Matthew
27:1-8
May 25, 2014
When morning came, all the chief
priests and the elders of the people conferred together against Jesus in order
to bring about his death. They bound him, led him away, and handed him over to
Pilate the governor. When Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he
repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and
the elders. He said, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.” But they
said, “What is that to us? See to it yourself.” Throwing down the pieces of
silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself. But the
chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, “It is not lawful to put them
into the treasury, since they are blood money.” After conferring together, they
used them to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners. For this
reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day.
Other than maybe Hitler, has there ever been anyone more
evil than Judas? Maybe you can throw in a few others like Joseph Stalin, Mao
Tse Tung, or Pol Pot, or your favorite serial killer, but do we consider what
they did as being as bad as betraying God? Judas will certainly go down in
history as the biggest betrayer ever. Who could surpass an evil like turning
Jesus over to the authorities so Jesus could be arrested and eventually
crucified?
Actually, the tragedy of Judas’ life is that what he did
might not have been an act of evil, but an attempt at good. But we don’t think
about Judas as a man of good. And because we don’t, it’s hard for us to dig
through what we know about him to discover what we don’t know about him.
The reality is that Judas is an enigma, a mystery man. The
Bible tells us how he betrayed Jesus, but it never really tells us why. And we
often don’t ask why. The irony of Judas’ betrayal is that the best biblical
scholars believe that he did it to try to help Jesus, not harm him. What the
Bible also doesn’t tell us is that before Judas betrayed Jesus, the two of them
probably had long talks, and even longer arguments, over what Jesus’ purpose
and mission was. I can imagine seeing the dusk of twilight the shadows of the
two of them, off a ways from the rest of the disciples sitting around a fire,
having heated discussions. Judas is waving his finger at Jesus, and then
pointing it back toward Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Jesus is gently pushing down
Judas’ hands, calming him while he slowly shakes his head “no.”
Judas may have had a clearer picture of what Jesus was
called to do than Jesus did. It’s just
that God didn’t agree and Judas’ was wrong. Let me tell you a bit more about
Judas so that you have a clearer picture.
First, who was Judas? This is the first mystery. We
don’t now much about him. Even his name, Judas Iscariot, is confusing. Scholars
aren’t sure if “Iscariot” is a reference to where he comes from (like Jesus of
Nazareth) or something else. There is no place called Iscariot, although some
scholars believe that the name may refer the southern Judean town of Kerioth.
Others say that “Iscariot” sounds a lot like the name of a secret society of
assassins bent on driving the Romans out of Israel, and so his name identifies
him as one of them. Still others believe that it was a name given to him later,
after he died, and that means “liar” in Hebrew. Despite this confusion, there
is much more certainty about his political passions. He was a zealot.
When you hear the word “zealot,” how do you define it? You
probably think it means a fanatic, or someone who is over the top politically
or religiously. Actually, the word zealot
meant something very different in Jesus’ time. Today we might call them
revolutionaries or patriots. They were people who believed in the violent
overthrow of the Roman government in Israel so that Israel could become an
independent nation again. Zealots chafed at their 500 years of foreign
occupation under the Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, and then Romans. Judas was
part of a loose collection of zealots who believed in revolution, and this gets
to the heart of his arguments with Jesus. He believed that Jesus was the
messiah sent to overthrow the Romans and restore Israel. He believed that Jesus
was a new David, ready to join his army of angels with an army of humans to
raise up Israel again.
The fact that included a zealot as a disciple tells us a
lot about both Jesus’ ministry and how he put together his collection of
disciples. I don’t know if you ever heard of a recent book by the acclaimed
historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, called Team
of Rivals. She talks about the genius of Abraham Lincoln, who constructed
an administrative cabinet not only of supporters, but also of enemies and
rivals. He wanted to have different perspectives on his team. Jesus created a
sort of discipleship of rivals.
While Jesus didn’t make enemies his disciples, he did do
something similar. Looking at the composition of his disciples, they were all
so very different. First, take John, James, Peter, and Andrew. I’ve already
told you from previous sermons that they were fishermen. I also mentioned that
they were previously disciples of John the Baptist. That may not have fully
registered with you, but what it meant was that they were all fairly extreme in
their beliefs. In fact, by following John the Baptist, they were following an
extreme form of Judaism that believed that all of Israel was corrupted by Roman
and Gentile influences, and that righteous Jews should limit or end all contact
with Gentiles.
John the Baptist had come out of the Essene movement, the
same movement that gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were a Jewish sect that
believed in the pursuit of purity. They had removed themselves from Jewish
society to live in caves and cave-like dwellings near the Dead Sea. There was a
reason John the Baptist baptized in the River Jordan. That was the dividing
line between the Jewish lands and the wilderness. John would not cross the
Jordan because it would lead him to set foot in the corruption of the world.
People came to the Jordan to be purified. What does that say about John, James,
Peter, and Andrew? It says that they had been pursuing purity, and that they
had believed in the separation of Jews and Gentiles.
Meanwhile, Jesus added two zealots: Judas Iscariot and
Simon the Zealot. They shared a belief that the Romans had corrupted the Jews,
but they had a different solution, as I mentioned above. They believed in the
violent overthrow of the Romans in order to purify Israel—a concept the Essenes
would have rejected because they believed only God could usher in a revolution,
not men.
