Category: Sermons

“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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“The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit and life”
(John 6. 63)

“Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage”

These are the opening lines of a wonderful poem by George Herbert called Prayer (1), a poem which presents a collection of images, biblical and natural, domestic and exotic, historical and experiential and which ends with two words, “something understood.” Prayer is something understood in and through the images of our journey in faith to God and with God.

It speaks, I think, to the rich marvel of today’s readings from Galatians and the Gospel according to St. John. There is a banquet in the wilderness. “Prayer the churches banquet” happens in the wilderness of human experience.

The theme of the wilderness is a fundamental feature of the season of Lent. By extension, the wilderness is a profound and important metaphor for the journey of our souls in faith.

The wilderness in the biblical accounts is the place of revelation: God reveals himself to Moses in the burning bush in the wilderness as “I am who I am.” The whole exodus is about the going forth of the people of Israel into the wilderness. There the Law is given to them. The wilderness is the place of the giving of the Law and the context of the giving of the Law is liberation; the law itself is about a greater freedom, a freedom to God. “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” the Ten Commandments begin.

This sense of liberation ultimately finds further expression in Paul’s evocative description of Jerusalem as the city which “is above”, which “is free” and which is “the mother of us all.” This passage takes us back to Quinquagesima Sunday where Jesus tells us that “we go up to Jerusalem.” What does that mean? It means learning to live from God’s Word and will.  It is in the wilderness that the people of the Hebrews become the people of the Law, after all, learning what it means to be God’s people, defined by the intellectual and spiritual realities of God’s word and will. How much more so when we are in the wilderness with Christ, learning about the darkness of our sinful hearts and about the light of Christ’s love?

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“God, be merciful to me a sinner”

The theme of divine mercy triumphs over human presumption and folly. Divine mercy, however, makes no sense whatsoever if we do not know ourselves to be, in fact, sinners. In a way the shadows of the Cross reach backwards as well as forwards. We are illumined, paradoxically as it may seem,  by the shadows of the Cross.

There is the grace of revelation and the grace of redemption and nowhere, perhaps, is that seen more wonderfully than in the 18^th chapter of the Book of Genesis both in terms of this morning’s lesson and in terms of what precedes it, namely, the encounter between God and Abraham under the shade of the oaks of Mamre, a scene in which God gives the promise of a son to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, the proverbial ‘promised son’. God appears to Abraham in threefold aspect and Abraham prepares a meal for them and waits upon them. The scene becomes the basis for the icon of the Trinity in Eastern Orthodoxy, an image at once of the Eucharist and the Trinity, the communion of our humanity with the communion of God. All under the shade of the oak of Mamre for such is the grace of revelation which in turn signals the grace of redemption which is what we see in the story which immediately follows and which is our first lesson this morning.

We are presented with a most remarkable exchange between Abraham and God about human wickedness and divine mercy, about the power of righteousness and the powerlessness of sin. The question has to do about Sodom and Gomorrah, cities which are the proverbial images for all that is wicked and perverse, a wickedness and perversity that has very much to do with our hearts of judgment and self-righteousness.

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“He that is not with me is against me: and he that
gathereth not with me scattereth”

It is an intriguing and, to my mind, a terrifying Gospel. It signals the moment of the most intense kind of darkness in the Lenten journey, at least before the heart-rending darkness of Holy Week. And yet, there is a great good for us in the discovery of the “dark wood” of the soul, as it were, a light in the darkness. It is about awakening to the light of Christ without which we are simply in darkness and despair. It may be, like Dante, that we shall discover there “a great good” precisely through the darkness of the “dark wood” of the soul.

The Gospel shows us the picture, the terrifying picture, of the despairing soul. And what is at the center of that darkness and despair? Simply ourselves as divided against ourselves. Simply ourselves as presuming upon ourselves to fix ourselves and everything else around us. Simply ourselves, too, when we are buried in our own griefs and sorrows for that, too, is really all about us. The devil is in us when we forget about who we truly and fundamentally are in the sight of God. We become the enemies of God, our souls divided against ourselves because we are separated from God.

This is the great truth and insight of the great religions. Our humanity is radically incomplete without God. That basic insight is intensified in the Christian understanding; we are more than merely incomplete, we are destructive and dangerous to ourselves and to others. This is where Jesus’ stark words come fully into play. “He that is not with me is against me.” There is, we might say, no neutral ground, no place for indifference. It is a matter of being with God or being against God. Without God there is simply a great emptiness within the human soul, a God-shaped hole, we might say, in our very being.

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This is the second 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.

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 is something wonderfully appropriate about commemorating St. Matthias in the course of our Lenten Programme on the Kiss of Judas. The Feast Day for St. Matthias is February 24th which this year fell on a Sunday in the season of Lent. The Feast of St. Matthias frequently, though not always, falls within Lent; sometimes it coincides with the pre-Lenten season of the Gesimas. But whether during the Gesimas or in Lent, if the 24th is a Sunday, the celebration of St. Matthias is transferred to the following Tuesday. What makes this wonderfully appropriate, even providential, is that the story of St. Matthias is directly related to the story of Judas. Matthias is the apostle chosen to take the place of Judas, the betrayer of Christ.

The readings for the Feast of St. Matthias are wonderfully illuminating about this connection to Judas. The lesson from Acts tells the story of Judas’ reaction to his betrayal – his self-destruction by falling headlong, bursting asunder and all his bowels gushed out (other accounts have him going out and hanging himself) – and the subsequent decision to choose another among those “which have companied with us” (Acts 1.21) and with Jesus “to be a witness with us of his resurrection” (Acts 1.22). The story of Matthias is about the one chosen by lot to take the place of Judas the betrayer. The Gospel from St. John is the last of the seven ‘I am’ sayings in which Jesus identifies himself in relation to us as the vine; we are the branches (John 15.5). We live from him. The image is inescapably sacramental and recalls us to the night on which he was betrayed, the night in which he institutes the form of his sacramental presence with us.

The kiss of Judas marks the greatest betrayal, one that gathers into itself all of the forms of betrayal. Not least is the idea of the betrayal of brotherhood and fellowship, betrayals that are related to our betrayals of ourselves and God. In a way, those aspects of betrayal are captured best in the Old Testament story of Joseph and his brothers and in the New Testament story of Peter’s betrayal of Christ. Both stories bring out the nature of betrayal and the prospect of forgiveness through contrition and repentance; paradoxically, the very things refused and denied by Judas himself.

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“O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”

It is called The Prayer of Humble Access, one of the beautiful prayers of the Anglican liturgical tradition.

“We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord; Trusting in our own righteousness, But in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy So much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, Whose property is always to have mercy…”

The prayer echoes explicitly the Gospel for this day, the story of the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus so resolutely, so determinedly and yet so humbly.

There are two words which stand here in a complementary relation. They are the words “humble” and “access.” Humility is the condition of our access to God. What the prayer expresses is a fundamental attitude of Faith. It is not our presumption, our “trusting in our own righteousness,” but our humility, our trusting in the “manifold and great mercies” of God. Against everything that is thrown at her, she has a hold of this one thing – the mercies of God in Christ Jesus. To have a hold of that is humility. She presumes upon nothing else and it is this that gains her access to the heart of Christ.

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