The moon stood in its fullness just last night.  The passion tide is fast approaching!  As John (JN 13: 21-33, 36-38) told us yesterday, “it is night,” and today, Matthew (MT 26: 14-25) continues with the evening darkness.  Standing on the edge of the high Holy Days of Christianity, we are besmirched with betrayal.  It is a form of sickness, even a virus,  that we feel and give to one another, sometimes on a daily basis.  It is heavy and brings feelings of weariness and even despair, but it is not the end – it cannot be!  Yet how, as the Loving Servant of Isaiah (IS 50: 4-9a), how can we “…know how to speak to the weary a word that will rouse them?”

 Today is sometimes referred to as Spy Wednesday, as it commemorates the day wherein Judas made the deal to betray Jesus.  “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?”  And we hear in Matthew’s Gospel story today of how Jesus, while gathered with his disciples, clearly states this reality – “Amen I say to you, one of you will betray me.”  Then the ‘reverse finger-pointing’ begins… “they began to say to him one after another, ‘Surely it is not I, Lord’?”  Surely it cannot be me, no not me – I would never do that!  And then the story ends – Judas seemingly identifies himself as the betrayer, while dipping his hand into the dish being shared among them. So, the heat is off the other disciples, or so it appears.  But maybe not…

Feelings of betrayal run deep.  Equally so do the feelings of guilt.  We all have probably felt both of these at one time or another.  Sometimes we come to expect betrayal, and if not careful we can fix a mindset within ourselves that manufactures a self-fulfilling prophecy replete with cynicism and bitterness.  And, OH the guilt!  We can feel that equally as deeply!  When we feel responsible for something, especially something which we consider to be inappropriate behavior, we can either allow the guilt to depress us as we try to take it into ourselves, or many times we have a way of creatively and somewhat unconsciously shifting the blame to something or someone else.  It can be a lie that we tell ourselves and then others that we did not do THAT!  There is no way…surely it is not I!

I wrote my Master’s thesis on the notion of the self as presented by the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard.  One of the profound insights that I found in Kierkegaard was his notion that more often than not we operate in what he called a ‘negative’ self.  This is a self that wants to create it’s self, i.e., to create the way that it wants to appear and be seen by others.   This negative self is somewhat like what Thomas Merton and others have referred to as the ‘false’ self.  For Kierkegaard, the authentic or true self is the given self, which flows from the sustaining relationship that God has with us!  We have trouble accepting that our truest self is not only a gift from God, but also that it is sustained within and by God all the time.  Our egos, in refusal of the graceful gift of authentic selfhood from our relationship with God, strive to create negative selves which appear to feed but actually starve the real self.   “Surely it is not I!”

When we refuse the gift of life, of authentic selfhood, of vulnerability, we betray ourselves, and in this way we betray God as well!  And that would also include each other.  So, Judas does not stand alone as much as we would sometimes like to think.  The indictment is of us as well.  But this indictment is not meant to impose guilt as much as responsibility.  It is a responsibility that celebrates by embracing the gift of life that we each have been given – that we are sustained within at every moment of our lives by the overwhelming and absolutely mystifying Love of God absolutely personified and humanized in Jesus.  It’s not just a one-to-one, me and God/Jesus, relationship either.  Its breadth is all inclusive and expansive.

To deny the gift of ourselves – loved by God in a community of brokenness and vulnerability – is a betrayal!  In the extreme, we become terrorist trying to take out everyone and everything around us!  We profile others with caricatures of what we find distasteful and unacceptable and then exclude those who fit the description by building walls that propose to protect but ultimately isolate everyone.  We dip our hands in the shared dish of love and life, and then  pawn the dish and all it holds for an arbitrary price.

So, back to the original question…How can we speak words to each other that will lift this weariness of ego-building negative selves that only lead to betrayal?  Isaiah gives us a hint, and Jesus himself is preparing to show us again in the Holy Days we are about to experience…it has to do with Trust and acceptance that steps beyond the boundaries of our mind and which flow directly from the Heart of God!  It involves a practice of both refusing to deny the gift of love and accepting the grace of Love given as ourselves.  It’s a practice of flowing ourselves out to each other in the divine creativity of Love freely given.  How encouraging would those spoken words be?

Morning after morning he opens my ear that I may hear; And I have not rebelled, have not turned back. (IS 50)

Peace

Thomas

(written 3/23/2016)