Icon of Judas Iscariot, Magdala Chapel, Migdal, Israel. Photo by the author, taken in January 2020.
[Spoken from the imagined perspective of Judas Iscariot.]
I am Judas Iscariot. Do you want to look at me?
If so, I think I can endure your gaze. I think I have endured worse.
The New Testament is not kind to me. All four evangelists record my story, or better said, they record my small yet enormous—and horrible—part in The Story. Luke says that I trip over a rock, and my bowels gush out. He is not wrong. I seem to be tripping over that rock all the time, for all ages. Have you ever felt like this? Have you ever been so consumed, so torn apart, by anguish and regret … or maybe by that most deadly combination: fear, and loneliness, and small-minded resentment … that your guts are roiling and want to gush out?
Maybe not. Maybe you have your moments but you are generally better than all that. That’s fair.
Matthew is maybe a little kinder to me. He says I am repenting, and that I want to make right what I did that was so badly wrong. Yes. I want that. I want to return the blood money. I want to undo what I have done, what I am doing, what I do now and seemingly forever, as the Sinner of sinners, as the Everyman of Wrongdoing, the quintessential human wretch. But even this impulse—the impulse to fix what I have broken—even this is depraved! Theologian Karl Barth says that my desire to return the blood money only means that I want to undo that which needs to happen: the handing over of the Lord to the authorities, the Gentiles, to condemnation and death. Only St. Paul, always a better man than me, only St. Paul fixes what I have done: he hands Jesus over to the Gentiles in his preaching of Christ crucified and risen. He does what I did, but he does it the right way. I just can’t win.
But “I just can’t win”—that sounds like a whine, a pathetic wail, and I don’t want to sound like that. St. Brendan found me on a remote island, do you know that story? On his great mystical voyage through the islands of the north Atlantic, he found me on one of the days I am let out of Hell for a brief respite, as a reward for the handful of things I managed to do right in my accursed earthly life. And when he found me, Brendan found a man who does not wallow in self-pity, no, I am awful but I am not that awful. Well, yes I am. But I aspire not to be. Maybe?
Children in the Caribbean like to kick me. It’s true! They call it the Judas Bobolee: it’s a doll made in my image that can be kicked and teased and torn apart, on Good Friday. This is, I suppose, an important role for someone to play: on the day when we contemplate Christ’s work of immense sacrifice and redemption, the day we call “Good” because on that day Christ is raised up in glory, like the serpent raised up in the wilderness, for the healing of all the nations—on that day, humans perhaps rightly punish or abuse that part of themselves that is culpable for his death. We put to death the forces of death that rise so lethally within us. So… kick me. Kick. Destroy. God knows—truly, God knows—that human wretchedness does great damage, and should be destroyed.
But you know what? You shouldn’t just kick me, or write me off as a mere pointer to our Savior, as the most repulsive and pathetic bit player in the salvation story, as a flat and contemptible bad guy. Don’t be like Dante. Dante places me in one of the three gaping mouths of Satan, who in turn is locked in a sheet of ice in the ninth circle of hell. Before you cast me out, you should wonder if that awful (and all-too-familiar!) location in Satan’s jaws is, finally, where I should be, and where I am. I encourage you to wonder this for your sake, for your own life, and your own community, and your own future.
Because maybe, maybe I am inside you, even now as the Savior removes all traces of me and carries you into God’s redemptive embrace. I am the worst part of damaged human nature, the most infected spot on the sore, the most badly broken bone, the worst moment of your life, the least and lowest dimension of your own complicated story. But I am not just a scoundrel, a wrongdoer. I am the location of your raw fear, that sad and fraught part of you that is worn out by loneliness, defeated by disappointment and disillusionment, haunted by hopeless despair, just plain sick and tired.
Hear this Good News, not just from the apostles, but from me. Hey. I might be an apostle too. Anyway, here’s the Good News: if even I can be raised up, then every single person can be raised up. Peter and Paul were both flawed men, a betrayer and a persecutor. (I hope I’m saying that without resentment, but probably not.) Like me, at their worst, they handed their Lord over to the authorities, to condemnation and to death. They listened to their fears. But they were raised up. God reached them. God made them the two founders of God’s new kingdom of justice and reconciliation and peace. It’s not a contest, but most of you are probably at least as good as them!
And some of you, or maybe just some small part of each of you, some of you may be worried that you are just as small and unhappy as me. I am, finally, a human person. I am all human persons: I am all of us when we are as sad and scared and lost as we can be. And the Good News means that even the worst among us and the worst within us can be raised up. Even the most diseased tissue can be healed. Even the worst betrayer can be called home, and drawn into the hard work of forgiveness and amends, a table set for everybody. Even me.
All of this can happen, does happen, on the eternal Holy Saturday, when the rising Christ visits every corner of hell, every anxious heart, every damaged spirit. Know that God, who leaves not even me behind, will find and heal and hold each one of you, and all of you together, and carry you to Galilee, where the Risen One has already gone, to announce to the whole world that life emerges triumphantly from death.
I long to get there myself, and see you.
***
Preached on Holy Saturday, April 8, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington. This sermon is an edited version of one preached in a Youtube video on Holy Saturday 2020, for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Burke, Virginia.