Passion, Sanity and Betrayal

As I write I am looking at the wedding portrait of two good friends -- still happily married as far as I know, and I hope they remain that way--but the portrait reminds me, nevertheless, that sometimes the people who most despise each other are those who were, in the past, married to each other. Why is it that we reserve our most intense, almost insane, enmity for the people who have been perviously the most dear to us? Passion: red hot or cold blooded, fire and ice, ecstasy and horrible pain. Love is so strong, so full of hope; yet also so costly and so prone to be disappointed. We expect that our loves will provide us with the reason for living. I think, in fact, it can be the hardest thing that we ever do to forgive when when we are failed by someone in whom we have invested so many of our hopes and dreams -- when we can only say, "I gave so many years of my life, my fortune, all my effort, all my future into building what has turned into only ruins and shambles." The sense of betrayal can be so severe that it does bring on a sort of (hopefully temporary) insanity, where it's almost impossible not to lash out in violence of words and/or acts. Perhaps at the same time, this is the greatest test of character.

The gospel for today (Matthew 26), I believe, gives us two examples of this kind of overwhelming passion that can lead to disappointment, and the extremes to which the one(s) who are disappointed may go.

The crowds who followed Jesus truly believed that he was going to be the leader who would restore the kingdom of God to Israel, who would give them independence from Rome, drive out foreign invaders, restore prosperity and self-determination. Many followed him at great personal expense, risking family, fortune and freedom to help in his political and social rebellion. And here he was seemingly giving himself up, abandoning their movement just when it looked like they could achieve something. If he would only seize the opportunity and call on the crowds he had gathered to fight and overwhelm the rulers, protest in the streets, create an uprising! Hadn't he been telling them that the time had come? --the kingdom of God was at hand? How quickly, but how naturally too, the devotion to Jesus' cause turned into hatred and scorn at how he had duped them, how he refused to fight, how he refused to compromise, even a little, for the sake of ends that should justify whatever means necessary to effect them! It's easy to look back in scorn at the crowds yelling "crucify him," but I've felt that same kind of bone crushing disappointment myself; that feeling of having given everything I had into the hands of someone who just thrust it all aside as if it was nothing. I suspect that Judas really did believe that Jesus just needed a little push; that his kiss would simply spur him into taking the action that he'd planned all along. But, if it did not, perhaps it was fitting as the last chance and the last straw -- "if this doesn't make him act, then we are all history! Too many promises, not enough follow through." It's perhaps a bit ironic that, with us, the crowd that condemned Jesus could have easily sung "All my Hopes on Him are Founded." The only difference is that their hopes were also thoroughly dashed. They expected an uprising, a successful throwing off (intifada) of the oppressor, a new kingdom that would launch a new age. And what they saw was a revolutionary that had given himself up and given them over. No WONDER they turned on him.

But, Jesus too must have been terribly disillusioned. By all accounts, he really believed, at least early in his ministry, that he would lead a revolution, establish a new society -- a kingdom of God here on Earth. James Taybor's The Jesus Dynasty (I highly recommend it, but be aware that it is a secular view of Jesus life and times, not a Christian text) gives some of the most convincing and exciting commentary on what Jesus and John the Baptist must have felt like and worked toward in those few years of his public ministry -- and it was revolutionary, and inspiring, and it did look like a believable threat to the Roman rule! Jesus too must have wondered where it all went wrong, where God's promises had taken him. In the garden, he gave God one last chance as well -- "There's still time, if it is Your will, You'd be welcome to get me out of this thing right about now!" Even in Jesus' choice on the cross to invoke King David in quoting Psalm 22 ("my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"), one can also hear the echo of later verses of the same psalm ("O Lord, make haste to help me! Deliver my soul from the sword."). What is amazing, though, is that Jesus never once turns bitter. I can't believe that he really knew that it was all part of the Plan, that he believed it would all turn out the way it did. He must have been truly disappointed, his hopes for his own life completely dashed and his hopes for his followers undergoing some serious confidence-shaking; given their dispersal and betrayal. Yet, he does not accuse God of betrayal. He follows his sense of God's will, his trust in life's goodness and in truth and justice to the end. Even his refusal of the drugged wine while on the cross was, above all, an act of confidence in the goodness and value of this life he had always conducted in the very best way he knew -- he would not willingly miss a minute of it, not will himself into oblivion for even those last few moments. For Jesus, it was truly not over until it was over, and he never wavered in his passion for life lived according to his revelation, his sense of God.

I have often read that it's not possible to understand the Easter story without fully understanding the Passion story. I've never quite understood why, but perhaps the key is Jesus' passion for life, his confidence in its goodness, his willingness to live every second of it in radical obedience to his vision despite every temptation to the contrary... In another book I read this week, the main character remarked about how good it is to outlive one's resentments. That is, how different life is when one has learned that resentment, feelings of betrayal, the desire to strike back when we've been hurt -- all those things that have the capacity to turn formerly loving, self-sacrificing individuals into insanely vindictive and broken people -- do not need to be our response to even the worst disappointments of life. Radical trust in God, profligate giving of one's self and one's resources--like the sower who scatters precious seed freely over good, poor, stony and weed-choked ground alike, confidence even when all reason seems to be gone; these crazy and counter-intuitive things are our inheritance as Christians. If there's anything in this idea of resurrection that we will ponder next week, perhaps there are clues here.