Sermon: Repentance, Remorse, Judas and Peter

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Repentance, Remorse, Judas and Peter

By Charles Rush

February 21, 1999

all accounts Dr. Gordon Oliver was a great humanitarian. He practiced internal medicine in Austin, Texas. For 20 years he treated patients there and he was known in the community by the poor because he would take whatever poor people had to pay. Over the years, he had received a lot of strange stuff, chickens, a well worn .3030 Winchester rifle, and once even an offer for an aging ostrich. The thought was nice.

With a couple of other people, he organized a community health clinic that was open every Friday morning and all day Saturday. Poor people could come in and get their children looked at. For migrant labor that was often the only medical care they ever received.

Dr. Oliver suffered from bouts of depression that got worse as he approached middle age and he had an awful spell. He found it impossible to get out of the house, let alone go to the office and complete a full day. He took more and more time off. Finally, his wife called some of his friends because he didn't want to seek treatment. She figured he might listen to his friends which he did and they checked him to the hospital at SMU in Dallas. He was worse than his friends imagined, worse than his family imagined and one morning he opened a window on the 9^th floor of the hospital and jumped to his death.

His wife was simply devastated and strangely guilty in the hours right after it happened, as though somehow she could have prevented this tragedy from happening if only she had done something different.

She was called over to the hospital to identify the body and the wife of one of the treating physicians thought she needed support, so she called her pastor from one of those large charismatic churches in Dallas that has a pretty fundamentalist theology.

He showed up and Mrs. Oliver asked him about the fate of her husband. She was in shock and needed to hear some words of assurance in a deep way, a primordial emotional way.

The Minister asked Mrs. Oliver if her husband had confessed Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Had he been born again. It was a puzzling question for an Episcopalian. She mumbled something about how Dr. Oliver went to church occasionally but found the Episcopal service rather dull.

The Minister asked if he had been anointed in the Holy Spirit. Mrs. Oliver didn't know what to say. The Minister said ‘I don't know how to tell you this Mrs. Oliver but I believe your husband is in Hell.'

That was 25 years ago. Fortunately today, we have Clergy malpractice insurance because that Minister would need it. Beyond the legalistic religiosity, even reflecting on that story I am amazed that he could say something so crushing to a woman in such vunerable grief.

As it turned out, he was something of an odd blessing because there are a lot of feelings of rage around suicide, anger at being abandoned, anger at not having the resources you would have, anger at being lonely and afraid. But you can't be angry with the person that died. It just doesn't work for quite a long time. So this stupid idiot Minister became a surrogate for all that anger and for a few years Mrs. Oliver could hate this man with impugnity and in some sense it probably helped get her through. Boneheadedness is like that.

On one level, this Minister merely gave voice to some attitudes that have been pretty popular in our culture, even if they haven't been given voice. If you talk to families that have been through suicide, they are worried about shame. It is not quite like other tragedies, they feel that maybe they should be ashamed about this death.

That stigma has a long and variegated past and certainly part of it in the West is wrapped up in our passage this morning. Judas is portrayed as the ultimate evil man. He betrays the Messiah as one of the disciples, one whom Jesus has trusted much. Surely, of all people, he must be banished to the outer darkness where there is only weeping and gnashing of teeth. Matthew even has Jesus say at the Last Supper ‘Woe to the man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.' How much more stigma can you get than that.

Look at what he does. In remorse over the depth of his sinfulness, he hangs himself. It would appear that he is beyond grace. He is only pariah. He is the ultimate exile.

I am told that in English common law from the Middle Ages, if you took your life, you forfeited all your property to the Crown, and your heirs got nothing. There is something peculiarly English about attaching a property punishment to an already great emotional trauma. The justification for such a law was that it would deter suicide.

Today most of our research goes into better understanding the bio-chemical nature of depression. It is a malady that affects a wide host of people for a variety of reasons but it ought not carry any more stigma than suffering from diabetes.

And this is part of a wider shame that is unwarranted in our culture. People are ashamed of psychiatric disorders. Physical disorders are just that, diseases of nature. But psychiatric disorders carry a stigma. Parents worry, even though they know better, that their children's psychiatric afflictions reflect badly on their parenting. We would never say that about cancer. There is nothing to be ashamed of and we in the community of love ought to be about the task of making sure that we are accepting and supportive, particularly in this area.

Judas raises a wider question. Theologically, can you put yourself beyond the realm of God's redemption? My personal answer to that is an unequivocal ‘no'. If the resurrection means anything, it means that nothing can stop God, not death, not our rejection, not our indifference, nothing. The grace of God is what finally wins the day, quite in spite of us. The resurrection means that the initiative rests with God and not with us. The resurrection means that we can't stop the grace of God, we can't limit that.

Let's turn back to the story for a moment. I have never been very comfortable with what happened to poor Judas. He died and never got a chance to explain himself, so the church explained him instead and they had a bit of embarrasment that he could be dispatched to cover.

