Christ Church

“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.

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“Christ our Lord became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross”

“While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Such is the mystery of this day, the double mystery of our disobedience and Christ’s obedience, his obedience unto death, a death that is somehow a blessing for us. How shall we think about Good Friday? The Scriptures unveil the great spectacles of obedience and disobedience that help us to ponder the deep mystery of human redemption in the passion and death of Christ. We ponder the mystery of Christ crucified.

The words of the Crucified challenge and confront us in our complacency and our cynicism and in our folly and our despair. These words which illumine so much of our understanding of the Scriptures and human life are also illumined by the whole pageant of God’s Word written.

The stories of Isaac and Absalom are the stories of obedience and disobedience that provide an interpretative framework for our reflection together on the mystery of human redemption.

The story of the Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac belongs historically and traditionally to the sorrowful and serious theological considerations of Good Friday. A most disturbing story, think how troubled Søren Kierkegaard was by this story, for example, it nonetheless helps us to think about Christ’s crucifixion. In Genesis, God puts Abraham to the test, to an almost unbelievable and utterly disturbing test, bidding him sacrifice his only son, the son whom he loves, the son of God’s promise to him and Sarah, the son through whom “all your descendants shall be named” and “through whom all nations of the earth shall be blessed.”

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“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.

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“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.

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