Gospel Reflection for Tuesday, April 7
John Sebastian, Ph.D.
Vice President for Mission and Ministry and Professor of English
Reclining at table with his disciples, Jesus was deeply troubled and testified, “Amen, amen, I say to you: one of you will betray me.” The disciples looked at one another, at a loss as to whom he meant. One of his disciples, the one whom Jesus loved, was reclining at Jesus’ side. So Simon Peter nodded to him to find out whom he meant. He leaned back against Jesus’ chest and said to him, “Master, who is it?” Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I hand the morsel after I have dipped it.” So he dipped the morsel and took it and handed it to Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot. After Judas took the morsel, Satan entered him. So Jesus said to him, “What you are going to do, do quickly.”
Every good story needs a villain, an antagonist who attempts to thwart the progress of the hero, even if sometimes serving only to reveal the hero’s real virtues and the villain’s own short-sightedness. Othello had his Iago, Sherlock Holmes his Moriarty, Harry Potter his He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named.
As we draw closer to Good Friday and to the Passion of Jesus, the Gospel narratives begin to take a decidedly darker turn as John today and Matthew tomorrow introduce us to Judas Iscariot, the villain whose unjustified plotting against Jesus sets in motion events that culminate in the unthinkable: Jesus’ death on the Cross. More than the indifferent Pilate, more than the envious high priests, more than the riled-up mob, it is Judas whose villainy stands out in the Gospel narratives and whose betrayal sets him up for history’s condemnation.
Indeed, for the great medieval poet Dante, history could claim no greater villain than Judas. For this wayward disciple Dante reserves a special place in his Inferno. Dante plumbs hell to its icy depths—Hell actually does freeze over in Dante’s imagination!—and brings us face to face with Lucifer. Or, more accurately, face to faces, for Lucifer appears before us as a three-headed monster with a body dangling from each slavering maw, including the body of Judas.
For his particular depiction of Lucifer Dante appears to have sought inspiration outside his own prodigious imagination. Instead he seems to have looked to the Baptistery of San Giovanni adjacent to the famous Duomo or cathedral in Florence, where Dante grew up. The Baptistery’s ceiling is covered in mosaics depicting key events in salvation history, including the Final Judgment complete with a three-headed demon making a meal of assorted unrepentant sinners. Dante would have been baptized there and certainly visited the Baptistery later in life. The colorful depiction of hell glittering from the ceiling clearly left a lasting impression!
But back to Judas in the Inferno: throughout his poetic rendering of hell, Dante employs a technique that literary critics call contrapasso and that we might identify as something like “poetic justice.” The deepest part of hell in Dante’s imagination is reserved for betrayers, and so it is fitting that Lucifer, the great angelic betrayer who turned away from God, would be the instrument of eternal punishment for that greatest of human betrayers, Judas, who turned away from the Son of God. Dante’s guide through the underworld, the Roman poet Virgil, explains the appearance of the terrible beast rising before them and directs Dante’s attention to one of the souls undergoing punishment:
“Quell’ anima là sù c’ha maggior pena,”
disse ‘l maestro ,”è Giuda Scarïotto,
che ‘l capo ha dentro e fuor le gambe mena.”
“That soul there, the one in the greatest pain,”
said the Master [Virgil], “that is Judas Iscariot,
the one who has his head inside and outside wriggles his legs about.”
Gruesome as this scene is, it’s hard to argue that Judas doesn’t get what’s coming to him. Dante certainly couldn’t imagine a worse crime than Judas’s betrayal.
But there is a coda to the reading from John’s Gospel today. No sooner does Jesus command Judas the betrayer to do what he must than Peter, ever eager but also overconfident in his abilities, makes Jesus a promise: “I will lay down my life for you.” Will you indeed, Jesus muses. We will see about that. Peter’s motives spare him the outcome that awaits poor Judas, but Jesus leaves us in no doubt about the limits of Peter’s faithfulness. “Amen, amen, I say to you, the cock will not crow before you deny me three times.”
Judas stands out as the villain of the piece, for sure, but he is more of the mustache-twirling variety, a caricature of faithlessness and cruelty motivated by petty jealousy and selfishness. It’s easy for us, like Dante, to condemn Judas. Peter’s is the more difficult case. Judas’s villainy is on full display, but it’s Peter whose betrayal hits closest to home because it is the betrayal of indifference and inaction. It’s the realization that sometimes we fail to live up to our own images of ourselves, that when push comes to shove we maybe aren’t who we think we are.
As we all adjust to life in a time of global pandemic, I cannot help but read this Gospel narrative of betrayal in light of our current circumstances. Many of us feel betrayed right now. Betrayed by our politicians who seem overmatched by the catastrophe unfolding before us and who are reduced to bickering among themselves and pointing fingers. Betrayed by our bodies that seem completely helpless in the face of a microscopic and invisible agent of indiscriminate suffering and death. Betrayed even by our God, who seems unmoved by desperate pleas from so many people who in turn are cut off even from the comfort of the sacraments as our churches and chapels sit empty.
Yes, there are plenty of villains—and scapegoats—to go around right now, and assigning blame can provide some much-needed distraction. We take comfort in the belief that if someone had done differently or done better, we would not be in this predicament in the first place and life could continue as it has always been. Witness the daily debates about whether we could have or should have predicted the spread of the novel coronavirus now responsible for felling more than 10,000 human beings in the United States alone. No doubt each of us has a list of people we’d like to feed to a hungry monster right about now, from the lady at the grocery store who snags the last roll of toilet paper to the pastor defying shelter-in-place orders and endangering his flock.
There are Judases to go around, but the real story may be that, like Peter, we are learning that we aren’t who we thought we were, that our illusions of safety, of security, of invincibility are just that: illusions. We are slowly coming to terms with the fact that we may be the agents of our own betrayal, that we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we control our own destinies, that we aren’t always gambling that the sun will rise again tomorrow to rescue us from darkest night.
And that’s the lesson for me of this Gospel at this moment in our shared human history. The people who bought the grocery stores out of toilet paper in the early days of COVID-19 in order to gouge us all on internet bidding sites are the Judases. They don’t really matter to our story. But most of us are Peters, outwardly confident that life will go on and too frightened to admit that we aren’t really so sure and, more terrifying still, that none of it is in our control. We cling to the notion that somehow we have been betrayed by the villains of the piece when we’ve really betrayed ourselves with fantasies of self-reliance and invulnerability. We tell ourselves that never before have we leaned more heavily on one another for our very survival, on our new heroes, the “essential workers” who keep our grocery stores stocked and our hospitals opened. Yet we have always needed each other. Nothing has changed in that sense. We’re just no longer certain that we will all be able to show up for one another when it matters the most.
So as we move deeper into the most sacred time of the year, let’s reflect on our vulnerabilities. Let us look for the places where we have always needed God and always needed our neighbors but failed to seek them out because our own delusions of self-sufficiency stood in the way. Let us identify the places where we have felt betrayed and consider whether our own unrealistic expectations may sometimes be the cause of the suffering we prefer to blame on others. And let us begin to discover what it really means to place our trust in the God who promises that on the other side of suffering and death is the certainty of new life.