Joy

In the Gospel of John, Jesus sums up pretty much everything by saying, "These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full" (John 15:11). He said it at the supper that he knew was the last one at which he'd have a mouth to eat with.

Happiness turns up more or less where you'd expect it to-a good marriage, a rewarding job, a pleasant vacation. Joy, on the other hand, is as notoriously unpredictable as the one who bequeaths it.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Judas

Nobody can be sure, of course, why Judas sold Jesus out, although according to John's Gospel, he already had a reputation for dipping into the poor box from time to time, so the cashmay have been part of it. If, like the other disciples, he was perennially worried about where he stood in the pecking order, he may also have been reacting to some imagined slight. Maybe he thought his job as treasurer to the outfit was beneath him. Another possibility is that he had gotten fed up with waiting for Jesus to take the world by storm and hoped that betraying him might force him to show his hand at last. Or maybe, because nothing human is ever uncomplicated, something of all of these was involved. Anyway, whatever his reasons were, the whole thing went sour for him soon enough.

Slipping out of the Last Supper before the party was over, he led the Romans to the garden that he knew his friends were planning to adjourn to afterward and said to lay low till he gave the signal. It was dark by the time the others showed up, and maybe for fear that he might scare them off if he used any other method, the way he showed the soldiers which was the one to jump was by kissing him. That was all he'd been paid to do, and as soon as he'd done it, there was no earthly reason why he couldn't have taken off with his laundered cash and found a place to spend it. But when the time came, he wasn't in the mood.

There are several versions of what he did instead, of which the most psychologically plausible seems to be that he tried to give the money back to the ones who'd given it to him and went out and hanged himself. This time there doesn't seem to be any ambiguity about the motive.

There is a tradition in the early church, however, that his suicide was based not on despair but on hope. If God was just, then he knew there was no question where he would be heading as soon as he'd breathed his last. Furthermore, if God was also merciful, he knew there was no question either that in a last-ditch effort to save the souls of the damned as God's son, Jesus would be down theretoo. Thus the way Judas figured it, hell might be the last chance he'd have of making it to heaven, so to get there as soon as possible, he tied the rope around his neck and kicked away the stool. Who knows?

In any case, it's a scene to conjure with. Once again they met in the shadows, the two old friends, both of them a little worse for wear after all that had happened, only this time it was Jesus who was the one to give the kiss, and this time it wasn't the kiss of death that was given.

John 12:1-8; 13:21-30; 18:1-12; Matthew 27:3-10

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Judgment

We are all of us judged every day. We are judged by the face that looks back at us from the bathroom mirror. We are judged by the faces of the people we love and by the faces and lives of our children and by our dreams. We are judged by the faces of the people we do not love. Each day finds us at the junction of many roads, and we are judged as much by the roads we have not taken as by the roads we have.

The New Testament proclaims that at some unforeseeable time in the future, God will ring down the final curtain on history, and there will come a Day on which all our days and all the judgments upon us and all our judgments upon each other will themselves be judged. The judge will be Christ. In other words, the one who judges us most finally will be the one who loves us most fully.

Romantic love is blind to everything except what is lovable and lovely, but Christ's love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole. Christ's love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy. The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering that Love has endured forour sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Judith

King Nebuchadnezzar of Assyria had a nasty temper and a long memory, and after pulverizing his enemies the Medes, he sent a man named Holofernes with a hundred and thirty-two thousand men to straighten out all the peoples who hadn't coughed up military aid when he needed it. The ones who resisted were to be liquidated. The rest were to tear down their temples, throw out their gods, and see to it that from then on the only god they had any dealings with was Nebuchadnezzar himself.

The Jews were among the others on Nebuchadnezzar's black list, and the place where Holofernes attacked them was a town called Bethulia, to which he laid siege. In Bethulia there lived a very attractive, well-heeled young widow named Judith, and she decided to go to Holofernes and see what she could do.

First she prayed to Yahweh to prosper her cause and then, just to play it safe, made a few preparations of a more secular nature. She skinned out of the drab black clothes she'd been wearing in memory of her late husband and took a long, hot tub. Then she sprayed herself with some expensive eau de cologne, had her maid give her a permanent, and slipped into a dazzling little number left over from happier days. She polished things off by decorating herself with all the chains, bracelets, earrings, and assorted bric-a-brac she could put her hands on and set out with her maid for the enemy lines (Judith 10:1-5).

As a Jew, she had a little trouble getting to see Holofernes, but when she said she was going to show him how to take Bethuliawithout losing a single man, they let her in. "I will declare unto the Lord no lie this night," she told him as soon as they'd been introduced (Judith 11:6), and you can only hope she had her fingers crossed at the time.

The only circumstances under which Yahweh would think of letting his people be defeated, she said, was if they sinned. As it happened, she went on to say, right that minute they were sinning like crazy back in Bethulia by eating a lot of unkosher food because, thanks to the siege, that was all there was left. She knew for a fact that the Jews in Jerusalem were about to pull the same stunt, and as soon as they did, Holofernes would be able to take the lot of them with both hands tied behind his back, and Yahweh wouldn't lift a finger to interfere. All Holofernes had to do was wait till she gave him the word.

Holofernes was not only much encouraged by what she had to say, but he was also knocked right off his pins by her good looks and fancy clothes. For three days he tried to lure her into his tent for an intimate little supper, and for three days she played hard to get. On the fourth day she finally said she'd come and put on an even flashier number for the occasion than the one she'd started out in. They had a gourmet meal together, during which Holofernes had three glasses of wine for every one of Judith's, and when it was over, he sent his servants packing so that it was just the two of them at last.

Unfortunately, he'd gotten himself so tanked up by then that before anything much had a chance to happen, he passed out on his bed. His scimitar was lying nearby, and with two good whacks Judith cut off his head, put it in her picnic basket, and went back to Bethulia, where she had it prominently displayed on the battlements. When the Assyrians saw it there the next day, they ran like rabbits, and the Jews drew their first easy breath in months.

They rewarded Judith by giving her the entire contents of Holofernes' tent including the silver cups and the bed he'd passed out on, but Judith turned around and gave them all to Yahweh. For all she knew, she might have forgotten to keep her fingers crossed when she said all those things to Holofernes the first time they met and thought the present might help make it up to Yahweh for having stretched things a little. And apparently she gauged things right because, although she never married again, she lived a long, happy life as Bethulia's leading citizen, and died peacefully in her bed at the age of one hundred and five.

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Justice

If you break a good law, justice must be invoked not only for goodness' sake but for the good of your own soul. Justice may consist of paying a price for what you've done or simply of the painful knowledge that you deserve to pay a price, which is payment enough. Without one form of justice or the other, the result is ultimately disorder and grief for you and everybody. Thus justice is itself not unmerciful.

Justice also does not preclude mercy. It makes mercy possible. Justice is the pitch of the roof and the structure of the walls. Mercy is the patter of rain on the roof and the life sheltered by the walls. Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.

The cross says something like the same thing on a scale so cosmic and full of mystery that it is hard to grasp. As it represents what one way or another human beings are always doing to each other, the death of that innocent man convicts us as a race, and we deserve the grim world that over the centuries we have made for ourselves.As it represents what one way or another we are always doing not so much to God above us somewhere as to God within us and among us everywhere, we deserve the very godlessness we have brought down on our own heads. That is the justice of things.

But the cross also represents the fact that goodness is present even in grimness and God even in godlessness. That is why it has become the symbol not of our darkest hopelessness, but of our brightest hope. That is the mercy of things. Granted who we are, perhaps we could have seen it no other way.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words