May 15, 2011

Glynn Cardy

Easter 4     John 10:1-10

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Jesus redefined greatness. 

Nowadays if a nation aspires to greatness then its rich will expect help and encouragement to get richer and be taxed less. Its poor will expect help and encouragement to live normal lives. Both measure greatness in terms of wealth and well-being.

Yet Jesus redefined well-being, telling the rich to give away their riches, and the poor to give away their dreams of riches. He talked about giving and mutuality.

Greatness for Jesus was not about the pursuit of happiness. It was not about getting, expanding and controlling. Rather it was about giving and grace.

Antony De Mello tells of two brothers who had neighbouring farms. The first brother would sit up at night worrying about his sibling. He worried that since his brother had no partner or children to look after him he was vulnerable if he should fall ill or get old. So the first brother would creep out in the wee hours of the night, take a sack of grain, and empty it into his brother’s granary.

The second brother also would sit up at night worrying. He worried about his older sibling and the financial burden that children bring. So he too would creep out into the night, take a sack of grain and empty it into his brother’s granary.

And so it continued, night after night, year after year, until one fateful evening the two brothers collided with each other and discovered the truth.

Years later when the village sought to build a church they could think of no holier spot than where the two brothers collided.

Two ‘siblings’ who did not get on great were Christianity and Judaism. 

Following the first Jewish-Roman War of 66-70 CE the revisionist Jews who followed the way of Jesus sought to differentiate themselves from more orthodox Jews for the sake of their own survival, less they be tarred with the same brush with which all Jews were being tarred with by the Romans. One way they did this was to insert a fictitious villain into the Jesus story, bearing the name of the Jewish nation [Judah] and bearing the guilt of betraying Jesus. His name was Judas. Instead of the Romans being culpable for Jesus death, they were portrayed as being manipulated by the orthodox party of the High Priest and Saduccees after receiving a tip off from the traitor Judas.

Around 88 CE the Jesus followers were excommunicated from the synagogues pushing Christianity rapidly into becoming a Gentile movement.

These dates are important because they inform the context in which the accounts of Jesus’ life were written and edited. Paul [writing in the 50s he was the earliest] was totally unaware of the tradition that one of the “twelve” played the role of the traitor. Not only is there no mention of this when Paul wrote the account of Jesus being “handed over,” but also when Paul described the experience of resurrection on “the third day,” he said that Jesus was seen by the “twelve.” Judas is still among them, a fact that would have been inconceivable if he had been the traitor.

Mark, writing just after the first Jewish-Roman war, introduced the Judas story. This story grew and developed as each successive gospel was written until the Fourth Gospel completed the Judas portrait some time around 95-100 CE. 

The character Judas is a composite of tales of other traitors in the Hebrew Scriptures. In II Samuel, for example, where the king is called “The Lord’s Anointed” [later translated as ‘Messiah’], there is a story of King David being betrayed by a man, Ahithophel, who broke bread with him around the table – just as Judas was portrayed at the Last Supper. Later Ahithophel realizing the consequences of his actions hung himself. 

Another example is in Zechariah chapters 9-14 when the Shepherd King of Israel is betrayed to those who are traders in the Temple for 30 pieces of silver, just as Matthew says Judas did.

As each Gospel was written it drew on earlier material. The Judas fable grew more sinister with each retelling as the historical context of late first century Jewish-Christian relations deteriorated. This deteriorating inter-faith context also informs the reading today of shepherds and sheep. The one who climbs into the sheep by some other way is a reference to orthodox Judaism. Words like ‘thief’, ‘bandit’, ‘steal and kill and destroy’, indicate the parlous state of relationships.

Soon fierce hostility toward the Jews became a primary mark of Christianity and its intensity grew in the first centuries of Christian history. The Church Fathers, Polycarp, Irenaeus, John Chrysostom and Jerome, among many others, filled their writings with a blood-curdling anti-Semitism. To them the Jews were “vermin unfit for life” and “Christ-Killers.” Good Friday became a day of peril for Jews as Christians emerged from their churches and cathedrals filled with wrath for what “the Jews had done to Jesus” and seeking revenge by beating and killing them.

The vilification of Judas also continues. This year a news item spoke of the long tradition on the island of Cyprus of lighting Easter bonfires, a tradition beloved by religious and nonreligious alike. On top of those fires they burn an effigy of Judas.

Blame, de-humanizing the blamed, and seeking revenge upon them are strong impulses, not restricted to Christianity or US foreign policy. These impulses both shape and scar us.

Jesus told us to love our enemies, and we need to learn and relearn the consequences of not doing so. Hate distorts our soul. Blame is detrimental to healing. Revenge is corrosive of lasting peace. Yet loving enemies is hard work and scary.

Last Sunday Pedro spoke of his brother’s murder – killed for a baseball cap. Such psychological pain is hard to imagine. Pedro spoke too of forgiving the murderer. Such psychological strength is also hard to imagine. For those of us who haven’t experienced trauma like this we have no idea what such forgiveness costs. Yet we sense something powerful, awesome, and holy here.

Greatness for Jesus was grounded in relationships where he emphasised the ethics of giving and mutuality, and where wealth and personal well-being took second place. Yet there is also at the heart of relationships the need to practice forgiveness, to ask it of others, and to give it to others. As a nation the rich [those who have] need to ask it of the poor [those who have not], and then support policies to prove it. As an Easter people we need to ask forgiveness of ‘Judas’, and all the other caricatures of blame we create.

I am indebted to Jack Spong’s work on Judas – e.g. http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2007/12/did-judas-iscariot-exist-by-bishop-john.html

Also worth reading [in parts] is http://vridar.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/judas-did-not-exist/