“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”
The kiss of Judas is the archetype of all betrayal. Holy Week in all of its intensity and drama has set before us the pageant of all our betrayals. What we contemplate is the Judas within each of us. How is this possible? Because of the love of God which is greater than our betrayals, because Truth has more power than all sin and evil. Betrayals, after all, are themselves an acknowledgment of a truth which we have denied. Even more, as we see in the pageant of the Passion, that truth is so much before us even in denial that we seek to destroy it. We kill God.
God is dead. That is the disturbing wonder of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. And yet the death of God in Christ – for the death of God only has meaning through the Incarnation – accomplishes a strange marvel. There is the quiet peace of this holy day. It is the peace of Paradise. All the rage and spite, all the bitter agony and ugly violence of Good Friday is past and gone. We have, literally, done all that we could to annihilate God from the horizon of our minds. We have, literally, in the crucifixion of Christ done all that we could to deny the dignity of our humanity. It is not just God who is dead in Christ; we are dead in ourselves and dead to God.
All our wild sin and evil has had its say. It all amounts to what it is. It is nothing. It is all a denial of what truly is, a denial of God and creation, a denial of all that is true and good about ourselves as well. “Nothing is but what is not,” indeed, to adapt Shakespeare’s phrase from Macbeth. And yet, there is the peace of Holy Saturday, the sense of paradise. Why? Precisely because the fury and folly of sin and evil has done its worst; there is, literally, nothing more that we can do by way of sin and destruction.
You may cavil at this. What about the monstrous and hideous pageant of man’s constant inhumanity towards his fellow man? What about the pageant of the holocaust and the vast enormity of the deaths in the last century, especially, those that are the product of totalitarian regimes? What about the continuing spectacles of genocide and the destruction and loss of human life in our unending world of wars? What about our misuse and destruction of the natural world? And so on, and so on. The litany of our disorder and destructive disarray is surely endless and mind-numbing. How, then, can the crucifixion of some obscure figure in some forgotten corner of the world, long ago and far away, be seen to be the end, in the sense of being the fullness of sin and evil? Precisely because the Gospel makes it clear that what is going on is our attempt to destroy God. All of the ugly pageant of our destructiveness is captured in this story. All that comes later is but more of the same.
But so, too, all that went before. All sin, past, present and future has run its course, we might say, in Christ’s crucifixion. God has given himself us into our hands. We have done our worst. Christ is God and so we have killed God. We have had our way. There is nothing left for us to do. And yet, God’s world remains and God’s word and truth remain as well. For all that we have done, after all, is but an empty contradiction of the truth. The truth remains the truth, we might say. But peace and the harmony of paradise? How is that possible? Because God has willed to bear all of the wicked packet of our follies and sins. He has embraced it all in himself. We have seen it in the crucified Christ. We have beheld him who we have pierced. There is nothing more to be said, really, about sin and evil. It has had its sway and its say and it all comes to nothing.
And so there is a kind of peace and quiet. We are in our sins and follies a spent force. God is dead to us, to be sure. But God who is truth lives and in the quiet of Holy Saturday there are the motions of divine love that are already quietly underway. Peter indicates this in the marvelous epistle reading for this day. “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: by which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3.18). Christ suffered once for sins. “We shall not see Christ crucified a second time,” Augustine remarks. There is the theological sense that all sin – past, present and future – has been borne in the body of the crucified. This is the great insight of the Christian Faith, part of the power of this story. Its truth is for all times and for all peoples.
This logically requires something else, something which is captured in Peter’s epistle, suggested in the reading from Zechariah, and expressed in the Creed. All sin is past in a way, that is to say, sin is about our denial of the truth of God. It is something we do only after the fact of our being. It is about an action in the mind, in the tongue and in the hand that has in some sense already happened. If it is an intention, then at least the intention is already there in some inchoate form or quite explicitly as something pre-meditated. To speak of sin and evil in the future is to project from the present and the past though this does not cause future sin. We merely surmise that there will be sin and wickedness in the world in the future.
But all actual sins that are committed are by definition thoughts, words and deeds that have already been thought, spoken and done. All involve the same logic of a denial of what is and the folly of trying to destroy God. Because of this, there is the strange but wonderful creedal doctrine of the descent into Hell. Christ goes and preaches to the spirits in prison. They too are gathered into his redemptive word. Their sin and evil is also part of the crucifixion. It is all done! Their actions are part of that empty and destructive nothingness that we see in the crucifixion and death of Christ.
The Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy have a beautiful way of capturing this teaching in an icon. It depicts Christ drawing up Adam and Eve out of a tomb, out of the prison of death, as it were. The theological point is wonderful. The sin of Adam and Eve, after all, is in each of us in each of our own particular sins. Adam and Eve are us is the point. And all of that sad sorry packet of sin and wickedness in all its manifold and different forms has been totally embraced in the arms of the crucified, in the body of Christ which lies in a borrowed tomb, even as he has, as Athanasius puts it, “borrowed a body so that he might borrow a death,” our death.
This is all part of the marvel of Holy Saturday. God and his creation are greater than our sin, greater than all evil. Christ rests in the tomb but the rest of God is always something more and there is something more at work in the quiet of Holy Saturday; it is the descent into Hell, into the place of departed spirits. It signals the divine truth of God who wills to be reconciled with the whole of sinful creation. His creation, past, present and future remains, we might say, despite the wicked folly of our sins. We have had our way in every sense, past, present, and future but God’s peace and truth remain. Sin is nothing and all is at peace. God has embraced it all.
The kiss of Judas reveals the full tenor of betrayal. It is all borne by God in Christ. It is only in the truth of God that we can contemplate our sin and learn something more and greater. It is God’s will to be reconciled with us. The peace of Holy Saturday celebrates that reconciliation. It has happened. The unseen activity celebrated on this day is the doctrine of the descent into hell because all that belongs to the past of sin and evil, too, has been embraced by the reconciling will of God.
The paradox is simply this. We can only confront our betrayals because of God’s forgiveness. Out of that paradox will come something new and wonderful, a new creation, the resurrection. But like all good things, we have to wait for it. Such is the holy wonder of this day; it becomes a day of waiting on God, for we have had our way.
“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”
Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday at Mattins and Ante-Communion, 2013