The Kiss of Judas: Themes of Betrayal & Forgiveness in the Scriptures – IV
This is the last in a series of four Lenten devotional reflections given by Fr. David Curry on The Kiss of Judas: Themes of Betrayal & Forgiveness in the Scriptures. The first is posted here, the second here, and the third here.
UPDATE (22 Mar.): The four addresses have been compiled into a booklet, which can be accessed here.
“Judas, betrayest thou me with a kiss?”
There are no greater betrayals than the betrayals of intimacy, the betrayals of trust and love. And indeed, the larger biblical witness to the ‘kiss of Judas’ as the archetype of all betrayal features precisely those themes of intimacy betrayed. At the same time, they become the occasions of a greater love, the redemptive love of God. Forgiveness is the greater theme that arises most profoundly out of the betrayals of the intimacies of love.
Our focus is upon the themes of betrayal and forgiveness in the Scriptures. There is, of course, a further story that belongs to the history of reflection upon the wisdom of the Scriptures. One has only to note Dante and Shakespeare, medieval and modern, so to speak, to realize how profoundly the themes of betrayal and forgiveness have shaped our literary, philosophical and political culture. Dante’s Divine Comedy explicates with a wonderful and powerful philosophical logic poetically expressed the dynamics of betrayal and forgiveness. Shakespeare, too, in a different timbre of expression but with no less insight undertakes to explore the very power of forgiveness precisely through the betrayals of trust. One only needs to consider The Merchant of Venice, where “mercy seasons justice,” or Measure for Measure, where the one who has been wronged seeks mercy for the wrong doer who himself wishes death and destruction for his sin. And, then, there is The Tempest, a play which in some sense puts love, the love that is greater than the burden of our remembrances, at the heart of the political and social order.
Powerful stuff, we might say. And yet all of it springs if not entirely at least mightily from the witness of the Scriptures. It will not do to focus simply on the New Testament for there is nothing in the witness of the New Testament that is not a reflection upon some story or theme or idea in the Old Testament. And with respect to the kiss of Judas, perhaps no story illumines so much of the dynamic of Christ’s redemptive love than the love-prophet of the Old Testament, Hosea.
The text is graphic. Hosea takes his personal situation in all of its vulnerability and wonder as the lesson of human betrayal and divine forgiveness and restoration. It is, perhaps, not by accident that the last two chapters of this book of prophecy are read in Holy Week in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. The whole book itself, of course, is rich and suggestive about the deeper meaning of the pageant of Holy Week.
