It is interesting to note that the whole passion of Jesus is built on a series of betrayals. There is Judas, obviously. And then there is Pilate who clearly believed Jesus innocent.

I think the tendency for us as we hear these things is to say: well Jesus knew what was going on, and Jesus is God and was therefore somehow immune to the pain of betrayal. Simple as that. I don’t think that is the case. I don’t think that is what the text of Philippians is saying either. Rather what I think Paul, in quoting this hymn, is getting at is this: Jesus was a human being just like us, made like Adam in the form of God, tempted as we are to be more than we really are, to be God-like and so to betray our humanity. Yet Jesus entered the world where everybody else was playing that game, and got into this deadly trouble for his effort.

Betrayal: I didn’t think there are many things that happen to us human beings in life that are more painful than that. What is betrayal? It means that you basically hand yourself over to somebody whom you trust, who you believe is going to treat you honestly, fairly, take you seriously. And then they walk away, or lie to you, or ignore you or damage you in some way. And there is left this terrible wound and gaping hole. I think that when that happens to most of us, - and it does happen to all of us, and we all do it too of course - the normal reflex runs something like this: well people are no dam good anyway, so it is a big mistake to trust anybody. And so we simply close in on our selves and become untrustworthy ourselves, in consequence. The extraordinary thing about Jesus is that he did not close in on himself . He lived, as the text from the Philippians says, in the condition of a slave. Slave to all of the fears, and guilt and shame, and embarrassment that marks all of our living and all of our operating. Yet he was not deterred from himself being trustworthy himself and trusting in God.

What I am getting at is that, unless we understand the human meaning of the death of Jesus then to think that Jesus knew what was going to happen and his anticipating the on crucitating, resurrection, is just evasion of the reality of His death. All that later theologizing about the death of Jesus had to be based on the human reality of the death of Jesus. The death of Jesus was, as I said, a matter of his betrayal. Here was a man who was utterly trustworthy, to whom people could readily entrust themselves, and did. Yet when it began to cost something, they went away and left him literally hanging there. This is really difficult to get a hold of, simply because we have mystified the career of Jesus. But until we understand the sort of structure of Jesus’ life, and not just Jesus’ life, but of our own life as well, we are not going to get very far. We have spent 6 weeks presumably looking at our lives to figure out where we have betrayed, where we have sinned. Until we are convinced that there is really somebody to whom we could entrust ourselves, absolutely, then we are not going to come to recognize our own betrayals: I made a mistake or a bad judgement, or whatever, but not betrayal. Failing to do that, I think we also fail to come to something that Luke had as a hallmark of his Gospel. Do you remember last Sunday, about the story of the Lady taken in adultery, whom Jesus forgave. (This is probably from the Gospel of Luke.) You have this echoed all over only in Luke. Only Luke's Passive narrative has Jesus forgiving those people who killed him. Only Luke has Jesus saying to the repentant thief "it’s all right, and it will be all right". In other words, we can only anticipate forgiveness if we have in fact, confided ourselves to someone who is absolutely trustworthy. And only can I then recognize my own betrayal over against that. But at the same time only then can I hope that I can move beyond that. Jesus certainly trusted, even when, as we have it in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew where Jesus cried out, "My God, why have you abandoned me?" This cry and its terrible sense of abandonment is itself an act of Jesus’ own faithfulness. Jesus’ own trust. We believe that the trust was not betrayed, and that is what we call the resurrection.

We are in a position where we have again these few days of holy week, the time of the year when we are supposed to regard Jesus' career with the greatest attentiveness, give it the most time to resonate in our lives. But until we begin to understand the human reality of Jesus’ death, I think, that when we come to celebrate Easter, it is all going to be something that happens over our heads. Something that happens, in some kind of magical realm. We are thus impeded in the way we look at God, and the way we look at ourselves if we see the Resurrection as one more magic trick at the end of a whole series of magic tricks that God would have done in Jesus. What I am suggesting is that we look at this man and revise our own ideas about whether we do trust, and to whom we entrust ourselves to use these last days of Lent to deepen our understanding, our appreciation and our commitment to Jesus' way of looking at life and the God in whom Jesus' life was grounded.

To other sermons

Created: 30 Nov 1996
© Copyright: R. Trojcak, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002
London Ontario Canada
Last Update: September 05, 2005
Comments: rtrojcak@hotmail.com