March 13, 2016
10:30 a.m.
JUST LIKE JUDAS
the Rev. Dr. Carla J. Bailey
Senior Minister
PLYMOUTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH
1900 Nicollet Ave.
Minneapolis, MN 55403
www.plymouth.org
Text: John 12:1–8
In New Hampshire, where I lived before returning to Minnesota, there is a young black man on death row.
New Hampshire is a death penalty state. Members of my former congregation have been actively involved
in eliminating the death penalty there. As recently as a week ago, a friend who is a state senator believed
the New Hampshire Senate was within a vote or two of passing an abolition bill. The New Hampshire
legislature has come close to passing abolition legislation a number of times, but the governor has said she
will only sign abolition if it does not apply to the one man on death row, which makes just no sense at all,
but points to the very problem of forgiveness. She is willing to stop putting future killers to death, as long as
New Hampshire can still put the killer who is currently behind bars to death.
As a death penalty abolitionist and as a Christian, I have always been interested in the practice of
forgiveness. A few weeks ago Paula Northwood preached a powerful sermon about forgiveness in which
she told the story of the man whose family had been killed by a drunk driver. In the courtroom at the
sentencing of the driver, the man said that he was a Christian and so he had to forgive the offender. That
cause and effect logic—because I am Christian I am obliged to forgive—has stumped the best of us. I’ve
even read apologists who claim that the mandate to forgive is the single distinguishing characteristic of
Christianity as it is compared to other religions. The powerful witness of the family members of the
murdered Christians from Mother Emanuel Church forgiving the murderer reminded me of an article I read,
years ago now, in which a mother wrote of the experience of forgiving her daughter’s murderer. There was
no artifice in her words. There was no self-aggrandizement, no saccharine piety. She did not claim moral
superiority. She did not imply that those who cannot forgive the murderers of their children are, in any
way, spiritually or ethically inferior. She simply described her experience, her decision to forgive and her
surprise at her own process. She was profoundly and deeply harmed by a person who was morally and
psychologically sick. By any rational measure, she would be entitled to remain unforgiving for the rest of
her life. Her words, and the Mother Emanuel forgivers, and countless other survivors of violence put me in
mind of R. E. Enright’s powerful definition of forgiveness. It is this: “the willingness to abandon one’s right
to resentment, negative judgment, and indifferent behavior toward one who unjustly injures, while
fostering the undeserved qualities of compassion, generosity, and even love.”1
Hardly any of us, thank God, will be called upon to forgive someone such heinous crimes. But we have been
or will be—all of us—injured emotionally at one time or another. It is an inevitable result of being humans
in relationship with other humans. And we have or will hurt someone dear to us—another inevitability. We
are complicated packages with emotional scars, obligations, passions and regrets. Some of the mistakes we
have made were deliberate but not many of them. For the most part, we’ve done the best we could with
1
R. E. Enright, “The Psychology of Interpersonal Forgiveness,” The National Conference on Forgiveness, March
1995.
© 2016 Plymouth Congregational Church
what we had to work with. Perhaps we have been too strident in our opinions about some things—frankly,
too opinionated. It’s possible we jumped to conclusions before knowing the full truth, if it is ever possibly
known. Occasionally, we have cared more about ourselves than others so we have missed important clues.
It is possible our self-righteousness has made us intolerant, impatient and disapproving. Perhaps we have
felt that something needed to be done to change the direction things were going so we stepped in, never
imagining our intervention would be hurtful or destructive. I’m fairly certain, being the basically wellmeaning folks we are, we believed we were doing the right thing at the time, even though the
consequences of our words or actions were devastating to others.
In other words, we have all been Judas. Of course, our minds recoil from that possibility in the same way
we beat a hasty retreat from ever imagining ourselves needing to forgive a murder. I would not have
betrayed Jesus! I wouldn’t have! Even if I had disagreed with what he was doing, I would not have betrayed
my Savior.
Judas has interested me ever since, years ago, I read Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, in which
Judas was imagined as Jesus’ dearest and oldest friend. I am interested in the fact that the stories about
Judas in the Gospels are so conflicting. Isn’t it curious that Gospel-writer John can barely stand him while
Luke is somewhat more sympathetic? Why did Jesus choose Judas as a disciple in the first place? And why
was he given a seat of honor, reclining next to Jesus at the Last Supper, as John suggests he was? What
happened to him during those few years that led to such a disastrous end?
