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Grace,
mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
And
throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed, and he went
and hanged himself.
Prayer: Dear Lord
Jesus, bless all of us with your Holy Spirit, to me that I may preach well, and
to all of us that we may hear well. Amen.
In our reading
tonight we read about Judas. The main event that we read about is that once
Jesus has been carried off, and led away to Pontius Pilate, Judas regrets what
he has done in betraying Jesus, and tries to convince the chief priests and
elders to take the money back. He then throws it all back into the temple, and goes
out and hangs himself.
Now, there’s
actually quite a lot in common with what happens in our reading tonight, with
Judas, and what happened in our reading from last week, where we read about
Peter’s denial. Here we have two men, both of whom are Jesus’ disciples, both
of whom are one the twelve apostles whom Jesus chose and sent out as his
representatives and missionaries. Peter denies Jesus, and Judas betrays Jesus.
Now what’s actually
the difference between these two things? Both of these men saw that Jesus was
under pressure, and was being rejected by the Jewish council. And, both of
these men were filled with fear, as they realised that because they had also
spent so much time with Jesus, they could also get themselves into deep trouble
too. Peter was questioned by simple people, maidservants who just happened to
be standing around, and yet, instead of saying, “Yes, I do know Jesus”, he
said, “I do not know the man”.
Judas, on the other
hand, never pretended not to know Jesus. He never denied Jesus like Peter. He
never said, “I do not know the man”. But instead he said, “Yes, I do know him,
and I can show you how to get him.” He had gone right into the lions’ den, and
made an arrangement with the priests about how they could go to Jesus’
favourite place of prayer and capture him.
One thing that
strikes me between Peter and Judas is that both of these men commit a sin
against Jesus, and both of them lament their sin. We read that Peter went
out and wept bitterly. Maybe Judas’s remorse about what he had done was even
greater. We read: He departed, and he went and hanged himself.
Both of these men
regret what they have done. And I don’t about you, but in my experience in
life, both in myself and in being a pastor to other people, there’s a very fine
line between weeping bitterly and pondering suicide. When I served as a
pastor in Gippsland, I served as a hospital chaplain, and I used to go
regularly to visit people in the mental health ward. Many people there wept
bitterly and many people contemplated taking their own life, and a lot of the
time there wasn’t much difference between the problems that these people had.
And yet, what the
bible says about Judas is a harsh sentence, and yet, Peter goes on to become a
wonderful apostle—he preaches the first sermon on the day of Pentecost, he
wrote two letters which we have in the New Testament which are full of
wonderful Christian comfort. Even we read that Peter had to convene everyone
together after Jesus ascended into heaven to choose another apostle to replace
Judas.
So the difference
between Peter and Judas is very important for us as Christians, because we sin
so often, and we come to terms with our sin, and we realise that we have done
wrong, what do we do? Do we weep bitterly, or do we completely give up on life
altogether? Surely, you know from your own experience that weeping bitterly and
the temptation to give up on life altogether are very closely related. So when
we do sin, then we can often look into our own hearts and say, “Well, maybe I’m
going to way of Judas, and there’s nothing that I can do about it.” People
think: what a wonderful thing it is to be a Christian. And we might think about
those words where we look forward to the time when Jesus will say to us: Come,
you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the
foundation of the world. But then people see all their sin weighing down on
them, and they think well maybe God is sending me to hell, and there’s nothing
that I can do about it.
Listen, this is not
the case. Listen to these words from Romans 15: Whatever was written in
former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through
the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. Do you see? What
kinds of things are found in the Scripture? Instruction and encouragement.
If you read the bible, and then come to a conclusion where you have no encouragement
and no hope, then you are reading it wrong. The devil doesn’t want you
know your sin—and when you despair at your sin and don’t know where to turn,
then look at the example of Peter and how Jesus promised to pray for him and
reached out to him at the resurrection. Simon, Simon, Satan demanded to have
you that he might sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for you that your
faith may not fail, and when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers. Peter
himself later on in his first letter says: Be soberminded; be watchful. Your
adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to
devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of
suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And
after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called
you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen,
and establish you.
