April 9, 2006 -
We are reading this morning from the Gospel of Mark and not from the Gospel of Judas—and for good reason. If you have been awake to the news this week, you know that much ado has been made over an ancient papyrus containing a Coptic translation of the second-century Judas Gospel. It’s much ado about nothing for most of us, but for the same cast of characters that want the premise of The Da Vinci Code to be true, it’s much ado about something.
The something they want to make of it is a new and improved version of Christianity, free from the traditional version that has, in their view, done so much harm to so many in the name of Jesus. If you believe them, the Gospel of Judas is an example of voices in early Christianity who were unfairly suppressed by imperial power. The Christianity we call orthodox squeezes the individuality out of faith, destroys the blessed diversity of opinion we should all cherish, and makes claims about truth that eliminate the competition the way Saddam Hussein did to any who challenged him.
But let’s consider what the Gospel of Judas would have us believe. Judas, not John, was actually the beloved disciple. Far from being a traitor, he was the secret partner in salvation with the Savior. Here’s how it begins: “The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week three days before he celebrated Passover. ... Jesus said to him, Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal.”
This brand of Christianity celebrates secret wisdom that ordinary people do not possess unless they have it passed to them in extraordinary ways. They become spiritual higher-ups, so to speak. They have the gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge, which is superior to ordinary belief.
A further feature has to do with special suffering for their special knowledge. Just as Jesus was badly treated, so his servant Judas would be scorned for his commitment to the idea that the real person is actually the one under the clothes of flesh. Another excerpt from the Gospel of Judas: “Jesus said to Judas, Look, you have been told everything. You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” [Elaine Pagels, “The Gospel Truth,” in The New York Times (April 8, 2006).]
The central Gnostic claim is that the soul has to be freed from the body in order to be saved. This is the mystical truth Judas knew and the church has rejected because, so the logic goes, the church likes to control the faith of others; and it likes to pillage the purses of the faithful, and keep men, in particular, in charge of things. If we would only follow the accounts of Judas and Thomas and Mary Magdalene, we would all be free to relate to God in our own inner spiritual way without all the dirty duties of discipleship in this flesh-and-blood world. We could all trust in our own good intentions, without any actual obligations to others. And surely God, who knows our hearts, will reward us for resisting the oppressive powers that would steal our freedom and bake us into cookie-cutter Christians.
But the matter is actually just the other way. The real elitists are these ancient and modern-day Gnostics. Only they seem to know the secret wisdom that somehow the common people of the church have for centuries been kept away from. It shouldn’t surprise us that Americans are largely behind this Gnostic craze. We like to challenge authority, write our own histories, and go our own way. We don’t like being told what to do. We don’t even like being part of a worldwide community that includes people of all nations and languages and cultures—which is just what the church of Jesus Christ has become.
Our Palm Sunday passage takes a different road. Here is a faith open to everyone. Even children can walk this road. You don’t need secret knowledge to be a disciple of Jesus. You don’t need to be a hero or heroine, doing extraordinary things for Christ. You simply need to do the dirty duties of discipleship that Jesus calls you to. You need only to trust and obey him, no matter how mundane the task, no matter how everyday the errand. You just attend to his way along the way.
For example, Jesus tells his disciples to go into a village and fetch a donkey for him. He is specific about it: where it is, what to say if someone asks what they are doing. Nothing glamorous, but the kind of thing that allows anyone to share in the Lord’s work.
Some of us want to be big shots, don’t we? We don’t think we matter in an organization if we are not on the board, or chairing the board, or at least getting our way on the board. We get this in church, too, though a passage like this ought to be an antidote to this attitude. You don’t get to be a deacon in our church unless you prove you are willing to do the dirty duties of discipleship. It’s not about whether you have or give a lot of money. It’s not about whether you are a big name in the community or know the right people. It’s about whether you prove yourself in the small and steady things that show up on Jesus’ scorecard of discipleship.
Discipleship is a long word for paying attention to the way of Jesus. Before you can be a leader in the community of Christ, you have to be a follower of Christ. And the only way you get to be and continue to be a leader in the community of Christ is by being and continuing to be a follower of Christ.
Look at the contrast in our Palm Sunday event. The disciples and the crowd all join the parade. They take off their cloaks and lay them upon the donkey and on the road. They wave palm fronds and lay them in the path that Jesus will ride upon into Jerusalem. They shout Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Everybody loves a parade. Everybody loves a hero. But this crowd would soon turn on Jesus. They would in only a matter of days be calling for his crucifixion. Why?
