Our Blog

You can listen to the reading and reflection by clicking here.

John 13.21-32

After saying this Jesus was troubled in spirit, and declared, “Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.” The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he was speaking. One of his disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining next to him; Simon Peter therefore motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking. So while reclining next to Jesus, he asked him, “Lord, who is it?” Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas son of Simon Iscariot. After he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, “Do quickly what you are going to do.” Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the common purse, Jesus was telling him, “Buy what we need for the festival”; or, that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.
When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.

During Holy Week, we think about Judas and his role in this drama on Maundy Thursday. It is interesting to note that he is heard from in the periscope that comes before today’s reading from the Gospel of John. Judas wants to know why the perfumed oil with which Mary anoints Jesus feet was not sold for 300 denarii and why the money was not given to the poor. Judas asked this because he had become a thief. Judas was a disciple with an agenda, but he was a necessary disciple. We always think we are picking the best people who will hold up the values of our organization, but there is often someone with ulterior motives. Judas’ was money, as far as we can tell. He could be bought, but what others meant for evil, God meant for good. Judas was always going to play a large part in the story of Jesus. Jesus already knew about Judas. You can feel in your spirit when someone is against you.

Some people like to believe God scapegoated Judas and make him the completion of God’s plan. I believe God was trying to drive another kind of message about betrayal.

Judas was a necessary disciple. Sometimes people come into our inner circle, as great enthusiasts, then turn on us and become the people who get bought. That is what makes Judas so interesting. Her is not an outsider. One cannot be a betrayer if one is an outsider. As an insider, Judas had cared about the plight of the poor—the plight of the disinherited about whom Jesus cared so much. But at some point, he turned his heart and his eyes away from the disinherited and this is what John called out in the gospel. The poor are the disinherited, and they were the focus of Jesus’ ministry. When Judas took the 30 pieces of silver out of the treasury, for what was he using it? When he turns his eyes back to the poor, when he takes the money back, in an attempt to get his soul back and intact, it is too late, for Jesus has already been crucified.

So if we focus on the betrayer without connecting it to Jesus, we only get to ourselves. This necessary disciple turned on Jesus because he could not get his own way or live out his agenda. The turning takes place in us. We betray ourselves before we betray God or other people. Judas followed Jesus, his true heart; he wanted to free the minds of the community, but Jesus’ agenda clashes with Judas’ agenda, as Jesus was not being the Messiah Judas wanted him to be. When Judas stops focusing on why he became a disciple, he betrays himself. We betray ourselves when we stop focusing on why we are followers of Jesus. We actually betray God first, then we betray ourselves and we betray the other. When we do that we betray our soul. That Judas sells Jesus is the mark of the betrayer. When he sells Jesus, he is really selling his own soul.

There are three marks of betrayal here:
The First Mark: When he decides and then takes the money
The Second Mark: When he kisses Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane
The Third Mark: When he betrays the community

He could have taken the money to save society. That would have been a disappointment, but not a betrayal .

We share the kiss of peace with one another during the exchange of the peace in non-Covid seasons in church, but that is not the kiss of betrayal.

So many agendas get communicated in a wink or a kiss or a handshake or as kick under the table in our present day.

Judas betrayed his community when he turned his eyes away from the needs of the poor. He still stays focused on getting rid of the rulers/oppressors, but he does not include the needs of the disinherited. Judas betrayed when he took his focus off the people God came to save; he only wanted to free the affluent, which is often the agenda of people who get into difficulty.

In those three marks of betrayal everyone suffers. Judas suffered and died. God suffered and died and their community suffered as they found out that the religious leaders did not have their best interest at heart. The saddest part of this experience, for the victims in the community, the disinherited, is that they never get to hear their story verified by the truth.