Maybe when Peter
wrote this he had Judas and himself in mind. He knew just how close he was to
being devoured by the roaring lion, the devil. And yet, he says: Resist him,
firm in your faith. Now this is the thing that Peter had, and Judas didn’t.
Both of these men we contrite, they regretted what they had done, both of these
men were sorrow and sorrowful about it. But it’s not feeling sorrow about your
sin that makes you a Christian—it’s faith. Resist [the devil], firm in your
faith. The warning that we see in Judas is that we must beware of lamenting
our sin without faith. Judas had lost his faith, but Peter remembered the words
of Jesus that the rooster would crow after he had denied him three times. Jesus
had also prophesied to Peter: After I am raised up, I will go before you to
Galilee.
So the same goes
for us. We know that we are sinners. We will always sin right until our dying
breath. And our whole life is one where we continually realise this, and we
come back Sunday after Sunday and say: I, a poor helpless sinner, confess to
you all my sins and repent of all the evil I have done. Sometimes in our
life we are going to feel these words more sharply than others. Even St Paul
said: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the
chief. Judas knew that he was a sinner, but he didn’t know that Christ
Jesus came into the world to save them. Do you see this difference?
So we read in
Revelation where an angel says: Be faithful unto death, and I will give you
the crown of life. He doesn’t say, “be remorseful unto death”, but “be
faithful”. Now—I have to be very careful I’m not misunderstood. There is so
Christian faith if we don’t recognise and lament our sin. If we want the
forgiveness of sins, we have to recognise that we are sinners. Jesus died for
no one except sinners. But we are not saved by recognising our sin—plenty of
people recognise that they are rotten people, but have no hope. And so, we read
in Ephesians: By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not
your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one
may boast.
Now, we might still
think: but my faith is so weak. My faith might not be as strong as Peter’s, but
my faith is weak like Judas. Maybe people think: I want to believe and be a
stronger believer, but I just can’t seem to.
Listen—you are not
saved by strong faith, you are saved by faith. If it were only people who were
strong in faith that were saved, then St Paul should have said: You have been
saved through strength, not faith! The important thing about faith is not you
who believe, but who you believe in, Jesus Christ, and he is the strong one who
makes your faith strong. If you go up to Cooper Pedy and find a nice opal, the
opal is still valuable whether a football player with massive biceps and big
muscly hands is holding it or a weak tiny little baby is holding it. The opal
is still an opal. Whether you have big muscly football player faith, or baby
faith—Jesus, our precious opal, is the one that saves us. Jesus is our
priceless treasure, as the old hymn says. We have been baptised, so that
whether our faith is strong or weak, we can look to the word that was spoken to
us on that day and the water that was poured out on us, and we can say: That
was God’s work. Jesus is the one who baptised me. And if the devil wants to pester
me, he can just rack off and take it up with Jesus. When the devil attacks your
faith, it’s as if you’re person who works in a call centre for a big company.
When the devil rings you up, you just say to the devil: How can I direct your
call? If you want to make a complaint, you’ll have to take it up with the
manager—I’m just answering the phone. And let me tell you, Mr Devil, Jesus, my
manager, is a lot more powerful that your sorry backside!
Also, St Paul says
in Philippians 2: It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for
his good pleasure. When we have faith, this is God who has worked it in us.
