Category: Sermons

“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”

It has been our mantra, the interpretative text for our Holy Week meditations. It speaks profoundly to this day, the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great Holy Days of Christ’s Passion. In our Anglican tradition, we immerse ourselves in the reading of all of the accounts of the Passion. Luke’s Passion is read on the Wednesday and the Thursday of Holy Week. It is from Luke that we get this defining word of betrayal.

Maundy Thursday is a day of complexity and confusion. Maundy is the Englishing of the Latin mandatum, meaning commandment. The novum mandatum, the new commandment, is Jesus’ word to us at the Last Supper, on the night in which he was betrayed. What is the new commandment? That we should love one another as he has loved us. The Passion of Christ signals to us exactly what that means. It means sacrifice and service.

Those two concepts mark the solemn ceremonies of this day. Christ institutes the Holy Communion, identifying himself with the bread and the wine of the Passover celebration and thereby inaugurating the new covenant that will be realized through his death and resurrection. He inaugurates this new reality in the face of our betrayals and he also insists on washing the feet of the disciples. It signals the servant ministry of the Gospel. “I am among you as one that serves.”

Sacrifice and service. And yet, betrayals.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”

Tenebrae means shadows or darkness. Part of the intensity of Holy Week is captured in an ancient tradition of the solemn recitation of the psalms and lessons of the Mattin services of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, sung on the evenings before each of those days. Less common, perhaps, in our time, Tenebrae now happens, if at all, on the Wednesday evening. The readings are those of the Mattins of Maundy Thursday while the psalms and canticles anticipate the whole drama of human redemption. Christ’s Passion and Resurrection are the central events of salvation; they illumine each other. Tenebrae helps us to appreciate something of the weight and the intensity of Holy Week and Easter.

The darkness is the deep darkness of spiritual betrayal, captured most profoundly in  the figure of Judas. Luke’s account of the Passion is read on the Wednesday in Holy Week and on Maundy Thursday. It is Luke who gives us these poignant and yet heart-rending words of Jesus to Judas, the question that in its scope and meaning catches us all. “Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”

The kiss is followed by Christ’s capture; it is a scene of violence. They have come out against him with swords and staves. In the melee, one of the servants of the high priest has his ear cut off but Jesus intervenes to prevent more violence and “touch[es] his ear and healed him.” Such things deliberately signal the contrast between human violence and destruction and divine grace and healing. In a way, Luke’s account accentuates this contrast. Judas’ betrayal, too, is seen to include all of us. We are all implicated, in one way or another, in the betrayals of Christ. Jesus’ words to Judas and his captors in the maelstrom of the confusion of his captivity are his words to us. They convict us of our neglect, read ‘betrayal’ of his teaching, our betrayal of the Word made flesh, we might say, whose words are meant to take flesh in us. We betray the words of his teaching and we betray the Word who is Christ.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Judas, betrayest thou the son of man with a kiss?”

Holy Week is the spectacle of all our betrayals. In a way, all betrayal is an aspect of the archetype of all betrayal, the betrayal of Judas. It is the intimacy of a kiss that heightens the sense of the enormity of sin and its betrayal of the goodness of God.

We read the Passion of St. Mark on Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week. The Passion of St. Matthew has already been read on Palm Sunday. The beginning of the Passion of St. Mark is intriguing and to my mind, quite beautiful and compelling. The passage begins with the pouring out of the ointment of spikenard from the alabaster box upon the head of Jesus. It ends with the outpouring of the tears of Peter. In between are the various scenes of betrayal: Judas Iscariot going to the chief priests to betray him; Jesus’ at table with the twelve predicting that “one of you which eateth with me shall betray me”; the falling asleep of the James and John and Simon Peter while Christ wrestles with the Father’s will in Gethsemane; the actual betrayal and capture of Christ; the false witnesses against Christ before the high priest and the council of the elders; and, of course, Peter’s threefold betrayal of Christ. Betrayals are us.

The frame of the story here is most instructive. What the unnamed woman has done is portrayed, too, as a kind of betrayal. Pouring out the ointment is seen as a waste “for it might have been sold for more than three hundred pieces of silver, and have been given to the poor.” Her anointing of Christ is seen as a betrayal of what is owed to the poor. We have obligations and duties, responsibilities and commitments to one another, to be sure, and especially towards the poor, but the point of the Gospel is not the eradication of poverty – an utopian dream – but to do always what you can, “for ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good.” There is more than money, dare I say, that the poor and, indeed, all of us need. The church must be more than another agency for worldly improvement.

(more…)

Print this entry

“We have become a spectacle to the world”

“We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men”, St. Paul tells us (1 Cor. 4.9). We have become a spectacle, but what kind of spectacle? A spectacle of what? we might ask, a spectacle of ourselves in our pride and vanity, in the celebration of our brokenness and woundedness, or the spectacle of Christ at once convicting us of our betrayals of his love and redeeming us by his love?

