Readings:
Isaiah 50:4-9; Psalm 69; Matthew 26:14-26

When evening came he was at table with the twelve disciples. And while they were eating he said, ‘I tell you solemnly, one of you is about to betray me.’ They were greatly distressed and started asking him in turn, ‘Not I, Lord, surely?’ He answered, ‘Someone who has dipped his hand into the dish with me, will betray me. The Son of Man is going to his fate, as the scriptures say he will, but alas for that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! Better for that man if he had never been born!’ Judas, who was to betray him, asked in his turn, ‘Not I, Rabbi, surely?’ ‘They are your own words,’ answered Jesus.
Matthew 20-20-25

In Ignatius Loyola’s book of the Spiritual Exercises, when he comes to consider the Passion of Christ, he suggests that in looking at the Passion we should see ‘how much Jesus suffers in his humanity’. This is an important reminder, because the teaching we have been given, and preaching we have heard, can sometimes leave us with a very glorified picture of Jesus, mostly divine and scarcely human. Some have taught that during his life Jesus lived constantly in a consciousness of the beatific vision, in a state of total bliss with a clear knowledge of the future. On such an interpretation we can magine Jesus choosing eleven apostles, then looking around for some shifty-eyed character to make up the total, that the scriptures might be fulfilled!

Jesus, image of the unseen God, was a human being, with human limitations, a human consciousness, a human unconscious. He had to grow and learn. ‘And Jesus increased in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and men’ (Luke 2:52).

Jesus must have loved Judas and known him intimately, choosing him in good faith. We cannot enter into the human consciousness of Jesus, or anyone else, with certainty, we can only conjecture. My conjecture is that Judas’ betrayal was for Jesus one of the most hurtful incidents in his Passion, for it is only those who are closest to us who can inflict the greatest pain. Jesus must have prayed for Judas after his betrayal and included him in his prayer on the cross. ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’

Judas was so immersed in his own vision for the future, that when his friendship with Jesus seemed to him a hindrance, Jesus had to be dropped. It is to Judas’ credit that he so soon came to realize the enormity of his crime.

We are all capable of Judas-like betrayal, so convinced of the righteousness of our cause, that we do not give a second thought to its victims, or if we do give a second thought, remain convinced of the rightness of our action. As a nation, we have been prepared in the past to unleash destruction on our enemies, killing far more innocent civilians than armed combatants, justifying our action in the name of patriotism. Today, our defence system includes four Trident submarines, any one of which contains many times the firepower of the total firepower used in the Second World War. The cause is a good one; the defence of our nation: the means used are demonic.

If this last paragraph seems exaggerated, we have to ask ourselves ‘Who is Christ, and where do I meet him and what is the connection between his Passion and death and our life now?’ Belief in his divinity means believing that he lives in every individual, and that what we do to another we also do to him.

The danger of dedication to a cause leading to disregard of individuals is seen writ large in our national defence policy, but the same danger is there in all our activities. In politics, in industry, in business, and in the professions, people can be treated as things, useful in so far as they promote the enterprise, disposable when they cease to be of use. In the Church, too, in the name of Christ’s Kingdom, people can be similarly treated. The nobility of the cause makes the abuse of individuals the more scandalous. Obviously, people have to move on, leave jobs and positions, but it is the way in which this is done which marks the difference between the Kingdom of God and of Mammon. God’s Kingdom is a kingdom of attitudes, not of religious boundaries.

As with Peter’s denial, so, too, with Judas’ betrayal, we need to beg God to alert us to our own ‘thingifying’* tendencies whenever our enthusiasm for a cause, no matter how good or religious in itself, leads us to use other people to their own detriment, or to discount, despise and discard them.

Prayer
O God, may the contemplation of your Passion and death so affect the core of our minds and hearts that all our desires, decisions and actions may be directed to your Kingdom of justice, peace and truth. We ask this through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Amen.

* Just a note to this, as it is popular in our culture to think that “thingifying” is a default ‘animal’ instinct for humans that needs to be overcome by willpower and learning. However, as Sue Gerhardt, discussing the murder of little Jamie Bulger by the two 10 year old children, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, speaks directly to this in Why Love Matters. In response to psychologist Steven Pinker’s implication that “violence is an instinctive human response to obstacles in our way, and that our basic instinct is to pursue our desires without considering other people. When other human being are the obstacle, we are prone to reducing them to ‘things’ or to dehumanising them in order to clear them out of our way,” she says, “the murder victim James Bulger was not an ‘obstacle’ to Robert Venables and James Thompson. They were not pursuing self-interest, they were venting their hatred on a safe object, someone weaker than themselves” (2004: 177). And the hatred they were feeling and expressing was the hatred they had felt themselves, in response to their own treatment by the world they were born into (this was their ‘cause’). So lets be careful about assumptions about what the “natural” human would be like — Steven Pinker, “putting strangers outside the ‘circle [of sympathy]’ is the human ‘default setting’, for which he claims a certain evolutionary logic. … But in fact, abusive families lack the regulatory skills that are needed to develop empathy with others. These have not been learned by the parents [or, evidently, by society] and so cannot be handed down” (2004:179).

We can think the same about our national “defence” policies and war (war on nature, war on people, war on countries), because what is true on the micro level is true on the macro level. Thus, we can learn from the individual and the individual’s relations to others, and to themselves. Our own self-hatred, materialises out of how we were treated ourselves, and then manifests in our behaviour towards others. “Thingifying” is not a default, it’s a new programming. We can tell this because it is divisive, it is not love, which would be the true “self interest”. as Gerda Boyesen describes, it is “secondary personality”, an overlay onto the “primary personality” which is love. So where we see hate in ourselves and others, we can think, “here is someone who has places where they can’t see clearly.”