“I have sinned, in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.”
Holy Week is the spectacle of all our betrayals. The words of Judas Iscariot are all the more poignant for this reason. His words are also our words. They belong entirely to the pageant of Holy Week. We go into the parade of Christ’s celebration of the Passover only to discover what we might call the great make-over, the great and redemptive transformation of our humanity. Central to that transformation, however, is a certain discovery about ourselves and our humanity. We discover the deep and dark betrayals of our hearts. But then what?
Make no mistake. There can be no Easter, no joy, no happiness apart from the realization of our own failings and stupidities, our own self-willed preoccupations which by definition set us at odds with every one around us. To know this and to feel its truth is to be catapulted into Truth itself. The paradox of Holy Week is signaled in the liturgy of this day. We who cry, “Hosanna to the Son of David” are the same as those who cry, “Crucify, crucify!” These are our cries, our voices, our contradictions, our betrayals.
We are Judas. Holy Week confronts us with the betrayals of our hearts. We do not wish to see this or to think it which is why our churches, like our souls, too, are in such disarray. Such is the power of our illusions. Holy Week would show us to ourselves as we are truly are. In the great Gospel for this day, we hear of Judas’ words of confession. “I have sinned, in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.” And yet, Judas’ confession does not lead to repentance and renewal, to new life and joy. His words are to the Chief Priests and elders, not to God. “And they said, What is that to us? See thou to that. And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed, and went and hung himself.” Confession without contrition; remorse without repentance leaves us in the darkness of our selves; in short, there is only death and despair.
Such is the power of remorse; it leaves us dead in ourselves. Even greater though is the power of forgiveness. God wills to be reconciled with his sinful creation. That means being recalled to the objective realities of the Christian faith. Judas’ confession is an object lesson for us about an aspect of confession which we easily ignore and overlook. It isn’t just about feeling bad – such is merely remorse. It is also about true contrition, a true sadness in our souls about the truth we have betrayed. True confession is to God. It acknowledges the divine truth and thus is open to that truth. True contrition and confession seeks the divine will. Remorse and regret leaves us trapped in the prison of our prideful selves. Despair is to be without hope. It is to be without God precisely because of the way we are buried in ourselves. Such despair is death, like the death of Judas.
In Giotto’s telling depiction in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua of Judas betraying Christ with a kiss, Christ looks directly at Judas. What is missing in Judas’ confession is that he is not looking at Christ but is more concerned with himself. That is the way of despair and death. Holy Week would reveal us to ourselves only through revealing to us the nature of divine love.
Palm Sunday ushers us into the intensity of Christ’s Passion. For Anglicans, especially, there is a most remarkable focus on the Passion in all of its fullness. We read through all four accounts of the Passion from each of the Evangelists. We do so as to learn about sin and love. The whole purpose of this week is captured in a poem by George Herbert entitled appropriately enough for Holy Week, The Agonie. There are “two vast, spacious things,” he says, which are needed to be measured or known though “few there are that sound them.” The two vast, spacious things are sin and love.
To know sin is to see our sins as borne in the sufferings of Christ. This is the counter to being absorbed in our sorrows, our remorse and regret. It means looking at the agony of Christ, the agony of our sins as borne by the innocent blood of Christ. The whole of Holy Week focuses our attention on Christ and on the various forms of human relationship to him. Ultimately, that brings us to the Cross. But, as Herbert’s poem suggests, we come to the Cross by way of two wonderful illustrations of the intensity and the enormity of sin and love in the pageant of the Passover: the Last Supper and the Agony in Gethsemane.
Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.
He has in mind the account of the Agony in Gethsemane in Luke’s Gospel. Luke provides us with a certain kind of psychological insight into the human soul of Christ, wrestling with the Father in prayer about Calvary. “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” As Luke indicates, “being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” It is a powerful visual and visceral image; his sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground, anticipating his blood outpoured on the Cross itself. Herbert has picked up on the imagery as applied to the inner struggle of the soul of Christ, the struggle between good and evil. “Sinne is that presse and vice” – images of torture applied here to the tortured soul of Christ. There is a very real intensity to the Passion of Christ. We learn something of the destructive nature of sin by having it made objective before us in Christ.
But we learn sin only so as to learn something more and greater than sin. We learn sin so as to learn love, the love that turns agony into ecstasy.
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.
The references are at once to the scene in the Upper Room on the night in which he was betrayed when Jesus identifies himself with the bread and wine of the Passover celebration and to the actual Crucifixion in the moment when the dead body of Christ is pierced by the pike or spear of one of the soldiers, “and forthwith came there out blood and water,” as John recounts in his Gospel. “Out of the wounded side of the crucified Christ flow the sacraments of baptism and holy communion,” as the ancient commentators put it. Here Herbert connects the sacrament of Holy Communion to the Cross of Christ and to the paradox that out of death comes life, the life of Christ which is to live in us. “Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,/which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.”
Caught in the betrayals of our hearts, Holy Week would have us know and confess our sins, to be sure, but even more to know and confess the love which reveals our sins to us. That love is greater than our hearts of betrayal. We go into the pageant of the Passion to learn the love that triumphs over our sins, the love that redeems and restores, the love that transforms our sorrows into joy. For that will be a Holy Week, indeed. To confess not just our sins but Christ crucified and risen from the dead; to confront the Judas within us without casting ourselves into despair.
“I have sinned, in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.”
Fr. David Curry
Palm Sunday, 2013