Betrayal and Hope: Sermon Preached by The Rev. Donald Hamer for Asylum Hill Good Friday Ecumenical Service
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Asylum Hill Christian Community
Good Friday, 2013
The Passion According to St. John
John 18: 1-11
The Kidron Valley that Jesus crossed with his disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane is only a few hundred yards wide. It stretches between the east wall of the Old City of Jerusalem – that part of Jerusalem which is now primarily Palestinian – and the steep hills of the Mount of Olives. Four years ago last night, on Maundy Thursday in Jerusalem, my wife and I had the thrill of processing with a group of pilgrims from St. George’s Episcopal Cathedral in Jerusalem across that same valley, retracing the footsteps of Jesus and his disciples up to that beautiful garden on the hillside, with the cypress trees rustling in the warm breeze and the moon lighting our way. It was an awesome experience that will forever frame the way I experience Maundy Thursday.
That night was not so peaceful for Jesus. The Passion Gospel of John begins with the words, “After Jesus had spoken these words, he went out . . .” The words that Jesus had just spoken are the closing words of his farewell discourse to his friends in Chapter 17. For most of that discourse, Jesus is talking to them, preparing them for his departure from them. But the closing words are not addressed to them: these words are a farewell prayer to God. Jesus concludes with the following words: Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” It is a powerful prayer, in which Jesus acknowledges his oneness with the father, and then takes that relationship as the model for his own intimate relationship with us.
So isn’t it ironic then that in John’s Gospel the very next verses following Jesus’ impassioned prayer are the very opposite of that for which Jesus so fervently prayed: Jesus prayed that the whole world might be at one with itself and one with God; the figure of Judas serves to remind us of the sad human reality that we can always be vulnerable to betrayal – even at the hands of those to whom we are closest.
And so in Judas we come to grips with the reality of evil in the world. Judas has no ulterior motives, he doesn’t even ultimately profit by his betrayal. He chose evil over good. Judas is a stark reminder to us of our own propensity to, time and again, choose evil over good. It is part of life in this fragile and imperfect world. Over this past year we have revisited evil time and again, whether it be in the mass shootings that happen with all-too-increasing frequency, the almost daily violence that permeates our cities and towns, our failure to take a moral stand as a nation about the role of violene in our society, or our failures to deal in a meaningful way with the continuing injustices of racism, poverty, inequality of educational opportunity or lack of adequate health care. Jesus continues to call us “that we all may be one,” and we continue to betray him.
On a personal and an institutional level, this has been the work of a Holy Lent for us. To examine our own lives, to examine the lives of our own communities of faith, and to recognize where we fall short of that dream of God that we all may be one as Jesus and his father our one. And that process culminates in this hour, when we all gather here together, with one voice out of many, acknowledging individually and collectively our failures in our journey to be Jesus’ faithful apostles.
Judas is a story of failure, but it is only the beginning of the story. We begin this gathering today remembering Judas and his betrayal, and for the next several hours we will together walk and pray and sing and praise God as we remember the events that followed that betrayal. May it be a time for acknowledging the reality of our human failures, claiming God’s forgiveness, and looking forward in hope through the power of the Resurrection. AMEN.