Blood Money

A Sermon Based Upon Matthew 27: 1-10

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Second Sunday of Lent,   March 1st,  2015

"It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood money." (Mat 27:6 NRS)

I want to begin with a simple question that’s not so simple:  “What is the worst thing that could happen?”  Consider this.

German pastoral scholar Helmut Thielicke tells of a man living amid the darkness of Hilter’s Third Reich.  He took his stand against the National Socialists government and all it stood for and was duly arrested.   He was sent to prison, where he was kept for a long time in solitary confinement, enduring regular beatings and torture.  His captors sought to extract a “false” confession from him so they could convict him of some crime. 

After several months he was released without charge.  Tired, physically weak and undernourished, he was nonetheless an unbroken spirit, as ardent in his opposition to the totalitarian state as he had ever been.  But two weeks after his release he was found hanged, having committed suicide in his attic.

Those who had followed his case with interest wondered how it was that his strength and courage had eventually been destroyed.  Those who knew him well were aware of the reason.  When he returned home from prison, he had made the awful discovery that it was his son who had informed against him and delivered him into the hands of the Nazis.

The treachery of one whom he loved finally accomplished what institutional brutality had failed to do  (From At the Cross,  Baucknam & Hart, 1999, 23)

EVIL IS NEVER PURE

The story of Judas Iscariot is also one of those stories that is ‘worst thing that could happen’.   Since Judas was one of the original twelve disciples whom Jesus himself hand-picked, it was evidently a very difficult story for the early church to ponder.  In the earliest gospel of Mark, hardly anything is said to explain why Judas did what he did.  In Luke’s gospel, we are told that “Satan entered into him” (Luk 22. 3), but by the time you get to the gospel of John, Jesus himself says when he was ‘chosen’  and is ‘a devil’ (Jn. 6.66).  It appeared that the early church also trying to figure out just how Jesus could have ever chosen a person like Judas, unless it was in God’s plan all along.

I wish the answer to evil was that easy.  I wish it were as easy as saying “evil was God’s plan all along” (or do ?).  I wish that evil were just as pure and as simple as it was in the old Cowboy Westerns with John Wayne.  You knew who was the good guy or who was the bad.   Some people think if you can isolate, expose or get rid of all the bad, then only the good guys would be left.  If only it were only that simple, but it’s not.   Would you dare call yourself ‘good?’  Even Jesus didn’t.  He said,  “Don’t call me good, only God is good!” (KJV, Mat. 19.17).

Back during the American response to 9/11, then President Bush called the people responsible for bombing the NY Trade Center an “Axis of Evil” as if it were clear exactly who the bad guys were and we, the good guys were going to get them.  Then, just this year, President Obama, in response to the beheading of  Peter Kassing, called the dastardly deed ‘an act of pure evil’    

While I agree wholeheartedly in the President’s feelings, I believe the story of Judas would never refer to evil a being ‘pure’ in any way.   The impurity of evil is the problem, not the purity of it.   Just like in story of Jesus when a disciple who was chosen to be good goes bad,  we are reminded that seldom, if ever, is evil purely evil.  There is always some mixture of the goodness that God has created, even in the most evil person, just as there was, at least in the beginning, in Judas, or in Hitler, or Stalin, or whomever.  In every story of human evil, somehow, someway, it is the story someone who has chosen to do the evil they have done. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/16/obama-peter-kassig_n_6167824.html.

There is another reason why their is nothing ‘pure’ about evil.  One of the greatest theologians of the church, Augustine, lived in a world that tended to put everything in simple categories of black and white, good verses evil, or light verses darkness, angels verses demons.   Augustine did not think it was that simple.   If everything was that simple this would put evil on equal terms with God, and in theory at least, this would mean that evil, darkness and the demonic could eventually defeat God and we are just pawns to whatever evil would want to do with us.http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Augustine/augustine_evil.html).

For Augustine, the greatest evil is not the presence of something bad as much as it is the absence of something good.   Evil, he claims, came into the world when sin came into the world.  It is not something out there trying to get to us, but it is our own choice not to obey, not to be willing to do and be the good God has created us to be and to do that invites evil.      

Since there no one person or nothing pure evil (even the devils believe), the story of Judas should cause us all to open our ears and listen.  We shouldn’t demonize Judas, as much as we should realize that the way Judas went, the choices Judas made, the tragedy Judas met, could be the our destiny too, if we fail to do the good, follow the good, or be the good, we are called and created to be.   Isn’t this why when Jesus told his disciples that one of them would betray him,  because they knew they were each capable of such evil, they all answered  with the chilling question: “Is it I?”  
 

EVIL SEEKS ITS OWN PROFIT

So how do we spot the evil that could rise up from within any of us?   The gospel of Matthew, and John too, want us to see at least one specific way that the devil got into Judas.  It involved money; that is ‘blood money’ as the text calls  it (v.7).  Blood money is the money that is earned at the expense or harm of someone else.   Matthew specifically says that Judas betrayed Jesus for a mere 30 pieces of silver, about 4 months wages, which is pennies in comparison to the value of a human life, let alone the value of the life of Jesus.  