I think Judas believed he was doing the right thing. I think Judas believed the ministry to which the disciples
had devoted everything and for which they had sacrificed everything was going down the tubes, that
alienating the priests was not a good idea and would certainly not win them over to the Way, that spending
so much money on lavish oil was a waste, especially when there were so many mouths to feed. I suspect
Judas harbored the narcissistic delusion that he alone was responsible for fixing Jesus’ increasingly
dangerous ministry—after all, was he not the holder of the accounts? I believe Judas believed that if he
didn’t fix things, no one would, and disaster would soon rain down on them all. And how should he have
interpreted Jesus’ strange and enigmatic words—“You always have the poor with you, but you do not
always have me”?
It is one of the most sorrowful stories in the Gospels, the story of Judas. When he realized what he had
done, he couldn’t live with himself, with the reality that his passion for what was right had brought about
something very, very wrong. He was and is still despised, vilified, scapegoated—buried in the field called
Blood, the potter’s field. Judas: the name itself the synonym for betrayer, traitor, pathetic empty vessel.
It is not my purpose here today to redeem Judas from centuries of judgment or to forgive his misguided
and catastrophic act of self-righteousness . . . unless, of course, one subscribes to the notion that to forgive
is to recognize that we have more in common with the one who has harmed us than not.2 Rather, I simply
want to suggest that we look more closely at this figure of self-righteousness and despair. Perhaps we
should choose Judas as our prayer guide, quietly imagine his story. Ponder, if we dare, how like Judas we
have become in our own self-righteousness.
Let me give you an example of what this might sound like—listening to Jesus through Judas’s ears.
Remember first that Judas was the keeper of the purse. In other words, Judas was the treasurer of the
movement. He would have been the one who kept track of the contributions, who approved expenditures
2
John Patton, Is Human Forgiveness Possible? (Academic Renewal Press, 2003).
© 2016 Plymouth Congregational Church
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for food, for charity, for travel. For our imagination purposes, ignore John’s assertion that Judas had been
stealing from the fund himself. That was John’s imagination at work. Rather, think of a time when you
might have been a treasurer of an organization’s resources, or your own family’s checkbook. Have you ever
served on a finance committee? Have you ever been responsible for overseeing a budget? Have you ever
been in a conversation with anyone about spending money? Have you ever questioned whether an
expenditure might be too lavish? Have you ever participated in a congregational meeting when the subject
of the church’s budget was discussed? Have you ever heard anything like Jesus’ words to Judas? “Leave her
alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you,
but you do not always have me.”
I’ve prayed with, for, through and about Judas for a long time, and I’ve come to some conclusions. He is a
complicated character in the original Christian morality play, complicated and, to me at least, tragic. I
actually love him a little bit. I’ve come to that feeling for Judas over a lot of years of preaching the Holy
Week story, the one that begins next Sunday with Jesus’ decision to go directly in to the heart of
oppression, Jerusalem, where he was greeted with cheers and palm branches. I’ll tell you how I prepare.
Each year I choose one of the members of the supporting cast—Mary, Jesus’ mother; Mary Magdalene;
Peter; Pilate; Judas; Joseph of Arimathea. I imagine the events through the eyes of that particular character.
I let my mind wander down Jerusalem’s dusty streets, up to a room where dinner is served, out to the
Garden of Gethsemane at night. To a stone tomb empty of the body. I always learn new things that way. I
recognize contemporary themes. I gain new strength for the work to come. I remember why I have chosen
to be a Christian disciple.
I may not have convinced you that Judas is a sympathetic character. You may not be able to find it in
yourselves to forgive his misguided and catastrophic act of self-righteousness. You may think it is something
of a waste of time and the power of the Passion story to dwell on Judas’s role. You may be right. But let me
suggest something to you as we prepare ourselves to walk with our Christ into Jerusalem, into the
desecrated Temple, into the upper room, into the garden of Gethsemane, into the halls of Pilate’s justice,
to Calvary’s desolate hill and to the tomb. Let me suggest that we all, every single one of us, needs to learn
how to be more forgiving. Every one of us. We need to look at the person who has come to the end of his
rope, and we need to learn how to love him. I may be wrong about Judas, but I am right about this. None of
us is as prompt to forgive as God wants us to be. Since that is true, and since I am your pastor and I preach
to you what I need to hear myself, let me just suggest to you that if you could allow Judas into your hearts,
if you can empathize with his anguish, before and after he betrayed Jesus, if you can cut for him a loving
tombstone to place in the potter’s field of your imagination and write on that stone words of love and
forgiveness, you will have taken a big step toward understanding why the empty tomb matters. Amen.
© 2016 Plymouth Congregational Church
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