Sermonette: Wednesday in Holy Week
Wednesday, 31 March 2021 06:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cjbanningAs preached at the midweek Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Wednesday, March 31, 2021.
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 70
Hebrews 12:1-3
John 13:21-32
When we hear the account of the Passion, we have to wonder: why did Judas betray Jesus?
Was it because he was a coward, afraid of the Roman and Jewish authorities? Or was he a thief, greedy for those thirty pieces of silver? Was he “in on the plot,” conspiring with Jesus and doing what he knew was necessary for the Messiah to be glorified? Was he a disillusioned disciple frustrated by Jesus’ failure to overthrow Roman rule? Was he possessed by the devil?
From the 2nd-century apocryphal Gospel of Judas to 20th-century works like The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus Christ Superstar, we remain fascinated with Judas, trying to work out, with very little success, why he did what he did. And yet Judas remains an enigma.
The Scriptural accounts concerning Judas raise more questions than they provide answers, right down to two mutually contradictory accounts of Judas’ death: he takes his own life by hanging himself in the Gospel of Matthew, while in the Acts of the Apostle he dies in an agricultural accident.
And yet when we examine our own motivations, are they really any clearer than Judas’? “I don’t understand what I do,” St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “for I don’t do the things I want to do, but rather the things I hate. [. . .] What happens is that I don’t do the good I intend to do, but the evil I do not intend. But if I do what is against my will, it is not I who do it, but sin that dwells in me” (7:15, 20-21). Anyone who has tried to stick to a diet--or, for that matter, a Lenten, devotion--can sympathize. Sometimes it really does feel like Satan has entered into us.
St. Paul referred to himself as “the worst of the sinners” because he recognized that what separates any one of us from Judas is, at best, a matter of degree. Hopefully, none of us have knowingly and deliberately brought about the death of a friend, but who has not committed some lesser betrayal, perhaps for reasons we couldn’t really explain even to ourselves?
And yet God draws divine glory even from our human brokenness. Jesus allowed himself to be betrayed and denied and doubted by his friends, by his disciples, because that was what was necessary for him, God’s Chosen One, the perfect image of what a human being ought to be, to be glorified. Jesus demonstrated his full humanity by being subject to his fellow human beings, even when they turned against him and put him to death on a Cross. And in this, he was and is glorified, and we are glorified with him. Our brokenness, our inability to do good, our flawed humanity are all redeemed in Jesus’s perfect humanity. We are, as the author of Hebrews writes in our second lesson, enabled to “lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and [. . .] run with the perseverance the race that is set before us.”
Amen.
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 70
Hebrews 12:1-3
John 13:21-32
When we hear the account of the Passion, we have to wonder: why did Judas betray Jesus?
Was it because he was a coward, afraid of the Roman and Jewish authorities? Or was he a thief, greedy for those thirty pieces of silver? Was he “in on the plot,” conspiring with Jesus and doing what he knew was necessary for the Messiah to be glorified? Was he a disillusioned disciple frustrated by Jesus’ failure to overthrow Roman rule? Was he possessed by the devil?
From the 2nd-century apocryphal Gospel of Judas to 20th-century works like The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus Christ Superstar, we remain fascinated with Judas, trying to work out, with very little success, why he did what he did. And yet Judas remains an enigma.
The Scriptural accounts concerning Judas raise more questions than they provide answers, right down to two mutually contradictory accounts of Judas’ death: he takes his own life by hanging himself in the Gospel of Matthew, while in the Acts of the Apostle he dies in an agricultural accident.
And yet when we examine our own motivations, are they really any clearer than Judas’? “I don’t understand what I do,” St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “for I don’t do the things I want to do, but rather the things I hate. [. . .] What happens is that I don’t do the good I intend to do, but the evil I do not intend. But if I do what is against my will, it is not I who do it, but sin that dwells in me” (7:15, 20-21). Anyone who has tried to stick to a diet--or, for that matter, a Lenten, devotion--can sympathize. Sometimes it really does feel like Satan has entered into us.
St. Paul referred to himself as “the worst of the sinners” because he recognized that what separates any one of us from Judas is, at best, a matter of degree. Hopefully, none of us have knowingly and deliberately brought about the death of a friend, but who has not committed some lesser betrayal, perhaps for reasons we couldn’t really explain even to ourselves?
And yet God draws divine glory even from our human brokenness. Jesus allowed himself to be betrayed and denied and doubted by his friends, by his disciples, because that was what was necessary for him, God’s Chosen One, the perfect image of what a human being ought to be, to be glorified. Jesus demonstrated his full humanity by being subject to his fellow human beings, even when they turned against him and put him to death on a Cross. And in this, he was and is glorified, and we are glorified with him. Our brokenness, our inability to do good, our flawed humanity are all redeemed in Jesus’s perfect humanity. We are, as the author of Hebrews writes in our second lesson, enabled to “lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and [. . .] run with the perseverance the race that is set before us.”
Amen.