Whether or not Judas only betrayed Jesus for the money, we can’t be sure, but we can be sure that Judas was trying in some way, to profit by going against Jesus.   There have been all kinds of speculation about why Judas did what he did.  While some have simply said he got greedy,  others have cooked more elaborate plots, saying that Judas was a Zealot, who tried to help Jesus use his power for good political purposes, similar to how the devil also tempted Jesus to do at the beginning of His public ministry  (Matt 4: 1-11).  When Judas realized the plot failed, he lost all hope, and committed suicide out of great despair.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Iscariot#Modern_interpretations).

Though we will never be sure why Judas betrayed Jesus, what we do know is that Judas betrayed Jesus for his own profit, whatever that profit might have been; religious, financial, political, nationalistic, or militaristic.  Whatever the profit was, Judas wanted his own version of Jesus and his own way of profiting from Jesus.   For him, it was about his own version of the profit.  This is the kind of thing that always happens, when people lose their integrity or sell out to that which comes only at the expense of harm and hurt to others.   If we make a deal with the devil, no matter how sincere we might think it to be, we might get what we want, but we can pay the ultimate price of losing our own soul or life.   

As we consider Judas’ profit seeking, one other thing we should do is take a moment to consider the difference between Jesus and Judas.  In the temptation of Jesus, the devil comes to Jesus in the wilderness and tempts him to make bread, to jump off the pinnacle of the temple to make a spectacle of himself, and finally, to stand on a high mountain and take a look at the world he could have for his own personal profit, if Jesus would only take the short cut and bow down to Satan  (Matt. 4. 1ff).  But Jesus refuses.  Jesus refuses to ‘gain the world which would result in ‘ losing his soul’ and decides to stay the course, to bear the cross, and to remain faithful to his calling, come what may. 

This is what Jesus did, but it is not what Judas did.  The difference in Judas includes the issue of money, but it was much more.  It was even more than about what Judas wanted.  It it was also about what Judas did not want---the way of Jesus that Judas refused to go as a disciple of Jesus.  Perhaps the money got in the way.   Perhaps the political ambition got in the way.  The heart of the problem was that Judas did not want to go all the way with Jesus.  Jesus  said he came to serve and to give his own life as a ransom for others.  Judas told us, by his actions, that he wanted to keep the ransom (or the money) for himself.  He did not follow Jesus, but he wanted Jesus to follow him.

EVIL GETS PERSONAL

The tragedy of Judas is the tragic choice that always brings evil into the world: Judas refused to follow the good that Jesus came to give to reveal.  Judas traded in everything for a just a few pennies which made his life so cheap it was finally worth nothing.   The greatest human evil always cheapens and destroys the good that God has created. This is what evil does. 

This is what Judas did, he cheapened God’s goodness by his own greed.  That’s tragic enough, but do you know what makes Judas’ story even more tragic?  Surprisingly, the greater tragedy and sin of Judas is not what he did wrong which caused him to commit great evil, but it is what he failed to do after he sinned.   We this right in front us in this text, as Judas ‘repented’ (27.3) or changes his mind, goes back to the Jewish leaders, begs them to take the money back, and then throws it down to go out and commit suicide.   This is a indeed a very tragic ending, but it’s still not the most tragic. 

When the great expositor John Calvin, way back in the 16^th  century, commented on what Judas did after his great sin, he said that Judas met all the qualifications for repentance and forgiveness.  He had contrition;  contrition or regret enough to change his mind.   He also gave confessio, giving confession that that he had sinned.  Finally, Calvin says Judas made satisfaction, he returned his ill-gotten money.  But why did following all these correct steps of repentance not bring Judas the forgiveness he could have gotten?   Calvin says that Judas forgot one most important thing everyone should do when they sin against God: He did all the right things except the main thing---he did not go to Jesus.   He should have been the first one who would have run to the cross, but he didn’t. 

This is the great tragedy of Judas.  He did not return to the only one who can restore a broken life, a wrong choice, and a prideful heart.   You need not only remorse and sorrow to find the forgiveness of Jesus, but you need the humility and courage to go to him face to face.  This is the tragedy of Judas, and it can still be our tragedy too.  It is not our failures, our sins, our mistakes, and not even our rebelliousness that destroys us, but it is our desire to die before we face who we are or what we’ve done, that destroys us.  

 

This is why evil is always personal.  Evil only wins if we allow it to win, because we will not do what we personally must do, in order to make our way to the Christ on the cross.  Don’t go the way of Judas.  Come to the cross.  Jesus welcomes sinners there in his death, just like he always welcomed sinners in his life.    His love can overcome the evil in us, all of us, but first, we have to come to him.   Amen.