by CCW | 20 February 2013 11:17
UPDATE (22 Mar.): This is the first of four Lenten reflections on The Kiss of Judas: Themes of Betrayal and Forgiveness in the Scriptures. The four addresses have been compiled into a booklet, which can be accessed here[1].
They are haunting and troubling words. All of the Gospels identify Judas in one way or another as the betrayer of Christ, the grand paradigm in a way of all betrayal. Luke alone has Jesus address Judas with this telling question in the very moment of his being taken captive (Luke 22.48), a chilling moment of truth and its betrayal. Mark, with admirable economy of expression, has Judas simply tell the crowd “whomsoever I kiss, that same is he; take him, and lead him away safely.” Whose safety, we may ask? “And as soon as he was come [Judas] goeth straightway to him, and saith, Master, master; and kissed him” (Mark 14. 44-45). Matthew identifies Judas outright as the betrayer. “Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, The one I shall kiss is the man; seize him. And he came up to Jesus at once and said, Hail, Master! And he kissed him” (Matthew 26. 48-49). Only John says nothing about the kiss of Judas, though he is very clear about Judas’ betrayal.
Luke gives us this most intimate moment of betrayal, a moment made ever so memorable by its intensity and its intimacy. It has, to be sure, captured the imagination of the artists, though depictions of the betrayal, like the crucifixion itself, are relatively rare at least in early Christian art. Apart from a few sarcophagi, the earliest artistic representation in a Church appears in Ravenna, Italy, at the Church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo[2] in a lovely mosaic dating to the sixth century. But perhaps the most arresting artistic representation of the betrayal is Giotto’s fresco[3] in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (1305/6). In a way it has become iconic. There are other representations to be sure – by Duccio[4] in Sienna, Fra Angelico[5] in Florence, and, later in the sixteenth century, Caravaggio[6] in Rome, to name but a few – all of which connect the betrayal with violence as well. “Are ye come out as against a thief, with swords and staves, to take me?” Jesus says, (Mt. 26.55, Mk. 14.48). There are representations in stone and wood and in stained glass, too, scattered among the Cathedrals and churches of Europe and beyond. But one could hardly say that there was an excess of artistic representation of this momentous scene which is such a telling moment in the life of Christ. There is, after all, a disturbing quality about such a theme.
One of my favourites is a wood carving[7] from the sixteenth century in Germany (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). It depicts Judas embracing Christ and kissing him while Christ holds up his right hand in the gesture of peace and blessing to all of us as he looks, not at Judas, but at us, the viewer. There is just that sense of disjunction between Judas’ action and Christ’s reaction. There is just that sense of divine compassion and forgiveness in the face of our betrayals of his goodness and love. Of course, it is Giotto who captures all of that best and in the most astounding way. In his portrayal, Jesus looks right at Judas who is kissing him. We are convicted in the moment of our betrayal. It is ever so powerful and moving.
John in his theological way has Judas convict himself and be convicted by Christ at the last supper “in the same night that he was betrayed” (BCP, p. 82), a theme that is captured in varying degrees of explicitness in the other gospel narratives, too, but nowhere more fully, perhaps, than in John’s Gospel. With John, there is a kind of emphasis upon the betrayal of intimacy and friendship – something which we shall see in the larger witness of the Scriptures. At the last supper, Jesus says to the disciples, “truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” This occasions some puzzlement and questioning to which Jesus replies, “It is he to whom I shall give this morsel when I have dipped it. So when he had dipped the morsel, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. Then after the morsel, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, What you are going to do, do quickly” (Jn 13.26-27).
What is this about? It is a feature of the knowing love of Christ. He does not go to the cross unknowingly or unwittingly, like Isaac in the sacrifice of Abraham who is the unknowing but intended victim. Nor is he like Socrates in his embrace of his sentence, for unlike Socrates, Jesus does not and cannot, we might say, ‘drink the hemlock,’ take his own life directly, as it were. The crucifixion is sacrifice, not suicide. It is the strongest counter to the death culture of our age. We want power and control over all aspects of our lives and our deaths. We forget who we are. It is one of the forms of betrayal, a betrayal of God and, paradoxically, of ourselves and of the logic of redemptive suffering.
The Gospel accounts of the kiss of Judas belong to the larger panorama of betrayal and forgiveness that has the beginnings of its shape and meaning in The Book of Genesis. The story of the Fall and the story of Cain and Abel provide two illustrations of the themes of betrayal and forgiveness.
The Fall
A betrayal of God in Christ, the story of the kiss of Judas actually begins with the story of the Fall, the archetypal account of our betrayal of God. Against the grand pageant of creation in chapters one and two, the third chapter of Genesis explains in mythic form the reality of our separation from God, from the created order, and from one another. How is it a betrayal? Because the created order is something known and grasped in thought and part of that created order is God’s commandment to the ‘Adam,’ to our humanity. The whole assumption of the first two chapters of Genesis is that the world is intelligible, that it shows, as it were, something of the mind of the maker. Our humanity is at once grounded in the created order as the dust into which God has breathed his spirit and as the creature who alone is said to be made in God’s image. Humanity has a special role, too, in the created order; he has been given dominion over all of it.