By ‘we’, I mean the Church or at least what claims to be the Church in its many manifestations. St. Paul’s challenge to the Corinthians is equally his challenge to us about what kind of spectacle we have become. The question is a constant challenge; one which is critically before us in the events of Holy Week. We are to see ourselves in the spectacle of sin and love, the spectacle of our betrayals. We are very much on display in these events, caught in the conflicting storms of the emotions of our hearts. We are not spectators of others so much as we are spectators of ourselves as betrayers of Christ. This reality of our humanity is strikingly, poignantly and painfully present to us in our liturgy. We who cry “Hosanna to the King” then cry “Crucify, Crucify Him”! If we have hearts, then we cannot help but be convicted by the terror and the tyranny of our betrayals.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

Fr. David Curry has compiled his four Lenten meditations on The Kiss of Judas: Themes of Betrayal and Forgiveness in the Scriptures into a booklet, complete with selected artwork. Click on the cover image below to download the pdf document.

Print this entry

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.

(more…)

Print this entry

This is the third 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, and the second here.

UPDATE (22 Mar.): The four addresses have been compiled into a booklet, which can be accessed here.

“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”

There are kisses and there are kisses. One has only to think of the sensual imagery of the kiss to realize how profound the very idea of a kiss as betrayal really is. And yet, it takes the larger view of the biblical panorama in all its complexity, and, dare I say, confusion, to bring home to us the radical nature of betrayal that in turn can be so simply and yet profoundly captured in a kiss.

The pageant of Holy Week immerses us in the theme of betrayal. In a way, it seeks to concentrate our minds on the ways in which we all participate in the kiss of Judas, the archetype of all betrayal. That may seem very distant and dismal, rather dark and disturbing, but the point is quite the contrary. Our being awakened to the awareness of betrayal in each of our hearts is the spring that catapults us into the freeing grace of Christ. The paradox is that we can really only come to that by way of the horrendous spectacles of betrayal. Two stories stand out in the Old Testament view of things that illumine so much of the later New Testament perspective.

The two stories that I have in mind are the stories of the Levite’s Concubine and the story of David’s betrayal of God. The one is told in the Book of Judges, the other in the books of Samuel and First Kings. The story of the Levite’s Concubine is probably, I am afraid to say, completely unknown to you. It does not figure in the Church’s public reading of Scripture. You can only know it from your own reading of Scripture or perhaps from the odd and curious reference from some preacher, no doubt odd and curious too! And there is very little about the story in the older commentary tradition either.

The story of the Levite’s Concubine is the most disturbing story of the whole of the Old Testament. It is at once complex and confusing yet quite compelling about the nature of a kind of inchoate form of betrayal, of betrayal avant la lettre in a way and yet as illuming après la lettre something of the deeper aspects of betrayal. The story appears at the end of the Book of Judges, a book which is buttressed by the telling theme that “in those days there was no king in Israel.” The idea of a king in Israel raises intriguing and compelling questions about authority. That the Book of Judges raises the question about Kingship in this way signals a kind of change and a problem. The problem is about how to give expression to our commitment to things spiritual and intellectual – to God and the soul, as it were. The whole Book of Judges is taken up with the problem of how the people of God are to be governed and organized under the ultimate authority of God. In other words, how are the transcendent principles of the Kingdom of God to be translated into the practical life of the people of God? Ultimately, it is a question about mediation, the mediation of authority.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of,
and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”

Passiontide begins with two powerful and suggestive readings, not to mention the gradual psalm set to one of Bach’s passion tunes. We ignore them at our peril. The epistle reading from Hebrews lays out the profound theology of atonement and redemption. Christ is the Mediator of the New Covenant, the new understanding of the relationship between God and Man accomplished through Christ’s sacrifice. The gospel reading from Matthew relates a critical set of exchanges, first, between Jesus and the mother of the sons of Zebedee, secondly, with the sons themselves, and, then, with the rest of the disciples. The dialogue is altogether about two things: sacrifice and service.

“We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus said, in the gospel read on the Sunday just before Lent, Quinquagesima Sunday. Not just I go up. Not just you go up, but we go up. In some sense that is the meaning of Christian pilgrimage. It is about a journey to God and with God. The meaning of that journey takes on an heightened sense of intensity with Passiontide. Suddenly more and more of what that journey entails begins to become more and more apparent. It challenges all our worldly aims and ambitions. It is not about success as the world counts success but neither is about being losers. No. There is altogether something here that is much deeper and grander. It speaks to our souls.

The Letter to the Hebrews is a theological treatise. It seeks to explicate the theology of God’s engagement with our humanity in Jesus Christ. Atonement is one of its major themes. Atonement simply means being at one; in this case, being at one with God. But the whole reality of human experience is about our estrangement from God. The story of the Fall is played out in each of our lives individually and collectively. We are not at one with the world. We are not at one with one another. We are not at one with God.

(more…)

Print this entry