King

YOU THINK OF THE NEWLY anointed King David conquering unconquerable Jerusalem and crowning his triumph by bringing into it the ark of God as all the people made merry with lyres, harps, tambourines, castanets, and cymbals. You think of the pope himself proclaiming Charlemagne emperor and augustus on Christmas Day and all Rome going mad with enthusiasm. You think of Shakespeare's Henry V comforting his troops on the eve of Agincourt and of the grands levers of Louis XIV, which rivaled in splendor the rising of the sun. Muffled drums and vast crowds of mourners followed the deaths of kings, and the peal of bells and dancing in the streets their births. The person of the king was so sacred that affronts upon him were punished with the most horrible of torments, and his touch had the power to heal.

Passionate loyalty, adoration, terror, awe—no words are perhaps too strong to describe the feelings evoked in his subjects by the mere sight of him, and it's no wonder. He held the power of life and death over them. Their destiny was in his keeping. He defended the kingdom against all enemies both from within and from without. He was the kingdom. If he rejoiced, it rejoiced with him. If he was angry, the earth trembled and the crops might fail.

"Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory!" proclaims the Psalmist (24:10). This rich metaphor is used again and again in Scripture. Yahweh alone was King over Israel, the prophets thundered: to be feared, to be loved, above all else to be obeyed. When the people decided they wanted a king of flesh and blood like all the other nations, Samuel warned them that the consequences would be tragic (1 Samuel 8:4-18), and history proved him correct in every particular. In the long run Israel as king and kingdom vanished from history altogether.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem for the last time, it was as King and Son of David that his followers hailed him. If it was a king like David the conquering hero that they were looking for, they were of course bitterly disappointed. What they got was a king like David the father, who, when he heard of his treacherous son's death, went up to his chamber and wept. "Would I had died instead of thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" he cried out. They were the most kingly words he ever uttered and an uncanny foreshadowing of his many-times great-grandson who some thousand years later put his money where David's mouth had been.

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Justification

IN PRINTERS' LANGUAGE, to justify means to set type in such a way that all full lines are of equal length and flush both left and right; in other words, to put the printed lines in the right relationship with the page they're printed on and with each other. The religious sense of the word is very close to this. Being justified means being brought into right relation. Paul says simply that being justified means having peace with God (Romans 5:1). He uses the noun justification for the first step in the process of salvation.

During his Pharisee phase, or "blue period," Paul was on his way to Damascus to mop up some Christians, when suddenly he heard the voice of Jesus Christ, whose resurrection he had up till now considered only an ugly rumor. What he might have expected the Voice to say was, "Just you wait." What in effect it did say was, "I want you on my side." Paul never got over it.

As far as Paul was concerned, he was the last man in the world for God to have called this way, but God had, thereby revealing that God was willing to do business with him even if he was in the process of mopping up Christians at the time. Paul also discovered that all the brownie points he had been trying to rack up as a super-Pharisee had been pointless. God did business with you not because of who you were, but because of who God was.

All the Voice seemed to want Paul to do was believe that it meant what it said and do as it asked. Paul did both.

At a moment in his life when he had least reason to expect it, Paul was staggered by the idea that no matter who you are or what you've done, God wants you on God's side. There is nothing you have to do or be. It's on the house. It goes with the territory. God has justified you, lined you up. To feel this somehow in your bones is the first step on the way to being saved.

You don't have to hear a Voice on the road to Damascus to feel it in your bones either. Maybe just noticing that the sun shines every bit as bright and sweet on Jack the Ripper as it does on Little Orphan Annie will do the trick. Maybe just noticing the holy and hallowing givenness of your own life.

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Judas

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 Bethulia without 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.

The Book of Judith

-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 for our 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

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 cash may 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 there too. 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