A loaded phrase, we misunderstand it if we assume that it means our dominance over the natural world as if it were simply dead stuff that exists for our manipulation and purpose. Such is an essentially modern outlook and one which we have more than enough occasion to be skeptical about in our present day. Domination actually recalls us to the Lord, the Dominus, to the will of the Creator, in other words. Human domination can only belong to the divine will and purpose. The ‘Adam’ – our humanity in general – is also given to name “every living creature”, a wonderful and profound act of intellection which suggests the way in which human knowing participates in the divine understanding of what God has made. Our naming enters into the meaning of “every living creature.” Yet, again, this cannot mean that the world and all that is in it is or exists simply for us. It is God’s world and our humanity is inescapably part of that world and part of it, too, intellectually and morally.
What the first two chapters of Genesis do not give us is much of a sense of our self-consciousness. Chapter three reveals the profound Judeo-Christian and Islamic sense of human self-consciousness that arises through division and separation, our division and separation from the truth of God. The story is at once the discovery and the betrayal of human reason in the form of disobedience. Through the Fall we discover the implicit basis of our own existence, even the discovery of our reason through our betrayal of what we have been given to know, namely, the essential goodness of the created order and therefore the essential rightness of the divine command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The story in its mythic form clearly shows the activity of human reason. The serpent, the most subtle of all the creatures, asks questions, questions which challenge and call into doubt what God has already said. The insinuating questions of the serpent are simply an aspect of human reason but as capable of contradicting the basis of all reasoning by disobeying God, therefore denying God, the very principle of our own existence. The creeping serpent, as John Donne puts it, has turned towards the dust and away from God. The creeping serpent in us is our reason as turned away from God, as turned downwards rather than upwards.
The story of the kiss of Judas has its absolute beginning in the story of the Fall, the story of our betrayal of the truth of God in creation and, even more, of the truth of God in our own creation as being, in principle at least, intellectual and moral creatures. The story of the Fall gives greater poignancy and meaning to the kiss of Judas because it is about the denial of God. Such denials are betrayals because we are in contradiction with ourselves. “I renounce the blessèd face,” as T.S. Eliot puts it, “and renounce the voice/ because I cannot hope to turn again” (Ash Wednesday). Luke’s account of the kiss of Judas recalls our renunciation of both the face of God and the voice of God in Jesus Christ.
There is a further significance to the story of the Fall in relation to the kiss of Judas. It is simply this. We – all of us – are in the story of the Fall; we are in Adam and Eve or, to reverse it, their story is our story, they are in each of us in the story of our own lives. And so, too, by extension we contemplate in the story of the kiss of Judas what is at once potential and actual in ourselves.
But the story of the Fall is more than mere condemnation and judgment. It marks the beginning of salvation history, we might say, the beginning of our learning and education which can ultimately bring us only nearer to the truth of God and to the hope of redemption. There is a fall upward, we might say, a fall into reason even in and through all the tropes of division and suffering and death. In other words, the story of the Fall is equally the beginning of the story of divine forgiveness. The divine order of creation is by definition greater than our folly. Hidden in the curses, for example, is what later Christian theology calls the protoevangelium, a foretaste of the good news of redemption in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. God says to the serpent “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3.15); her seed is understood to be a reference to Christ, our redeemer, born of the new Eve, Mary. It signifies the idea that God does not abandon us to ourselves. As such it heightens the poignancy and the terror of the betrayal of Christ by Judas’ kiss, the betrayal of the redeemer which becomes an essential aspect of redemption; the idea that God alone makes something good out of human evil.
Cain and Abel
If the kiss of Judas means our renunciation of the face and voice of God in reference to the story of the Fall in Genesis, it must also signal our turning away from one another and, more acutely, the forms of our defacing or destroying one another. The story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4.1-16) reveals the form of our betrayal of one another. We betray God and this leads, in turn, to our betrayals of one another. The archetypical story here is the Cain’s murder of his brother, Abel. It follows directly upon our expulsion from the Garden of Eden and places us in the fields of creation, upon the ground of the fallen world of human experience.
“Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground.” Both bring the fruits of their labours to God. “And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” One is accepted; the other is not. In a way, this sparsely told story inaugurates the old, old story of sibling rivalry and resentment. The Book of Genesis, starting with this story, is testament to an entire sequence of contests and dissensions between brothers, brothers who are often at enmity with one another. What is of moment here is Cain’s reaction to his brother’s offering being accepted. We are told that “Cain was very angry and his countenance fell.” We often wear our hearts on our sleeves. Our faces reveal our souls. This is pointed out to Cain. “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen?” the Lord asks Cain, “if you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”
Already a certain aspect of the Divine is hinted at here. It is the idea of the divine knowing which knows our hearts and souls better than we know ourselves. Cain does not learn the lesson from what God says, for he immediately goes out into the field with his brother Abel and kills him. Why? we may ask? Because Abel’s offering was accepted and Cain’s was not? Yes. In the New Testament that idea will be further developed and named as envy, one of the most destructive of what will come to be called the seven deadly sins. Envy is about our resentment at the good of another, a resentment that leads to wanting to hurt and destroy. In this case, Cain seeks to remove Abel from the face of the earth, or, to put it in another way, to obliterate his face from the universe.
And so begins the sad, sad tale of man’s inhumanity against his fellow man; the sad and bloody tale of murder and carnage, of war and destruction. And yet, in this story, too, there is hidden the germ of redemption. “The Lord said to Cain, Where is Abel your brother? He said, I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” In a way, Cain’s retort to God is impertinent and dismissive. It is itself a kind of denial of the idea of God as all-knowing. But the divine purpose here is to bring us to self-knowledge and to the greater knowledge of God. “What have you done?” the Lord says to Cain, “your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” It is a powerful image.
It connects, I think, to the kiss of Judas in this sense. Judas betrays Christ to his face. He sees and hears Jesus and yet assumes that he can get away with it. It is a form of self-contradiction and denial. The kiss of Judas is not only about turning away from the face of God in Jesus Christ but a denial of the human face of Jesus as well. A betrayal of God and man, we might say, even as the story of Cain and Abel plays out on the field of our humanity the same discord and division between God and man in the story of the Fall.
Cain is brought to see and know his sin both in terms of his brother’s blood crying out to God from the ground, itself an image of an injustice suffered but known to God in his righteousness, and in the penalty that Cain receives. “You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer upon the earth.” But even more, “the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who came upon him should kill him.” In other words, Cain has to live with the realization of what he has done. He has to ponder his sin, his sin against his brother, for it is a sin against himself and against God, too.
The kiss of Judas, particularly as described by Luke, captures these interrelated concepts: the betrayals of God and man, betrayals that are in our face, as it were. The divine mercy and the beginnings of the concept of forgiveness are seen in the way in which Cain has to contemplate his sin and the way in which he is protected. “If any one slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken upon him sevenfold.” There is in this the counter to the endlessness of the blood feud through the divine justice, a justice which is also a mercy. It opens us out to the possibilities of repentance and forgiveness but only if we are open to the face of God.
The story of the kiss of Judas will be about more than betrayal and forgiveness; it will also be about the rejection of the possibility of forgiveness, a denial of the possibility of a kind of friendship between man and God and between one another. Such rejection and denial is really a rejection and a denial of the scriptural accounts of the Fall and of Cain and Abel. The kiss of Judas brings out the deeper destructive power of our humanity to reject and deny the truth and power of God even when we are face-to-face with God in Jesus Christ. It will lead as well to a denial of the forms of fellowship that belong to the truth of our humanity. For the kiss of Judas will also be about the betrayals of fellowship and friendship.
Duccio’s painting of the kiss of Judas, part of the Maesta altarpiece in the Cathedral of Sienna (1308-11), shows two distinct groups; those who have come out with swords and staves to take Jesus and surround him in the moment of the kiss of Judas, and a group of disciples who are drawing away from Christ and his captors. In a way, it points to what will be our theme next time: the betrayals of fellowship that lead to disorder and disarray. Yet, the divine forgiveness makes something good out of all our disorders and destructive disarray. The kiss of Judas is part of the pageant of redemption that brings us to the Cross and to the first word from the Cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
In Luke’s account, Jesus speaks to Judas face-to-face. Like the story of the Fall and the story of Cain and Abel, we confront our sins face-to-face in the encounter with God. Will we learn? The poet, John Donne, in one of his holy sonnets, bids us think about how we face judgment.
What if this present were the world’s last night?
Mark in my heart, O soul, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether that countenance can thee affright,
Tears in his eyes quench the amazing light,
Blood fills his frowns, which from his pierced head fell,
And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,
Which prayed forgiveness for his foes’ fierce spite?
He bids us look within and find there the image of the crucified and to think upon its meaning, to think upon the face and voice of Christ, the very things which Judas confronts in the moment of his betrayal in Luke’s account. The kiss of Judas compels us to think about how we look at God and Christ and how we look upon one another. It compels us to contemplate all the forms of betrayal in our own hearts. It does so in the power of God whose grace and forgiveness make it possible to face Jesus and to face ourselves and one another. There are our betrayals, to be sure, but there is the greater power of God’s grace and forgiveness provided we will open ourselves to it. It means letting go of our sin and folly. Then we may say with Donne about the image of the crucified that “this beauteous form assures a piteous mind.”
Fr. David Curry
Judas’ Kiss I,
Lent, 2013
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