The crooked timber of humanity

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

****

Today's gospel (John 12:1-11) is another of those iconic scenes that occur in the last week of Jesus’ life before the crucifixion. At a dinner to honour Jesus at which the recently resurrected Lazarus was in attendance, Mary, Lazarus’s sister, anointed the feet of Jesus with an expensive perfume. Judas Iscariot questions the wisdom of this action, saying that the ointment could have been sold and the money given to the poor. Blessed are the poor! Jesus chides him for this rebuke, saying that the poor will always be there. The attention garnered by the resurrection of Lazarus draws large crowds, and the chief priests make plans to murder Lazarus so that people will not believe in Jesus.

This scene in the gospel brings to light a paradox that underpins the place of the religion of Jesus Christ in the world. The nearer one draws to the light, the more one is shown up for who one is. The consequence of this paradox is that everyone of us is then required to make a choice about our futures.

Take Judas, for example. Judas was indeed one of the twelve apostles, and his facetious comment about selling the ointment and giving the money to the poor might well have been made by any of the more headstrong followers of Jesus. But at this point, Saint John reveals something about Judas that is rarely mentioned by those who appear to belong to the Judas Fan Club: the kind of people who believe that Judas was well-intentioned and really only wanted to advance the Kingdom when he betrayed his master. The fact is that Judas was a thief. The fact is that Judas was also a liar. The fact is that his thievery and his deceit are carried out right under the nose of a Rabbi whom he well knows can read minds and hearts. The affrontery of the man is unbelievable.

We like to think of Judas as being the one apostle nobody is really akin to, but there is a little bit of Judas in every single one of us. For which one of us is not a thief? If Jesus can call the lusts of the heart adultery, then why should not our envies and jealousies be considered theft, and who is truly free of both envy and jealousy? But in the same way, which one of us is not a liar, and primarily and principally, a liar to ourselves? Driven on by our dissonant needs and entangled by attachments that we barely notice, we still have the temerity to hold ourselves to be if not good Christians, then at least not bad ones, and certainly not as bad as Judas.

Hypocritical reader, you who resemble me, my brother, as Charles Baudelaire wrote.

The Judas Fan club would like to defend Judas by attributing to him a clever if wrong-headed plan to get Jesus up to the starting line with the launch of his Kingdom. Here, we will “defend” him only by saying that he was too often the creature of his passions, like every sinful human being. And like so many of us, Judas’s lies and peccadillos became an avalanche of treachery when the going got tough. After all, a man who was stealing from the Apostolic purse could well have had a gambling problem too. But the derisory sum he accepted for Jesus’ betrayal suggests that Jesus’ correction of him in this scene may well have goaded him into retaliation. Yes, there is every sign that Judas was that immature. The Judas Fan Club again likes to assume that his despair arose from the bad consequences of his treason. This blogger argues that his despair might have arisen because he realised how badly damaged he was, and when catastrophe was on him, he did not have the habit of repentance: of facing his actions square on in the light of Jesus, and turning to his Saviour for help. If we are in various ways thieves and liars, let us at least be penitent ones like the good thief.

The other group of people whose inner reality comes to light as we move towards Calvary this week are the chief priests. Swollen with power, having consciences thickened by years of legalistic wrangling, they now propose to murder Lazarus - an action that even the dimmest synagogue student could have told them would make them children of Cain and defilers of God’s law. If they were looking for a moment to rend their garments in grief, the second they conceived this homicidal plan was surely it. It is in this moment that we see their potential defence of acting in sincerity collapse beneath the weight of their utter hypocrisy. The perversity of the plan is all the worse because in addition to plotting against the life of Jesus, they are now plotting against the life of Lazarus whose body gave off the odour of decay before Jesus arrived and restored him to life. There are none so blind as those who will not see.

If there is a little bit of Judas in all of us, please God there is nothing of the chief priests in us. It is on this crooked timber of humanity that Jesus is crucified, but it is also by that sacrifice He redeems the world. How careful we must be to examine our religion honestly and with utter sincerity, the more so if we enjoy any kind of responsibility. What monsters these men had become – what monsters we men can become - while dressed in every sign of piety and given the recognition accorded to the holy. They too were liars, like Judas, but the depth of their depravity arose from their twisting a divine ministry into a tool for power, and not only for power but also for the oppression and destruction of their neighbour. And all this ghastliness is thrown into light, the closer we come this week to Calvary.

What is left for us to do now, other than to gather by the foot of that hill, to strip from our hearts all the lies we wrap around us, to pluck from them the splinters of the world that poison our minds, and so to cast our weary eyes upon the Saviour in whose grace alone we must place our confidence? As we move closer to the light, far be it from us to bury ourselves more deeply in the deceit of the chief priests or the despair of the wretched Judas. Our hearts are diseased but they have a chance to live  a life renewed in this Paschal death and resurrection we are about to take part in.

O Jesus, teach us always to love your truth, even when it shows us to be merchants of deceit. O Jesus, teach us always to love your way, even at the cost of every wayward desire of our crooked hearts.

May Jesus bring us all to love His truth and love His way, that we might share His life forever.