I think Carlyle Marney was right that in Matthew, Judas feels phoney, staged, set up to take the fall. It reminds me of an ignominious story from childhood. The regular gang of boys was playing baseball at the elementary school one afternoon in Little Rock, Arkansas. They grew restless and God only knows why little boys do things like this but they decided to knock all the windows out of the elementary school. One of them threw a rock and the window crashed. What a terrific noise it made. Then it became a dare. Others joined in. Now, there were about 900 windows on this school. Somewhere after the first hundred, one of the boys ran back home to tell some other people how much fun the gang was having and a group of them came running back to the school. Of course, some mother got wind of this too and called the police who were on their way. Little Laurence MacMillan, aged 7, was with them. Laurence was slow in all ways. He couldn't run and he was mildly retarded but he loved to hang with the big guys.

At some point, the police cruiser drove up, boys began a mad flight into the woods, in every direction. By the time the police cruiser actually got up to the scene of the crime, there was no one there except Laurence who was still throwing stones at the windows. Eventually, all the boys snaked back into their homes. Every mother had been called. You could look down the block and see the police cruiser with Laurence.

As far as I know, every boy had the same story. No, they hadn't played ball that day though they heard everyone else had been. They were in another neighborhood, visiting people that no one else knew. No, they couldn't imagine that anyone would do such a thing. Yes, I suppose Laurence could have knocked all those windows out. No, I don't know what got into him to do it.

Judas feels like little Laurence to me. He has been dispatched and set up because we don't want to remember that we all betrayed Jesus. It was not a high moment and there were different faces to weakness. But at the last supper Jesus said ‘He who has dipped his hand in the dish with me will betray me.' That was everyone. One by one they fall away, so that at the end Jesus is alone, only with God, who disappears too.

Judas may have been the one to actually walk up and kiss Jesus but no one looks too good in this story. There was no courage shown that night. Everyone was covering their backside. Peter, the man on whom Jesus would later say he would build his church, denied Jesus not once but three times and the third time he cursed his name.

But no one is beyond redemption and that is the point. For the most remarkable part of the story of Jesus is the way that a group of dispirited, frightened, aimless disciples get pulled together after the resurrection and become filled with an incredible courage, purpose, and mission. That doesn't happen because of some virtue that they have. It happens because of the initiative of God. Redemption and reconciliation are like that. They need a divine moment, a divine breakthrough.

We all know people that have been through a bitter divorce. Dealing with the details of the divorce settlement and the terms for child custody can open some wounds of bitterness and resentment that can last for years. And I know people that stay bitter for the rest of their life and can't get beyond it, it can be that powerful. Usually, if there is a breakthrough towards reconciliation, one person has to move toward their ex-spouse in a very vulnerable way, in an unexpected way, in a way that appears at the time to be nothing short of a miracle. It is a very powerful thing when someone drops their legitimate grudges and says ‘the relationship is more important to me than the calculus of rights and wrongs.' It is a Spirit filled moment and rare.

There is a tragedy to Judas and it lies precisely here. He is not ultimately cut off but he did miss out on the opportunity to be forgiven in the resurrection and have the experience of the grace to start over his life.

This is often the irony of remorse. Remorse is a Greek idea, though surely every culture in the world knows about it. Remorse is when you feel bad for something that you have done. In ancient Greece it was the sorrow you felt after you had drunk too much and said something inappropriate or kissed the wrong person.

The God of the Bible is not much interested in remorse. The God of the Bible is interested in repentance, which is a change of behavior, a conversion towards a new character.

Judas felt awful about what he had done and in that sorrow took his own life. So often remorse is like that. Because we feel bad about how we have treated an ex-spouse, we end up just avoiding them so that curiously no healing takes place. We just stay for an extended period in a holding pattern of distance. We feel bad and we do self-destructive things to ourselves- we don't eat right, we anesthetize our souls, we undermine our careers, we isolate ourselves- but no healing takes place. It is just scars upon scars.

I don't know what Judas was thinking but I know that too many people deeply believe- when no one is around and it is all dark -they deeply believe that they are unworthy and that if people really knew what they were like, no one would want to be with them. Whatever the particular thing is that they did wrong, they put it together with a whole other trove of evidence that keep to themselves, and then they reflect on it and say ‘this is what you always knew about yourself.' And they feel worse and worse.

Judas took his life. It is simply the surest way of staying cut off. It is the defining mode of an indefinite holding pattern.

And the only antidote for that malady comes from without. It is a divine breakthrough that reaches out for you. It is a divine comfort that holds you anyway. It is a fundamentally spiritual moment when you know that you are accepted in a way that you cannot be unaccepted. There will be no revocation of this grace.

I have this vision of the spiritual life that we are all on a journey. Some of us are on a daily quest to get to the promised land. Some of us wake up each morning ready to tackle the quest, no matter how arduous. Most of us take quite a few side journeys- towards the adventure of love, to the oasis of satiation, to the mountaintop of power and reputation. And some of us are running away. But all of us, at the end of the journey, whether we want to or not, we are headed toward home. Not the alienated place that we grew up, with its quirky dysfunction. We come to our real home. We are headed toward the real place of safety and acceptance where we can realize our true potential, where we can become the person that we were meant to be. God has been drawing us home all of our lives whether we knew it or not and we have been meandering in that direction whether we meant to or not. Somewhere along the way, on our way home, I am sure we will run into Judas too. And who knows what we will say. Probably it won't be all that important anyway. But we will be together. And all of us will be headed in the right direction.

Amen.