But when sigh and think, I wish I had a stronger faith, then we remember that
God works in us both to will and to work. Our faith is only as strong as
we wish it would be. When we will, when we wish, when we desire to have faith,
that is also faith, because God has worked that desire, that will in you—He
works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
But let’s go back
to Judas. Actually, one thing before we go back to Judas—let’s talk about
suicide for a moment. The fifth commandment says: You shall not murder. And
that includes killing your neighbour or yourself. Suicide is a sin. But at the
same time, there is nowhere in the bible where it is specifically spelled out
that people who suicide automatically go to hell. But then people think: if we
sin, we need to repent. But if you suicide, then you can’t repent afterwards,
because you’re dead. Well, if that’s the way we think, then baptism, and
absolution, and the Lord’s Supper would have no power at all. Do you think when
you are baptised, that it’s only for my sins of action in the past? I was
baptised as a child—the only sins of action I committed back then were annoying
my mum at night. Do you think that Jesus didn’t die for all the times in the
future when I would continue to annoy my mum, when I was 5 years old, 10, 15,
20, 25 years old? Or what about the Lord’s Supper, given and shed for you
for the forgiveness of sins. Do you think that it’s only powerful
backwards? What happens if you have an argument in the car on the way home from
church? Do you think that all of a sudden the blood of Christ has switched off
its wonderful power? No—the forgiveness of sins works into the past and into
the future. We can tell the devil—get lost! I received Christ’s body and blood
on Sunday, given and shed for me for the forgiveness of sins, and you can’t
accuse me!
Some of you may
have a friend who took their own life. When I was a teenager, at an age when I
was thinking about becoming a pastor, a Catholic priest from St Ignatius Church
in Norwood doused himself with petrol and set himself alight. It shook me up
for years, and has always been a warning to me that even the ministry is not
immune to experiencing darkness. But there’s a difference between losing the
faith, and a time where the devil overcomes a person to such an extent that
they do something like that. If you get robbed by a mugger, is it your fault?
So, we know suicide is a sin, and we Christians preach against it and say it’s
wrong. But there is also something more powerful than sin, and that is Jesus’
suffering and blood and death, and the forgiveness of sins.
Now, back to Judas.
I think sometimes I feel a bit sorry for Judas, as if he has been a bit hard
done by. Many Christians throughout history have been like this too. In
preparation for this sermon, I read about Judas from a commentary from a 10th
century Bulgarian writer, called Theophylactus. Theophylactus was from Ohrid, which
is in modern-day Macedonia, in former Yugoslavia. He was a well-respected
biblical commentator, and he was well known to the Luther and the Lutheran
reformers, and is even quoted in the Book of Concord.
However, he writes:
But when Judas saw that Jesus was already condemned and already sentenced to
die, he repented that the affair had not turned out as he had planned.
Whereupon he hanged himself thinking to [go ahead] of Jesus into [hell] and
there to plead for his own salvation. Nevertheless, know that while he did put
his neck into the noose and hanged himself from a tree, the tree bent and he
survived, as God wanted to save his life, either so that he could repent, or to
make an example of him and to shame him… And he goes on. Some writers seem
to want to put the best spin on Judas, to say that he really was a nice guy,
but he just mucked up a bit at the end.
But I don’t know if
this is what the bible really says about him. In fact, the bible never says
that about anyone. God created us all in his image, but we are all completely
thoroughly corrupted by Satan. We all deserve to be like Judas, but if we end
up like Peter, it is all because of grace.
And so, let’s go
through and see what the bible does say about Judas. A year or so, before Jesus
died, he elected his twelve apostles. And in Matthew, Mark and Luke, these
twelve apostles are all named. In all three gospels, the last apostle to be
named is Judas. All three gospels call him Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him,
or in Luke, who became a traitor. And nevertheless, like all of the
other disciples, Jesus sent them out to preach and gave them
authority over unclean spirits to cast them out, and to heal every disease and
every affliction. In Luke we read that before he chose these twelve
disciples, Jesus went out to [a] mountain to pray, and all night he
continued in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples and
chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles.
How come Jesus
chose Judas even after praying all night about it? We might say that Judas
later changed became a hypocrite, but the bible doesn’t really spell this out.
He might have been a hypocrite right from the beginning, when Jesus called him.
In John 6, we read where Jesus says: “Did I not choose you, the Twelve? And
yet one of you is a devil.” And John says: He spoke of Judas the son of
Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the Twelve, was going to betray him.
