Tag: Betrayal

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March 2016

March 22nd 2016: Luke 22: 39-53

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

Have you ever prayed so earnestly that it was as if you were sweating blood? In our comfortable Western context, prayer can easily lack intensity. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place where someone sweated like great drops of blood blood in anguished prayer. If they did, we’d probably try and calm them down, make them sit down so as not to distress other people. Jesus, as he does this, is entering the most intense moment, not just of his life, but arguably of all of human history. Still, it’s a detail that can sometimes get brushed over in our cultural of appropriateness.

Jesus finds his disciples sleeping ‘because of grief’ and demands that they pray ‘earnestly that you might not come into the time of trial’. If we do pray like this, it’s easy for us to slip into feeling selfish or to descend into self-absorption. Recently, the concept of the enemy ‘prowling like a lion that he might devour some’ has been much on my mind. As I write this in front of the backdrop of the unfolding event of the terror attacks in Brussels this morning, I find myself thinking again of how accepting I have become of ‘times of trial’, moments when evil rears its head and wreaks as much havoc as it possibly can, seeking not just to devour individuals, but whole communities, cultures and ideologies. Evil is part of our world, our lives, but it is never acceptable. We should do all we can to stand against it, recognising, especially this week of all weeks, that we have one who is for us and who went to the Cross to defeat evil. In our own lives, in our thoughts and actions, in our words, in our politics, in the choices we make with money, let us not be people who repay evil for evil. Let’s instead be people who pray earnestly for those who find themselves in a time of trial, that the merciful love of God would enfold them. Let’s be people who, when faced with evil, repay it with good. Where there is hatred, let’s bring love. Easy in theory, but all so very hard in practice.

Let’s be people who hold true to the one we believe in and love, the Prince of Peace.

 

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January 2016

January 29th 2016: Matthew 26:57-75

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

Following from our previous discussion on Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, the end of today’s reading finds Peter weeping bitterly, as he becomes aware that he has done the one thing he promised Jesus he would never do, in exactly the way that Jesus foretold he would. If you know the story, you know that restoration comes for Peter, in pretty short order too, but the sheer emotional weight of this moment dictates that we as readers owe it to Peter to stay with him in this moment of desolation.

Isn’t this the flip side of betrayal? I can do things my own way for a remarkably long time, but in the end, for me at least, there’s always a moment of being pulled up short. I have a tendency at such times to feel crushed. That isn’t too strong a word for it. I’m an emotional, feeling person. Often to my detriment. There have been several times I can distinctly remember where the realisation that something I was doing to protect myself, keep myself safe, or even make myself feel better has hurt others. I’d like to think I don’t deliberately set out to hurt people often, if at all, but still, the unintended consequence for me of self-serving or self-absorbed action is quite often that others suffer. I hate this. It renders any benefit I might have felt I received from the action which caused the hurt not just null and void, but in fact reverses it. Now everyone is hurt. I have let everyone down. I don’t deserve love. I’m a disappointment.

I hope you don’t feel like this too often, but I think it is a pretty common, honest human experience, if we are open to our emotions. I don’t know how Peter was feeling on this fateful day, but I have a sense that it was something like this. All that he had built the last years of his life upon was going up in flames, and rather than stand firm, he sought to save himself. What kind of a man did that make him.

And yet, he was to find later that the loving heart of God beat strongest for him in that very moment. I imagine his betrayal still hurt, but love would win in Peter’s life, and win him back again for God.

For now, though, all was darkness and despair. If you’re in that place today, do all you can to take courage. Don’t be defeated. Reach out to people around you. Don’t suffer alone or in silence. God is with you. He hears your cries, even if, right now, the idea that you might hear his feels extremely far-fetched.

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

August 5th 2014: Luke 22:31-38

Read Luke 22:31-38 here

This is a well known part of the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Just as Judas is betraying Him, Jesus is promised by Peter that he never will. Of course we know what happens. Jesus tells Peter that he will, in fact deny Him, three times. This scandalises Peter, and yet he goes on to do exactly this a short time later. We love the reconciliation between Jesus and Peter over breakfast which follows later too, don’t we. Isn’t it interesting, though that the betrayals of Judas and Peter are set side by side by Luke here. Having reported that Judas has agreed to betray Jesus, and taken us to the Last Supper, at which Jesus says that all of this is necessary, we see that Peter, just as he is about to betray Jesus himself, cannot believe that another would do this.

How often are we so quick to see the speck in the eyes of others that we miss the log in our own eye? It’s easy for me to look at your life and see what is wrong with it, but I should watch myself. In the instant of doing that I may well be rushing headlong in to my own disaster, born of bad decision making, arrogance or whatever else it may be. It is striking that Jesus, knowing what both Judas and Peter were about to do, tells them both, in a sense, that He understands.

