Thinking with the mind of Judas

Philippians 3:4b-11

4…If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

     7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8 More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. 10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, 11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

    12 Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal, but I press on to lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me. 13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider that I have laid hold of it, but one thing I have laid hold of: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. 

John 12:1-8

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. 2 There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him. 3 Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’s feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 4 But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, 5 “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” 6 (He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) 7 Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. 8 You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

At some point in university I decided to memorize a passage of scripture, both because I was convinced that this was a formative spiritual discipline and also because I wanted to convince myself that I was the sort of person who engaged in serious spiritual disciplines.  It’s hard for the desire for righteousness - especially when you’re young - not to become a form of self-righteousness.  And the passage I chose to memorize was the one we read from Philippians.  

I think I must’ve chosen this passage because I was drawn to its emphatic declaration that Jesus is the thing above all else, that knowing Jesus exceeds anything else we might experience or achieve.  At an age when my identity was still being formed and when I had also decided to make being a follower of Jesus the core of my identity, this passage was like a mission statement and pep talk all in one.  I felt like memorizing the passage put me a step closer to the goal (and also that it maybe me a better Christian than my classmates). 

Paul was a fanatic, it’s safe to say.  It’s crucial to his biography, as he often reminds anyone who would listen, that Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus.  He experienced a dramatic rupture in his reality, a singular moment diving life into before and after.   I grew up in a tradition which emphasized conversion, and Paul’s experience was taken as the ideal, though it seemed no one ever quite reached it. Usually conversion stories involve tales contrasting the bad former life with the good new life, but it must be emphasized that Paul, in his “former” life was living what any God-fearing person would’ve considered the most righteous kind of life.  He was already on the straight and narrow.   So Paul begins the passage by reciting his religious bona fides, that within the conventional paradigm he was at the pinnacle.  And yet he had abandoned all that for the sake of Christ.

It helps that Paul was convinced that Jesus had appeared to Paul and commissioned him with a new vocation.   Even so, there was surely a path for Paul to do this halfway; he could’ve continued doing the stuff Pharisees did, finding ways of sharing Jesus here and there.  But Paul clearly felt compelled, in light of the truth which had revealed itself to him, to leave everything behind.  In fact, he regarded his former life as not only inferior but as comparatively worthless, his former righteousness a potential obstacle to embracing the infinitely superior righteousness of Christ.  He didn’t incorporate Jesus into his life; he lived an entirely new life.  

When we think about faith, coming to faith, increasing our faith, living more faithfully, etc., the way we tend to talk about it is in terms of adding more Jesus to the equation, of making some changes here and there, of leaving some old things behind and adding some new things, all of which incrementally adds up to a better life.  We incorporate Jesus into the life we’re already living and he improves it, helps us cope, gives us hope to endure, reassures us we’re good people, provides some teachings we can apply (or not).  

There’s an underlying but rarely identified tension at the heart of Christian practice which is that the reality described in the pages of Scripture is simply not the reality we think we’re living in.  Very few of us, I think it’s safe to say, find the idea of abandoning everything to follow Jesus very attractive.  The issue is not merely a lack of faith, as if the solution is simply to try harder, just summon the fortitude.  The problem is that we can scarcely imagine that it could be true, that it even exists in the realm of possibility.

Mary, like Paul, had a life-altering experience: she witnessed Jesus raise her brother Lazarus from the dead.  Soon after the two of them, along with their sister Martha, had Jesus to dinner, and there Mary anointed his feet with a costly perfume, and wiped his feet with her hair.  This was, by measure, an extravagant, startling, even scandalous act.  Mary humbled herself and honored Jesus in unusually intimate way.  She seemed to be acting without thinking of the consequences.  Judas, who witnessed this, objected that the expensive perfume would’ve been better off sold and the proceeds given to the poor.  The text dismisses Judas’ objection as duplicitous since he used to steal from their account anyway, but I have to admit that this is probably what I would’ve been thinking, that the cost/benefit analysis comes up negative, that more deliberation was needed, greater emphasis on efficiency and impact, or something like that.  The beauty of her act, however, is exactly that it defies any such calculation, that it exceeds all reason, it goes as far as she can possibly go.  

They might’ve expected that Jesus, quite famous for caring the poor himself, would’ve agreed with Judas’ assessment, but he defends Mary and frames what she did in terms she probably didn’t understand herself: “She bought [the perfume] so that she might keep it for the day of burial”.  And then he continues to say something rather surprising: “You always have the poor with you, but do you do not always have me.”  This could be read to suggest Jesus thinks worshipping him is more important than caring for the poor, but it really just exposes the weakness of Judas’ complaint.  If you really care about the poor, you could’ve been helping them yesterday, and you’ll be able to help them tomorrow, if you want. 

If Jesus really is who was say he is, then Mary’s extravagant act, then Paul’s abandonment of his former life for a new life, both make a lot of sense.  They make the appropriate response to something of infinite value: they re-orient all that they are, they give everything.  Like the pearl of great price, Chris is to be desired about all else, desired alone.  So Paul can claim, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection” - but not only that, he continues that he wants to know, “the sharing of [Christ’s] sufferings by becoming like him in his death.”  Paul doesn’t pick and choose which parts he like and which he can do without.  If knowing Christ is good then knowing Christ’s suffering is good too.  If becoming like Christ is good, this even includes dying like Christ.  He wants to participate in the very life and death of Christ so that,  “somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”  

Paul insists that he had not yet reached the goal, but rather must keeping running the race in order to win the prize.  Unity with Christ is Paul’s goal, and this is something not realized in this life but which he must continue straining toward until his conversion is complete.  He’s not here wrestling with his salvation; at issue is not whether it can somehow be lost.  What we see is an expression of his absolute longing, of the distance he still experiences between his current and future realities.  

The challenge that Paul’s words and his life present to us is that, if we’re going to take this stuff as seriously as he does, then we too need to undergo a conversion, a new way of seeing which leads to a new way of living.  Or perhaps the other way around: a new way of living which gives us new eyes to see.  We ought to consider the possibility that we are like Paul in his former life, more or less having attained the ideal of what a good religious person’s life ought to look like - we go to church, we’re generally nice people, etc. - and, also like Paul, experiencing no sense of inadequacy or lack.  Indeed, the life Paul lived before and the lives we’re living now, might actually be pretty good.  And yet there might be much, much more for us, so much that we might one day reach the other side and look back to see the relative poverty of our current situation.  

And when we do begin to entertain the idea of taking some action which reorients our lives, we should consider that the voice in our head probably sounds a lot like Judas, giving quite reasonable sounding objections, even cloaking them pious language, when really we’re only justifying ourselves and maintaining the status quo.   

The challenge is to begin to imagine that Christ really might be the one thing, even to learn to see the cross not just as something that Christ did for us so we didn’t have to, but even as something which we could or should embrace, even something we, like Paul, might learn to long for.  For it’s only when die that we truly live.