Well, they should have seen it coming. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, not a white stallion. Now, they might have thought that was a clever trick. They might have remembered the prophet Zechariah, who foretold: Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. Of course he couldn’t come riding into a Roman-occupied city on a horse. That would have caused too much of a stir in the procurator’s palace. So he comes in humbly, on a donkey. But still he comes to conquer the enemies of Israel, they think.
They think wrongly. They think salvation is fundamentally political. It’s about who’s on top in the end. But here’s the down-and-dirty truth: no one is on top in the end. We are all under ground, so to speak—six feet under, don’t you know?!
Slobodan Milosevic died recently before the International Criminal Court in The Hague could issue a verdict on charges of crimes against humanity. He was a Serbian hero during the Balkan War in the former Yugoslavia. He and his generals orchestrated genocide against their Bosnian Muslim neighbors in Kosovo. It was all about revenge, about the retrieval of human dignity for the Serbian people, who had been humiliated in the year 1389, in the battle against the Ottoman Turks in the so-called Field of Blackbirds. In 1989 the Muslim administration in Kosovo was supposedly mistreating the Serbs, and this stirred the nationalist passions of the Serbs. On the exact anniversary of that lost battle 600 years later, and on the same date 75 years after Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist, Milosevic returned to the Field of Blackbirds. He “addressed a crowd of Kosovo’s embittered Serbian minority, many of them frightened of what the breakup of Yugoslavia would mean to them, living in a province with a majority Albanian population. Catching the mood of the crowd, almost like a musician or a performer, Milosevic screamed to the crowd: No one will ever beat you again. The crowd went wild, hysterical. Police had to hold it back. There in Kosovo, Milosevic discovered that he could exploit Serbs’ fear of what the breakup of Yugoslavia would mean for them into a potent—and dangerous—form of political power.” [Laura Rozen, “Beginner’s Guide to the Balkans,” in Salon.com, 2000.]
This must be what the crowds wanted that day in Jerusalem. And when they didn’t get it, they turned on Jesus instead of turning to him.
We must be careful about how we talk to people about what it means to be a Christian. Sometimes we are so eager to sign up more converts that we forget that they must actually convert. We all must change and become soldiers in a different kind of army. Onward, Christian Soldiers is a great old hymn, as long as it is taken rightly. Unfortunately, the words are ambiguous: it can either promote a crusader mentality that would enlist Christ in our war efforts against national enemies, or it could point us, as it should, to being soldiers in a spiritual warfare who faithfully fetch donkeys for our humble leader, shoveling the dung along the way in the service of peace.
News item this week in The New York Times. Seems some Jewish synagogues are taking marketing lessons from Christian megachurch evangelicals. They are meeting people where they are, they say, offering things like “Shabbat yoga” classes and comedy nights at the synagogue. They are making worship more outsider-friendly and hoping to attract new people who have been turned off by the demands of traditional Judaism. [It’s] a different world, says one rabbi. There’s a greater marketplace of spiritual options for people. If synagogues are not compelling places, who’s going to bother to join and be involved?Another commentator put it this way: I think what’s going on is a product of the consumer-driven nature of this culture and the need to compete for people’s time and attention. [Michael Luo, “With Yoga, Comedy and Parties …” (April 4, 2006).]
So that’s what we’re supposed to do: compete for people’s time and attention? If that’s the point, if the church follows the desires of a consumer-driven culture, how can we then ask them to come and follow a humble Christ who saves us by dying on a cross for us?
Christ calls us to attend to his way, even if that means fetching donkeys for him. Sometimes it means speaking a quiet word in a committee meeting (or just serving on one). Sometimes it’s spending time with someone whose life is coming apart at the seams and just listening and praying. Sometimes it’s hammering a nail for a Habitat house or with Church Builders, or emptying a bedpan at a nursing home or serving in preschool worship care or writing a check that amounts to a tithe.
You won’t find that in the Gospel of Judas. But in Mark’s gospel, and in the brand of Christianity this church practices, preparing the way of the Lord may find you standing hip-deep in the mire of some stable, trying to corral a donkey for Jesus. [Thomas G. Long, “Donkey Fetchers,” in Christian Century (April 4, 2006): 18.]
Good attentions, then—not good intentions. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Judas may have had good intentions. But the road to heaven is paved with good attentions—attentions to the daily duties of discipleship. Which road are you on?
under the chosen Sunday to hear audio of sermon (mp3 format) (beginning March 11, 2007).
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