When the opportunity arises today to be appalled at the behaviour of others and to look down upon them, let’s be aware that we are only ever a few bad decisions away from being much worse than we perceive others to be. And the beauty of it all is that God loved us, and them, from the first, and will do beyond the end of the world. Let’s do all we can to love like that today.

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

August 2nd 2014: Luke 22:14-23

Read Luke 22:14-23 here

As the story of Jesus’ betrayal and suffering draws on inexorably. we are faced with the odd scene of the Passover meal among friends, after which Jesus knows He will be handed over to His death, and the mysteriously, powerfully symbolic with hindsight utterances commanding the disciples, and us, to eat and drink in remembrance of Him. As seems to have been the case with Jesus more often than we like to admit, what He says during this meal, and how He says it must have been quite perverse to those who heard/ Why didn’t Jesus just say “it’s Judas, he’s going to betray me”? Why didn’t He say “When I say it’s my body and blood, I mean that it actually is/spiritually is/is meant to signify the sacrifice I’m about to make and all that it means”? It would certainly have been a lot easier for us who followed after Him. I wonder though if that isn’t something of the point. Here, in the midst of the fear of oncoming death, in the middle of the most real, crucial event and undertaking in the whole of human history, Jesus doesn’t lay it all out in easy, bitesize chunks. Rather, He does what needs to be done, and doesn’t feel the need to elaborate or explain further.

So often, we want to break faith down in to easy, approachable elements. We want to make it seem attractive. We want to minimise the sacrifice we feel called to undertake in order to be faithful. We want to understand everything, to live it all day by day, and still to enjoy our comfortable, “successful” lives. I’m sure Jesus, in a sense, wouldn’t have minded doing that either. You only have to watch The Last Temptation of Christ to be able to see what a strong drive their might have been to follow that path rather than the crushing one set before Him.

The thing is, He took it anyway. I wonder sometimes if He truly knew what He was getting in to, the gravity and severity of the pain, the separation, and how it would feel to die an undeserved death on behalf of others who would reject Him continually. I have very little doubt that He knew it was needed and that the benefits to Him and to all would ultimately be enormous, but still, I wonder, how in control of things was Jesus at that point? And yet, He did it anyway.

Often, for me at least, unless the risks are minimised, the way is clear, the steps are logical and sensible, I’m not willing to move on in my faith and life. My trust in God only extends to the limits of my intellect. In which case it is no trust at all. I’m trusting myself and calling it trusting God instead. How can we live in such a way that we might be so obedient that, whatever the consequences to us, we follow God, His ways, and live, love and hope for the coming of the kingdom, today?

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

August 1st 2014: Luke 22:1-13

Read Luke 22:1-13 here

As Jesus’ story moves towards its conclusion and He and the disciples enter Jerusalem for the Passover, it might be easy to focus on the betrayal of Judas, and how this parallels our own betrayal of Jesus in our day to day lives. This, however, would be cheap, and would take away from the power of the narrative. We do, all of us, have a tendency towards living our own way, falling short of the glory of God, and the glory set before us in Christ. However, something else has grabbed my attention this morning:

The priests and scribes sought to find a way of killing Jesus “because they were scared of the people”. I’d not noticed this before when reading this passage. The priests, societal power-brokers and gate-keepers, weren’t scared of Jesus himself, they were scared of the impact He, and His message, were having. This indicates that the message was finding traction, that it was causing  a stir. The fear exhibited here also indicates some were worried about the upsetting of the status quo, the debasement of the truths of faith which they held dear. Placed in this context, in spite of the fact that there were dozens of “Messiahs” active in Israel at the time of Jesus, it is perhaps obvious why something needed to be done. Silence the leader and the rabble will go away.

Except it didn’t turn out like that, did it.

We live in a culture today where it’s ok to believe pretty much anything, except that Jesus is Lord. There is a societally-driven moral code which is pre-disposed to the expression of outrage, distrust and so on. It can also often show great compassion and care for the “other”. We like, though, to be right, to show our compassion from a position of strength, and to keep those we disagree with where we can see them. I’d go as far as to say that if you disagree with the prevailing cultural norm, on whatever issue, there’s an undercurrent now of a wish that you, and your opinion, would go elsewhere, or better still not exist.

Isn’t this how Jesus and His disciples were treated? Most people who aren’t Christians think the whole thing is preposterous nonsense. Perhaps they’re right (I don’t think so) but it’s amazing how the minutest inkling of a fear that it might be true motivates whole swathes of culture to continually seek, with increasing desperation, ways of proving that it must all be bunkum. If you are a Christian, you’re silly. If you’re a Christian you lack the common sense, faculties of logic, fortitude etc to rise above the crass set of beliefs which must have been forced upon you anyway.

Or put it another way, society is actually scared of you. What if your belief is right? If your God exists? If Jesus is real and He did do what He said He would do? What then? If you believe today, stand firm and confident.