Sunday of the Passion
Mt 26:1-27:66
4/14/19
Why did he do it? Why did Judas betray Jesus? The truth of the matter is that we really
don’t know what Judas’ motivation was.
Matthew’s Gospel calls him “Judas Iscariot,” but unfortunately that
doesn’t help us very much. We are not sure exactly what “Iscariot” means. There
are a number of suggestions, and one of them includes ties to revolutionary
ideas, but that is no more than one possibility among several others.
In our Gospel lesson, Judas’ first
move to betray Jesus takes place after complaints about the expensive ointment
that a woman had used to anoint Jesus.
We are told that when the disciples
saw it they were indignant and said, “Why this waste?
For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to
the poor.” However, Jesus responded,
“Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me. For
you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. In pouring
this ointment on my body, she has done it to prepare me for burial.” If we look further afield, the Gospel of John
specifically identifies Judas in this incident and then adds, “He did not say
this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of
the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.”
This may
indicate that greed was a factor. But
the problem with that explanation is that thirty pieces of silver just isn’t
all that much money. Surely he could
have gotten more. We learn at the
beginning of our text that the Jewish religious leaders intended to arrest
Jesus by stealth and kill him. However
they had said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar among the
people.” Yet they wanted Jesus dead so
much that they were willing to scrap this plan when the opportunity presented
itself in Judas during Holy Week.
Surely, Judas could have negotiated a better payoff.
If it
wasn’t only about money, then what else could have prompted Judas to do
it? Perhaps Judas just got tired of waiting
for Jesus to do something. If he had
nationalistic and revolutionary hopes, then Jesus was proving to be quite a
disappointment. Or maybe he thought that
betraying Jesus would force Jesus’ hand and make
him do something. These are all plausible, but we can’t say for sure.
Certainly,
the demonic was involved. Luke says that
“Satan entered into Judas” at this moment
when he made the decision to betray Jesus, and John tells us that at the Last
Supper, the “devil had already put it
into the heart of Judas” to betray him. Yet this really tells us nothing more
than the fact that Satan tempted Judas to do it. That’s what Satan always does to people, and
it doesn’t change the fact that Judas was responsible for what he did.
If you want to know for sure why
Judas did it, then there is only one answer: It was because it was God’s will
to save you. Our Gospel lesson begins
with the words, “When
Jesus had finished all these sayings, he said to his disciples, ‘You know that
after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be delivered up
to be crucified.’”
This is
actually the fourth passion prediction in Matthew’s Gospel. Just before
entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday Jesus said, “See, we are going up to
Jerusalem. And the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and
scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the
Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified, and he will be raised on the
third day.” And then Jesus went on to
add, “the Son of Man came not to be served but
to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
It was God the Father’s will for his
Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross as the ransom for your sins. Through the
Scriptures of the Old Testament he had declared ahead of time that this is what
would happen. Jesus says in our text, “The Son of Man goes as it is written
of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have
been better for that man if he had not been born.”
The events
of Jesus’ passion and death had been written in Scripture. And that includes Judas’ betrayal. We learn that when Judas tried to return the
money, the Jewish leaders refused to accept it, and instead used the money to
buy a burial plot for strangers. Matthew
tells us: “Then was fulfilled what had been spoken by the prophet Jeremiah,
saying, ‘And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him on whom a
price had been set by some of the sons of Israel, and they gave them for the
potter's field, as the Lord directed me.’”
Now we may
say, “Well if God foreknows all things, and if he wills these events to happen,
then surely Judas can’t be responsible for what he did.” And yet, Judas
is. God foreknew it. God willed it to happen for you. Judas gave into
temptation. Judas chose to do it, and bears responsibility for it. They are all true.
We may say,
“But how can all of those be true at the same time?” And in that question we are confronted with
the fact that God is God, and we are not. The first sin, the Fall, was about wanting to
be God. In the Fall we lost the image of God.
Now, having become less, we
are even more convinced that God’s
dealing must fit within our reason. We want to be God, and there is always the
temptation to reject God when God refuses to play by our rules.
You see, we
are not really talking about Judas. We are talking about you. We are talking about the things that happen in your life
that you don’t want. You know what you want. You know what makes sense. You know the plans you have made. And then someone is diagnosed with
cancer. Or struggles with mental illness
arise. Or we face a financial
crisis. Or our children reject faith in
Jesus Christ.
When things
like this occur, they do not make sense to us.
Our reason struggles to figure out what God is doing. Or it wants to rebel against God. But God is God, and we are not. He doesn’t have to play by our rules, because
frankly, our rules are just too small.
We never get to “peer behind the curtain” and figure out what God is
really up to. That’s just not how it
works.
What we do get is this week, and the eighth
day. We get the events of Holy Week. We
get Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, “My Father, if it be possible,
let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” We learn that it was the Father’s will for
the incarnate Son to drink the cup of God’s wrath that we deserved. We get
Jesus, betrayed into death by one of his chosen followers – by one of his own
apostles. We get Jesus whipped, mocked, spit upon and crucified. We get Jesus
bearing our sins and crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
We learn that this
was God’s will for you. None of it is
what we would expect. None of it is what we would have planned. None of it looks good. And yet all of it is God acting to save you.
We know
this because on the eighth day, God raised Jesus from the dead. One week is not enough. If you decide that
you can only bear with these things for seven days, then you are just going to
miss out. You have to push on to the eighth day, for in the resurrection of
Jesus Christ we see the vindication of all that God was doing. In the eighth day we find the assurance of
forgiveness and the hope of resurrection and eternal life.
That is how
the life of faith works. We must always
push on to the eighth day. Our reason
will always learn that God is God, and we are not. We will not be able to understand what God is
doing. In truth, we may not like it at
all. But we have seen what happened this
week. We have seen what it looked
like. And then, on the eighth day we
learn that God was doing mighty things in the midst of it. He was giving us life, and peace, and hope.
The eighth
day, the morning of the first day of the new week changes everything. So this
week, we look forward to the eighth day.
And in our lives, we always look to the eighth day, for in it the events
of Holy Week make perfect sense. We see what God has done and what it means for
us. And because we know this, we can trust and believe in him in the midst of
all the other days of our life, no matter what happens.
No comments:
Post a Comment