In this Holy Week, I pray that you might think of Judas in a deeper way than he is usually presented to us. What are the ways that we, in our own life and time, are betraying or have betrayed our God, Our Self and Our Community? You cannot pray for your enemy if you do not know who your enemy is. Whenever we have destroyed all our expectations or others have destroyed them, we look to Christ. Perhaps we need to remember that the betrayal in our lives can be the the thing that awakens us from our comfort zone, moves us to a place that God needs us to be and to the action that will make any evil mischief become God’s work for good.

So let us recognize that from betrayals in our lives can come good, reflect on the ways that we betray our own values, God, the people around us and let us give thanks for the God whose death represents salvation, forgiveness, reconciliation, hope and an extravagant love that will never ever let us go.

You can listen to the reading and reflection by clicking here.

John 12.20-36

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.

“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. The crowd answered him, “We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?” Jesus said to them, “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.” After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them.

I am a clinical psychologist. In the work I do professionally and that I strive to do personally, I rely upon a dialectic: as humans, we need to feel accepted; and we also need to change. Relatedly, we need to accept the present moment as is, and at the same time, make it better.

I have a client who has recently fallen in love. After many experiences of hurt and pain, in past relationships and broadly by way of living in a world that has made it hard for him to feel accepted, he met someone who inspires him and who makes him feel seen and valued. And he is happy. A couple of weeks ago, he and I spent our session trying to make sense of why he left this man’s house after having spent what he described as a beautiful weekend with him, and found himself sobbing in his car, unable to turn the engine on for overwhelming fear that the love he found won’t last.

And just before re-reading this verse for the second time, I had a session with another client that was centered on a series of panic attacks she has been having, triggered by anticipation of her first vaccination shot this weekend. This, after a year of unemployment and loneliness, triggered, really, by the hope of soon seeing her mother in person. Among the clients I have worked with, I have talked about and tried to remediate many such panic attacks. And also, intense episodes of anger that follow along such rigid lines of thinking, foci so singularly sharp, I don’t want to go near the edges. Or, feelings of sadness so heavy, they become like guttural cannon balls pinning my clients to their beds. Or I might confront smothering urges toward compulsions that when performed, provide so many of my clients a small moment of breathing room, before smothering them again.

A counterbalance to this tendency to become consumed, attached and hijacked by emotion, there is another tendency altogether that I often work on with my clients: the knee-jerk reflex of avoidance. I see so many of them respond to the discomfort of pain as if trying to use their whole bodies to block it out, push it away, try to make it unreal. Against the possibility of rejection, the memories of loss, feelings of insecurity, and even against the pain of compassion for others, I see people use whatever they’ve got to do this – mental strategizing, drugs and alcohol, physical hiding, blame. And at worst, the planning of life escape routes.

I initially found this verse so complicated. It seemed there were many details to the story, and it was hard to make meaning of them all. And I also felt a resistance; I had to push myself to read it again, working against a kind of forcefield blocking me from the words. Like my clients, I am attached. I am attached to so much in this life: my kids, my work, my marriage, my health, my sense of security, how I am regarded by others. I think I had a difficult time with this for the same reasons that my clients fear happiness itself, for the sake that it’s transient; I, too, panic at the thought of loss, numb myself in the face of stress, throwing up shields of excuses and denial and minimization at the first breath of pain. It seems to me that we are all so acutely aware in the recesses of our emotions, in the places we don’t want to go, that in fact, all is uncertain - has always been uncertain and will always be uncertain. We don’t want to feel the deep, almost white-hot pain that comes with acknowledging the truth - that what we have, what we love most and what we’ve worked for, what we think keeps us safe and gives us worth - we may have to surrender. What we cling to and clench our fists around, bank on and put our hearts in this life - are things that are always vulnerable to the risk of shifting, breaking, and in some cases, falling out altogether. And this hurts. It hurts in a way so visceral and frightening that we as humans do everything we can to avoid this truth. In ways sophisticated, nuanced, effective and entrenched, we avoid the pain of uncertainty. In the best of cases, we cry into our steering wheels, mourning the loss of control we otherwise like to think we have. Or we may go breathless, hearts pounding, limbs tingling. Or become mired in thoughts about how the world and others and ourselves “should” be. Or we may perform compulsions, ruminate, check, and seek reassurance where we can find it. We avoid until the lives outside of the walls we erect become unbearable to face, even as the walls start breaking. We cling and we hide. We cling and we hide.