Then Jesus added Matthew. He was a tax collector. In
other words, he believed in collaboration with the Romans. He worked with the
Romans. He had few problems with Roman occupation. Imagine what the
conversations among the disciples must have been like—some advocating
separation, some overthrow, and others accommodation.
Getting back to Judas, if you remember the image I gave
of Jesus and Judas having passionate conversations in the background, they
would have been about Judas’ belief that Jesus was called to overthrow the
Romans. Judas was convinced that Jesus’ calling was to be a sword-bearing
messiah, raising an army of angels and zealots. Judas’ betrayal was actually
his attempt to force Jesus to accept his messianic mantle. Judas wanted to
force Jesus to stand up and start the revolution. In his own zealot mind,
betraying Jesus wasn’t a betrayal. It was a call to action. He would have been
convinced that by bringing soldiers there to arrest him, people would have
responded the way they often do when a revolutionary leader is arrested. They
would have risen up in protest, and Jesus would have been at the center,
leading the Jews to glorious victory. The problem is that Judas’ vision wasn’t
Jesus’ calling.
Judas didn’t intend to have what happened happen. He did
not intend for Jesus to be tortured and crucified. He did not intend for his
betrayal to lead to Jesus’ death. He did not even imagine that resurrection was
possible, and so he killed himself before he had a chance to discover a deeper
truth. There is a belief, though, in the ancient Jewish legends that after
Jesus’ death he descended into Hell, where a repentant Judas was lifted to
Heaven. Remember that in our passage Judas did repent before killing himself.
Judas offers a powerful example of the dark side of
religious zeal. There are some really important lessons Judas teaches us about
the nature of religious life and religious calling. Let me share some of them.
The first lesson is the most crucial for so many
religious people: Just because you are
certain doesn’t make you right. On both the religious right and the left
there are many zealots who are so sure that they know best what God wants, and
because they are, they have no problems betraying God’s will in order to
achieve what they think is God’s will. Throughout Christian history there have
been so many movements, on a large and small scale, that were so certain of
their rightness they would use any means necessary to accomplish their goals;
even if it went against Jesus’ teachings and God’s will.
The most obvious example of this is the Crusades. They
were an attempt to recapture the Holy Lands from Muslims. They were a terrible period
of Christian abuse and corruption. A great example of this is what happened in
the first Crusade (there were twelve in all). The Byzantine king, in 1096, had
encouraged the kings and nobles of Europe to travel through Byzantium to the
Holy Lands to recapture Jerusalem. Many people responded to the call, but most
only got as far as the Byzantine capital, Constantinople. Seeing no way to
actually get to the Holy Lands from there, they pillaged Constantinople and the
surrounding areas before returning to Europe. The first Crusade led to an
attack on fellow Christians.
Another example of certainty leading to wrongness was the
period of Christian inquisitions. For three centuries during the Middle Ages,
Christians persecuted each other in the attempt to route out heretics. The
worst was the Spanish Inquisition, where Muslims, Jews, and enlightened
Christians were often brutally tortured in the attempts\ to force conversions
or get rid of heretics.
Even great and good Christian figures weren’t immune to
this kind of certainty that begets wrongness. Martin Luther, late in his life,
was shocked by a widespread peasants’ revolt that was actually inspired by his
own writings and Protestant beliefs. Thousands of impoverished peasants
revolted in order to raise their standards of living. Luther wrote a pamphlet
permitting the crushing of the revolt. The result was that between 100,000 and
300,000 peasants.
Also, John Calvin (the namesake of Calvin Church) ended
up giving permission to have one of his friends, Michael Servetus, burned at
the stake. Servetus denied the doctrine of the Trinity, and Calvin believed
that the threat of death would cause him to recant. It didn’t. Of course,
Calvin, as great as he was, often led with certainty, whether he was right or
not.
Basically, being certain religiously is not the same
as being right. Being passionate about a cause doesn’t make the cause right.
Take a look around you. Where do you see people being absolutely certain but
also wrong? Now, after you’ve done that, look inward. This is much harder: What are you certain about, but may not be
right about? Be honest. You’ll find something.
The second lesson from Judas is a simple one,
although I have to admit that it’s a scary one for me to mention on Memorial Day
because of people’s patriotic passions. Here goes: don’t confuse God and country. Judas did, and it led him to
betray Jesus. I’m not saying that God doesn’t care about our country. What I am
saying is that too often people mistake one for the other. They believe (as
John Winthrop said about the founding of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony)
that America is meant to be a shining city upon a hill (misquoting Matthew 5:14).
So they believe that anything America does must be God-ordained. That’s both
hubris and confusing God and country. I believe God is involved in our country,
but that does not mean that our country is God, nor that defending everything
American is defending God.
The final lesson is this: Don’t try to force God to do what you want. Instead, seek and do what
God wants. Too often, when we seek God’s will, we aren’t really seeking
God’s will. We are seeking what we want God to will for us, and we are
mistakenly asking God to confirm what we’ve already decided. We do this when we
pray to God, asking God what God wants, while secretly looking for proof that
God wants what we’ve already decided.
Judas is a great example of the dark side of faith, and
so we need to learn from him important lessons: don’t confuse our certainty
with God’s rightness, don’t confuse God and country, and don’t try to force God
to do what we believe is right.
Amen.
