JUDAS AND THE "GOOD" BETRAYAL

It's "big" news today, the revealing by the National Geographic Society of the papyri of the Gnostic Coptic Gospel of Judas. "It's authentic!" Which statement the news services have picked up and run with as being "This will shake the foundations of Christianity!!" (As if this shaking stuff is some new social recreation - "Shake up those fusty old Christians, dislodge them!" ... Okay, that's sarcasm on my part.)

But first off, lets get some things straight.

(1) That there had been such a document at some time is nothing new. It was referred to in other records. Nor are the concepts it presents anything new. Particularly, the Gnostic aspect of it.

(2) When an archeologist says of a papyrus that it is authentic, he means that yes, it does date from the period it's supposed to come from. It's not an evaluation of the truth of the contents.

(3) The document dates from the second century after Christ. That is, written down by folks who not only didn't know Jesus alive, they probably didn't know anyone else who had been alive at the time Jesus walked the Earth.

That said, there is a certain irony that this is coming into the news just now, in the weeks before the film version of The DaVinci Code is released. (I'm planning to blog about that, but haven't gotten to it yet.) It's as if anything that can be used to say "Christianity is a crock" is being thrown out into the cultural currents. Anything that can challenge orthodoxy is given a forum, with the implication that the speakers have "suddenly" (in the here and now) shaken off the dusty irrationality of orthodox doctrine, and become free thinkers, who have found the Truth of God.

Yeah, right.

As if any of what they're saying is really new in the history of the church. 'Cause it ain't.

Anyway, the gist of the Gospel of Judas is that Judas "betrayed" Jesus at Jesus' request.

It also plays up Judas as a favored disciple. Now, that I will concede as an interesting point. Because, if you read the canonical gospels carefully, you will see a very studied avoidance of talking about Judas, until the end. And then the references are bitter. Those are the signs of betrayal folks, something that can only happen where trust was present. Judas was the treasurer of the group (not Matthew, the former tax collector, whom you'd think would be the natural money-man of the group): he dispensed the funds for food, for their lodgings, for things like renting the donkey that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. They all trusted him. When he gave Jesus over to the authorities, the other disciples were taken utterly by surprise. No wonder they didn't want to talk about him. The tidbit does get added that Judas had been stealing from their treasury (maybe he was, maybe he wasn't: the comment had the tinge of bitter resentment). But the bitterness and silence indicate that something agreeable had been shattered.

That is actually the definition of betrayal.

So how then could there be a "good" betrayal?

Well, there can't be.

For the "Christian" Gnostics, the whole point was that the body is evil, and the spiritual is good. Therefore, the crucifixion is a good thing because it freed the Spirit of Jesus from the evil shackles of the flesh. And also all that other stuff about sin. If you start from the point of the gnostics, then, anything that would free the Divine from the corruption of the flesh was a good thing. Therefore the betrayal of Judas is a "good thing" because it had that ultimate end. The betrayal of the trust of the rest of the disciples is just ... insignificant (by comparison) "collateral damage".

It's all a crock.

That sort of duality (that the material world is evil and the spiritual world is the only good) doesn't hold up in the face of the basics of creation.

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

That's our starting point. And when the first thing we are told about God is that He created the material world, I think we can safely assume that God actually thinks the material world is a good thing.

And if that is the case, when Judas betrays the Manifestation (or Incarnation) of the Divine in the Material World, he betrays the ... well, Uber-Good. ("It's Material! It's Created! It's God Himself in the Here and Now! But wait, there's more!" Heh. Okay, that's being flippant.) Judas made the choice that undercut everything the disciples had been doing and learning during those three years.

Now (putting on my science-fiction trained speculative hat here), I do believe that the cross was inevitable. The authorities had serious intentions to get rid of Jesus. He was just too radical (I mean, what's all this about coming close to the Holiness of God without having to deal with the intercession of the priests?). They would have gotten him eventually. The crucifixion was not dependent on Judas betraying Jesus. The significance of the incarnation and the crucifixion would not have been diminished if the capture of Jesus had come about in some other fashion.

So, really, in the Bigger Picture of God's involvement with us and His campaign to get closer to us, Judas isn't, well, that big a deal. He's a cautionary lesson to us: that even in circles of believers who ought to know better, there may be some who suddenly think they know better than Jesus about how things should be (for whatever reason). There will be some who throw over the long standing trust and affection a core group has given them, for the sake of some action; who will betray the trust given them. And who are likely to lose greatly as a consequence of their betrayal (after all, Judas killed himself in a fit of self-disgust when he realized what he'd done).

There is no good in betrayal at all.

So, here at the beginning of all the noise about "The Gospel of Judas", I declare that already it is a mere blip on the radar of my spiritual life. There's nothing truly earth-shaking about it, nothing truly revolutionary, nothing truly new. It's just an ancient document that shows that even within a century of the life of Jesus, there were people who wanted to reshape the message to suit themselves.

The Divine and Holy One chose to become flesh and blood and sweat and all those incredibly mundane and sometimes icky things that are part of being a living, breathing human. Because He wanted us to learn how to come even closer to Him. Now, that's radical.