So why did Jesus do
this? Well, first of all, it was prophesied long ago that Jesus would be
betrayed. But also, Jesus wants to teach a special lesson. The outward things
that belong to ministry are not actually all that difficult. People might joke
that pastor’s only work one hour a week! I am often embarrassed when people
thank me for conducting a baptism or a funeral—and I often say to them: All I
did was read things out of a book! A pastor could easily get by and not do
much, download their sermons off the internet, and go and spend all week
drinking tea and eating scones. And yet, we read in Acts 6, that the apostles
wanted to dedicate themselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word. The
hard, hard work of the ministry, to bring the people continually before God in
prayer, and to study the word and to apply it to people and to teach it, is a
task that most people, even in the congregation, never see. And so it often
goes unnoticed and unrewarded from a human point of view. But our Father who
sees in secret will reward this kind of work. I remember someone one said that
the best thing a pastor can do is go into his room, shut the door, and pray,
and then let the whole world think that he is incompetent!
And Jesus knows
that the hard work of the ministry is invisible to the world. And the visible
work is relatively easy—even Judas can do it. And yet, Jesus calls Judas
to do it. Sometimes we end up with pastors in the church, or people in the
church, who are real Judases. All they do is put on a show, but they never take
a stand. It’s easy to be polite, but to love is something much harder, and
something much more noble. It’s easy to give Jesus a kiss, but for what reason
is the kiss given? In love or in betrayal?
And yet, when we
have a pastor or a bishop or leader in the church who is a hypocrite, the words
they speak are still God’s word, the baptisms they perform are still filled
with the Holy Spirit even if they are not, the Lord’s Supper is still the body
and blood of Christ, even if the pastor’s just going through the motions. When
the church is given a person like this, then we are called to pray for them
like any other pastor—the sheep may yet make a shepherd out of their wolf! And
Jesus wants to teach this to the church of all times, by even allowing his
betrayer to be an apostle for a while.
Now, when Jesus
calls Judas a “devil”, it’s a bit like when St Paul says: He who is joined
to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. And when we are joined to the
devil, and actively seek to do his work, then we become one spirit with the
devil. Even Jesus calls Judas, a “devil”. Judas was still created in the image
of God, but he actively and willingly unites himself to the devil’s work and
his plans.
In our Gospel
reading for this coming Sunday, we’re going to hear another thing about Judas,
where Mary, Lazarus and Martha’s sister, pours expensive ointment on Jesus’
feet. We read: Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to
betray him), said, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii
and given to the poor?” He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but
because he was a thief, and having change of the moneybag he used to help
himself to what was put into it.
You can see here a
little insight into Judas’s inclinations. He had a lust for money, and of
course, he even betrayed Jesus for money. We know from St Paul that the love
of money is the root of all evil. Jesus himself says: You cannot love
God and mammon. It happens all the time in the church—someone makes a
generous donation to the church, and then what happens? It just gives cause for
everyone to fight! How many examples we might look to today or all throughout
church history where pastors and bishops and cushy church officials pad up
their retirement funds from the church coffers, helping themselves to God’s
money. The end of such people is that they betray their Lord once again. They
sell their birthright for a bowl of soup
And so, with Judas,
one sin leads to another. And he serves for us as a warning, to fight the good
fight against our own sin, and our sinful flesh, before our hypocrisy is
revealed to our shame. It’s easy to put on a show—but Jesus calls us not to put
on a show, but to follow him. There are a few details about our text tonight
that I’m still yet to cover, which we will pick up next week. But let’s leave
it there for tonight.
But let’s conclude
by saying that when we recognise our own sin within us, and when we despair of
ourselves, this is a good thing. The Holy Spirit is the one who convicts us of
our sin. Despair of yourself, but don’t despair of Christ. He has suffered and
died for you, and now he is seated at God’s right hand and is waiting for you.
He has prepared a place for you, and he will never let you go. Amen.
Dear Jesus, we are
your baptised children, and we ask that you would be with us always to the end
of the age. Teach us to know our sin, but also to know you, our wonderful
Saviour. Amen.
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