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.”