IMPERFECT LIVES. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of

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1 IMPERFECT LIVES Acts 3:12-19; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48 Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account, says Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and continues, Rejoice and be glad for your reward will be great in heaven. By that measure, it may be no one in the history of Christianity is due greater heavenly reward than Judas Iscariort. There is a new book titled Judas: A Biography that details not merely the inconsistent fragments of Judas life that are depicted in the New Testament, but the way that subsequent generations of artists and writers and theologians have treated the man whom tradition has it betrayed Jesus. For two millennia the figure of Judas was used to express Christian culture s understanding of good and evil, loyalty and treachery, belonging and exclusivism. For much of Christian history Judas was a vehicle for Christian anti-semitism, his name from Yehuda from which the word Judaism derives. More recently, Christian sensibility has shown sympathy for Judas, identifying with him even to the point of Jorge Luis Borges story in 1944 where he writes that God became Judas for the redemption of the human race, choosing the most abject existence of all. ( New York Times Book Review, 4/5/09, Adam Kirsch, p. 10) The reasons for such a shift in thinking are many and varied, but all of them probably fall within the spectrum of thinking that we find in two of our texts for today. Consider first what we read in the First Letter of John: Everyone who commits sin is 1

2 guilty of lawlessness Sin is by this account a bad thing that someone chooses freely to do. There s the law, but the sinner flouts the law and disobeys the law by his own volition. He is fully responsible for the offense. It isn t as if he didn t know what he was doing or was confused or somehow unable to do the right thing. He just chooses to do the wrong thing and is guilty. On the other end of the spectrum is St. Peter saying to the Israelites in reference to the crucifixion of Jesus, I know you acted in ignorance as did your rulers. He says this after he has accused them of the most egregious crimes against Jesus and against their own God whom Peter claims was represented by Jesus, the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. But after building up this damning case, Peter says it was something done from ignorance, and if from ignorance, how can the Jews be held responsible for the crime? So here we have a spectrum of thinking about human responsibility for sin, from complete personal responsibility for sins committed, to the mitigation of one s responsibility because of extenuating circumstances such as the person being ignorant of what he is doing. Thinking once more about Judas, where does he fall along this plane? Is he fully responsible for his actions and thus worthy of condemnation? Or, like, the executioners of Jesus, was he ignorant of what he was doing, misguided, mistaken, lost in one way or another so that he just didn t know what he was doing? What if Judas believed, really believed that Jesus was wrong and was indignant with Jesus, for instance, for allowing expensive ointment to be lavished on himself when it could have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor, as suggested in the gospels of Mark and Matthew? Maybe he didn t know the authorities would kill Jesus if he turned him in. Maybe he just 2

3 wanted to denounce what Jesus was doing for some higher purpose. He was mistaken. He was ignorant. But that s not, of course, how Judas has been understood. He has been portrayed as a malevolent person, a man with evil in his heart who just chooses to do a terrible thing and is thereby instrumental in Jesus death. So what do you think? Is Judas a terrible villain or is he a misguided fool? Maybe a bit of both like all of us. It is probably true that we are less free in making our decisions than we generally think we are. The tide of modern research suggests that we are mostly the products of our genes and the conditions that surround us, and as such that we are never fully responsible for what we do. On the spectrum between absolute responsibility for our actions and absolute irresponsibility, we are probably closer to the side of not being responsible for what we do, at least in the sense that we do not by our own volition have the ability to fully determine our actions and what will result from them. And yet we must do our best. One of the problems with the New Testament s portrayal of Jesus is that he is often made to seem perfect and almost automatically so. For instance, take what he says in his post-resurrection appearance to the disciples: These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled. If everything is all laid out in advance in the scriptures, then in what sense is Jesus responsible for what he does? How could he have done otherwise? And if this is the case, then his life really isn t much of an example for us, perfect as he is. Except that, with all due respect to Jesus, there isn t anything written about him in the law of Moses or the prophets or the psalms. Passages like this in the New Testament encouraged Christians throughout the centuries to read the Old 3

4 Testament in a way that makes Jesus the fulfillment of ancient Israel s hopes. But this is a biased reading and I would say a misleading reading. If Jesus life was all set out for him in advance, all written up in the scriptures, then his life is not like ours at all. He knows his destiny as we do not and cannot. He is perfectly wise and discerning where we are ignorant. This is not a very human Jesus. What if we were to think of Jesus as more like Peter thinks about the Jews he is speaking to, as someone struggling to understand what is the best way to live in a world that is confusing and difficult and where much of the time we are unsure and even ignorant of what is the best thing to do? Under such circumstances, how does Jesus become Jesus, choosing and doing the good? Peter says that the Israelites and even their leaders acted against Jesus out of ignorance. But if we cannot be perfect, cannot we at least be less ignorant? Can we not at least be wiser human beings and specifically wiser with the wisdom that is represented in the teaching and life of Jesus? You will note that I have not said we need to be smarter. Smart is not enough. Smart has given us the economic crisis we are now suffering, all those smart Wall Street types and their minions. It is not nearly as important that we be smart as that we be wise. The wise person is one who lives a life that is in balance with the rest of creation and with her Creator. And among the things the wise person knows is that we are all in need of forgiveness for the wrongs we do in our ignorance and weakness, forgiveness to give us a chance to start over and to become wiser in the future. This is at least part of the wisdom that we see in Jesus and do not see in Judas as he is portrayed in the New Testament. 4

5 We are ignorant about much. We are not wise enough to be perfect, even if we always had the will and the courage to do the right thing, which is perhaps also a matter of wisdom. As Christians it is our responsibility to grow in the wisdom that our faith recognizes in Christ Jesus, and it is at least in part for such growth that we gather together in this place to ponder what sort of people we are and what sort of people we might become, by the grace of God. If we are not absolutely responsible for everything we do, neither are we irresponsible. We do our best according to the wisdom of Christ, in the promise of forgiveness when we fall short which is itself part of the wisdom of Christ for the living of our imperfect lives Amen. Third Sunday of Easter, April 26, 2009 Emanuel Lutheran Church 5