JUDAS AND PETER
INTRODUCTION
It’s Tuesday of Holy Week -- Holy Week. Today’s readings get
us to look at two people: Judas and Peter.
Looking at my life: am I more like Peter or more like Judas?
People move us. People motivate us. Judas and Peter still
are impacting our world—still making us think.
Today’s two readings get us into the question of darkness
and light—how we can move into the dark—into sin—into death.
Today’s first reading talks about light, but we soon leave
the light when we move into listening to the second reading. There is a line
that grabs us: “It was night!”
HEART OF DARKNESS
Joseph Conrad wrote a book on all this. It’s called “The
Heart of Darkness.” There are a few movie
versions of this book by Joseph Conrad. It’s the story of a man trying to
figure out what happened to Kurtz—who moved deeper into the jungle—into The
Heart of Darkness. Maybe you saw the
movie, Apocalypse Now. Same theme
- same name: Kurtz moving into the jungle.
Judas and Peter both moved into The Heart of Darkness
MESSAGE
So my message, my suggestion today is to meditate on Judas
and Peter.
Talk with them. Ask them questions. Be with them in their
struggles.
JUDAS
Take Judas. The tendency is to avoid him as if he had AIDS.
Why?
The value would be is that Judas personalizes sin.
He also personalizes redemption.
Question: Why did Judas do it?
ANSWERS
There have been many answers to the WHY question—the “Why
did he do it?” question down through the years.
We see some answers in Scripture as well as other writers.
Some answers are:
avarice and greed: Judas held the money (Scripture hints at
this), especially in the story of Mary washing Jesus’ feet with the expensive
perfume (yesterday’s gospel). People
steal from their mother’s purse or their father’s wallet - or from a fund at
school or on the job and their sin is always before them.
anger: Jesus put him down publicly at that occasion. Maybe
he wanted to strike back.
jealousy: Perhaps Jesus was putting others first.
assumptions: Perhaps his assumptions about Jesus might have
been wrong and he was filled with frustration that he made a mistake.
pride: perhaps he was also filled with pride that he had
made a mistake, had made the wrong judgment about Jesus.
WE DON’T KNOW
Or we can say, “We don’t know!” We don’t know. All we have
are the gospel writers who also seem to trying to answer the “Why” question.
They play with a lot of the human emotions when they write about Judas.
Dante puts Judas on the lowest level of hell— not there for
robbing the local collection - down there along with Brutus—they were the
traitors—people who betrayed a friend.
PETER
Peter was like a kid. He got caught with his hand in the
cookie jar and he panicked. He said that he didn’t know Jesus.
SIN IS COMPLEX
Sin is complex.
We often don’t know why we sin.
It’s deep. Each sin is tied in with every other sin.
The sin of the world.
Others have effected us. We are part of all that we have met
and we have effected others by our sin.
TEMPTATION
The temptation is to give up when we sense all this.
The temptation is to say the hell with Christ.
We want to betray him.
And then when we do that, we want to leave Christ.
We want to hide. We want to be like Judas and commit
suicide, to hang ourselves, quickly, or like most, slowly, slowly hanging in
the wind, slow psychological suicide, morbidity, laziness, the easy route out.
CHOICE
But we don’t have to go that way. We can choose to be
Christ, to die on the cross because of others, or life.
Or to be like Peter, to fall and keep trying to get up, even
though we will hear the rooster waking us up every morning.
Be Christ, not Judas.
Or at least be Peter not Judas.
CONCLUSION
I always wish that Judas hesitated—and waited two more days.
He could have experienced resurrection and a new dawn. He could have seen the
light. I wish he could have run into Peter or one of the disciples who could
have helped him. It’s not good to be alone. It’s not good to be lost in the
night.
Help!
Amen! Come Lord Jesus.
Peter didn’t kill himself. Yet, as the tradition puts it,
for the rest of his life he cried each morning as he heard the cock crow.
That’s an old tradition. You can find it in a poem by Elizabeth Bishop
entitled, “Roosters.”
