to the alarm of the religious officials, who planned to kill both Jesus and Lazarus in order to put an end to this messianic movement.
But let us return to Judas and that exchange in which Jesus blows off the poor. I went to the Nestle-Aland this week, the accepted version of the original Greek text used by scholars, hoping to find that the line about Judas being a thief was a textual variant, which is to say that our oldest manuscripts might not agree on this point. Unfortunately, there are no textual variants. This claim about Judas is consistently found in the manuscript tradition. But it just does not feel right to me. It feels inserted as a justification for the thirty-silver pieces story that would come at betrayal that itself feels like a justification for the role Judas would play.
Judas is, in many ways, as mysterious as those demigods before the flood. As we journey through Lent and get closer to that Last Supper, he haunts us, for a faith that sees humanity and the divine in rich complexity cannot flatten this one figure.
So mysterious is he, that some scholars have suggested that he is fabricated. Judas doesn’t appear in the earliest texts, Paul’s letters to early Christian communities, but why would he? Paul was not one of Jesus’ disciples, and came on the scene after Judas is gone. He first appears in Mark, itself a second-hand account, and one written after the disastrous Jewish War that culminated in 70 CE with the destruction of the Temple. The strongest Hebrew sect still standing, the Pharisees, began expelling all other sects from the synagogue, including the followers of Jesus. These scholars, including Bishop John Shelby Spong, believe Judas represents this rejection of the Jesus movement, that Judas represents Judea, the name of the Jewish puppet-state centered on ancient Judah. Judas as Jew, agent of Satan and betrayer of the Messiah, then becomes the foundation for two millennia of Christian antisemitism.
There are some problems with this theory, which is not widely accepted. Probably the greatest problem is also the simplest. Judas was a very popular name, so trying to use it as a type for evil Jews would be problematic from the outset. Less than two centuries before Jesus, Judas Maccabeus was the hero of a successful Jewish revolt against another occupier. So many Hebrew men were named some form of Jude or Judas, that we find a confusing batch of Judes and Judas’s in the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. There is another disciple named Jude or Judas, who may or may not be the same person as Judas Didymus Thomas, which simply means Judas the Twin in both Aramaic and Greek. There is also a Jude who is one of two named brothers of Jesus, who may or may not be the twin. It would seem a poor strategy to manufacture an archetype for Jewish rejection of Jesus then give him a name that is already represented by other and mostly positive characters in the history.
Another great biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, is one of those opposed to this theory of a made-up Judas, for among other things, he considers that it makes Jesus look like he has bad judgment in choosing disciples. Ehrman believes Judas is real because if you were making stuff up, you’d write a better story, , not something this unflattering, though there is the question of a divine script to which we will return.
The second name assigned to Judas, Iscariot, is a mystery as well. We do not know if it is meant to be a formal name, or a nickname given to him, just as Simon would be given the nickname Peter, and James and John would be called the Thunder Brothers. Some think it means from Kerioth, a town that may or may not have existed in south Judea, though all of the other disciples appear to be Galilean. Some believe Iscariot is a corrupt derivative of Sicarii, the Latin name for the “dagger-men†who advocated violent rebellion against Rome. Neither explanation is compelling.
An apocryphal text called the Gospel of Judas was first brought to public attention by National Geographic in 2006. It is an authentic 2nd century text – gnostic in orientation – rediscovered in the 1970’s in a 4th century codex in Coptic, the same language that gives us our only full copy of the Gospel of Thomas. The text attempts to redeem Judas, making him a partner with Jesus in planning the dramatic confrontation in Jerusalem. There are concerns about the authenticity and historicity of the text, as there are with all of the non-canonical gospels and letters, but there is even greater concern with the translation, for as is often the case with translation, there appears to be an agenda that is influencing word choice.
In the end, the historic Jesus scholar John P. Meier states, we only know two facts about Judas: Jesus chose him as a disciple, and Judas betrayed Jesus to the Temple authorities.
Judas and his role also bring us back to that fundamental question of human agency and the goodness of God in the gospel narrative. If the entire Christ event was a divine play, written and directed by God, then what sort of cruel puppet-master God would use Judas but then punish him? This is the debate Jesus people have been having almost from the beginning. It touches on other questions like how human is Jesus, and if he isn’t, how can we model ourselves on his life?
It seems to me that answering these questions for ourselves is essential to a faith that is functional, that is lived into the world, and I hope to offer some answers from this pulpit on occasion. But for now, I want us to put these bigger questions aside and simply allow Judas to be real, not a flat caricature of evil.
I want us to consider, as so many have over the years, that maybe Judas was doing what he thought was the right thing to do, that he was a faithful disciple that Jesus had wisely chosen, that in the wake of the terrible events that would take place, he became the target of a smear campaign, but that demon-possessed Judas is a fiction, greedy and thieving Judas is a fiction, and that Judas who cares for the poor just like his rabbi is the real Judas.
Judas who does things for the right reason and things turn out all wrong.
For we have all been there.
Judas who maybe got played, was duped. Judas who gave his whole life over to this movement, spent every day for three years wandering with this charismatic teacher and healer, Judas who believed that the Kingdom of God was at hand. Judas who was distraught enough when it was over to take his own life.
For we have all found ourselves bereft at times, not sure what just happened, how everything went south. Good intentions are good, but there is that saying about the road to hell being paved…
We’re not perfect. We need to be able to forgive ourselves. We need pathways to reconciliation with our community. But most of all, we could use tools to prevent us from getting in quite so many jams in the first place.
And it turns out we have them. Our toolbox starts with the Micah 6:8 pack of justice, love, and most important, humility. Jesus gives us the power tools of prayer and scripture. Then, as he is facing the end, as Judas is doing whatever it was Judas was doing, as Jerusalem prepared to kill yet one more prophet, Jesus gave them the most important tool of all. He gave them each other. He turned them into a team, a community centered on a task.
Judas, for good or for bad, dagger-man or faithful disciple, acted alone. Maybe that was his mistake.
It is not that the collective can’t get it wrong. We know that groups can get it wrong. But we choose to believe, in the Congregational tradition, in the United Church of Christ tradition, that if we are faithful, if we use our spiritual tools, if we work together, that we will get it right more often than we will get it wrong.
And when things do go wrong, as they sometimes will even if we work together faithfully and humbly, we won’t be alone.
Maybe, as per tradition, Judas was just bad. Maybe, as some have hoped, he was doing what he thought was the right thing, and the results were not what was expected. Maybe he believed in his heart that this rabbi he had seen heal the sick, feed thousands, walk on the waves, maybe he believed that this man could do anything, including defeat the power of evil, the power of death itself, as he would indeed do on Easter morning.
I’m not willing to leave Judas hanging from a tree or with his guts spilled out on the ground. I want a God that is big enough to include Judas in an eternal kingdom filled with the imperfect, well-intentioned, and beautiful. For we are the imperfect, well-intentioned, and beautiful, longing for the kingdom. May it always be so.