And these efforts to control – where do they take us? Besides to the offices (or Zoom rooms) of well-meaning therapists, these efforts take us much deeper into places Jesus labels here as the darkness. Less so than bringing us somewhere, even more frightening, they take us away from where we need to be, away from what we value, away from where God might otherwise meet us. In an effort to wrap ourselves around pleasure, safety, competency, regard, anything that feels good – in an effort to restrain these things and aggressively keep them in place, we lose them. We lose our experience of them. And in an effort to shield ourselves from pain, discomfort, insecurity, fear, anything that feels bad - in an effort to hide our minds and hearts from being touched by them – we are overcome by them. We suffer. Those who love their lives will lose them and those who hate their lives in this world will live them eternally. What I finally hear in this verse is Jesus offering a different prescription: to accept it all and stay with him.

Jesus calls on us in this verse to do differently; he himself is modelling how to do differently. He is pushing us to acceptance: to opening up the knuckles we have clenched around what we value, and letting go; and at the same time, willing our hands to embrace pain and difficulty, and opening up. For it is with him, as his servants, where we may finally find the long-sought peace we all otherwise frenetically search for, as we attach to and avoid the shape-shifting illusions of what we think roots us in this world.

Having pushed through the forcefield and considered what I myself have to let go of and open up to, I find this verse especially moving right now, just before Good Friday, one year after the pandemic started and swept up with it the most glaring manifestations of human injustice and fault, certainly that I have witnessed in my own lifetime. There is so much we have all lost this year, so much that we all used to innocently rely upon. And there is so much we learned to face, so much we have to take in and accept. So much about the pained experience of our fellow humans, our fellow servants of Christ, and so much that has happened on heels of our own attachment to safety and pleasure and comfort, that we can no longer protect ourselves from. And though it hurts, it has to be. What we have lost, at best, has to make us finally more keen to see.

Jesus says that his soul is troubled. And yet he does not ask his Father to intervene. He does not ask for change. He does not try to control. He is troubled, and he accepts. This kind of acceptance takes great faith - faith in meaning, faith in purpose, faith in good, faith even in, perhaps especially in, pain. Jesus says, “it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” And we have come to our own hour for good reason, too. Jesus faces his death with acceptance of the fallen world that he is leaving, and with intent to use his death to fundamentally change it. It is my hope that the faith required of acceptance, should we practice it, is exactly what glorifies God’s name and that what comes of it is the freedom to live fully and to follow Christ’s leadership in fully embracing our need as humans to change. And so, this Easter season, I use this verse to further my own commitment to living vulnerably, honestly and with openness, faith in God as the tethers upon which I will try harder to rely. And all so that I can finally be free to see how I can do better.

You can listen to the reading and reflection by clicking here.

Isaiah 42. 1-7

Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I
have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will
not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he
will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully
bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has
established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching.
Thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people
upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: I am the Lord, I have called you in
righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as
a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in
darkness.

I see this passage as a message of hope and encouragement. It strikes me that the Lord is introducing us, His servants, as His proud creation. He has created us and given us strength and ability to work to accomplish His will on earth. He describes the humility overlying the power and the sensitivity we have to work to accomplish justice. He has confidence that his creation will continually work to establish justice. He then tells us that he will support us in this important effort. He wants us to strive to establish justice for all, following his teachings. He especially encourages us to be confident in this course and to strive to educate our fellow humans while working for the downtrodden. As was most passages, it contains solid general principles as well as timely encouragement in light of our current omnipresent inequalities and undercurrent of inexplicable hatred. Once again, overall the message to me is: hope and encouragement.