Betrayal and Self-Righteousness

Walking in the Valley Lenten Series #3, 3/26/2011

Text: Mark 14:1-11

During my sophomore year at UVA, I betrayed my school. Some of you may remember Steve Wojciechowski, the most hated point guard in Duke basketball history. In Wojo’s senior year, the Blue Devils came to play at UVA and I went to the game wearing a Duke sweatshirt. UVA was up by 1 with less than two seconds remaining. Wojo got the ball and dribbled it quickly down the court, but mysteriously the game clock didn’t start. When a UVA player saw that Wojo was about to score, he fouled him, and Wojo hit both free throws to win the game for Duke. I’ve never walked through an angrier mob of college frat-boys in my life. And I was wearing a Duke sweatshirt. Somehow I made it out alive.

I figured I needed some comic relief because betrayal is a very serious sin. It’s serious enough that in Dante’s epic poem about hell, the Inferno, traitors find themselves in the deepest circle of hell with Judas having the honor of spending eternity in the mouth of Satan. What makes betrayal sting so bad is that the one who hurts you is someone you trusted. Since we know how Judas turned out, we can only see him as a traitor, but up until he turned on Jesus, he was one of Jesus’ best friends. In fact, the gospel of John tells us that Jesus trusted him enough to let him hold onto the money. So why did he do what he did? Nobody can say for sure, but let’s take a look at how the gospel of Mark tells the story.

It was two days before the Passover and the festival of Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him; for they said, ‘Not during the festival, or there may be a riot among the people.’ While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.’ And they scolded her.

But Jesus said, ‘Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.’ Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. When they heard it, they were greatly pleased, and promised to give him money. So he began to look for an opportunity to betray him.

Luke tells the story a little differently, but in Matthew, Mark, and John, Judas’ betrayal comes immediately after this scandalous incident that we might call “perfume-gate.” A woman does something that is plainly irresponsible not to mention socially inappropriate. It wasn’t just a waste of money. It was completely unfitting for a respectable rabbi to let an unrelated woman into his personal space. And Jesus had a habit of letting loose women into his personal space to rub oil on him and literally kiss his feet, just like the way Jesus let those country people bring their filthy children to him to be loved on. It was embarrassing and unbecoming of the brilliant rabbi Judas had decided to follow.

How many of y’all have ever had an eccentric boss who you had to cover for? I did once, and I ended up betraying him. Before I worked for him, I saw him giving speeches and got a larger-than-life impression of him in my head. When he became my boss, I learned that he was just a human being with habits and opinions that drove me crazy especially since I was responsible for managing how the public perceived our organization. After a few too many press conferences in which he went “off-message,” I quit my job and wrote a long email airing my grievances which got back to him and hurt him pretty badly.

I’m not sure what was going through Judas’ head, but I imagine that the perfume incident was the straw that broke the camel’s back after a long list of ways that Jesus had not lived up to Judas’ expectations. Not only had Jesus failed to be what Judas wanted him to be, but he had publicly shamed Judas and the other disciples for trying to keep scandalous people and their embarrassing behavior away from the rabbi. Now Judas could have made a different choice. He could have trusted that Jesus had a lesson to teach him in the way that he let these women pour perfume and oil all over him.

He could have wrestled through the discomfort and awkwardness he felt and allowed Jesus’ witness to transform him into a person who responded with gentleness when other people did socially inappropriate things out of the goodness of their hearts. But Judas didn’t trust Jesus as a teacher; he trusted his own assumptions about the cause that Jesus was supposed to represent. Jesus had betrayed Judas’ assumptions, so Judas felt justified betraying Jesus.

I realize that there are many different types of betrayal, but I suspect that some form of self-righteousness lies at the heart of every betrayal. To betray other people means deciding that they do not deserve my respect, whether it’s because they have wronged me in some way or because I feel entitled to do whatever feels good regardless of the consequences for other people. But the opposite of betrayal is not just following the rules of social relationships. If I’m just a rule-follower, then it’s far too easy for me to call fouls on other people that justify breaking the rules myself. Jesus broke the rules when he not only allowed this woman to pour perfume on him but when he rebuked his disciples for trying to protect him from scandal. And this was just too much for Judas.

Of course, Jesus didn’t break the rules just to break them; every time he violated the Sabbath; every time he committed a social faux pas; every time he let a sketchy woman into his personal space, he did so out of mercy. Mercy is the true opposite of betrayal, because when you’re merciful, you aren’t looking for excuses to stop respecting other people. Looking at others with the eyes of mercy means seeking to preserve their dignity, even if they do things that you could judge them for doing. Mercy is what Jesus was trying to model for Judas and the other disciples by how he reacted to the woman’s waste of perfume. It wasn’t that this woman had some clairvoyant sense that Jesus was about to be buried. As Jesus says it, “She did what she could.” That was all that mattered, so he honored the sincerity of her heart by describing her act as the best thing she could have done.

How many of y’all know somebody who sincerely tries to do the right thing but can’t seem to pull it off in a way that doesn’t create drama and alienate other people? Isn’t it tempting to gossip about people like that behind their backs? I know that I do. Well what if every time we did that, Jesus came into the room and took up for the person we were badmouthing, arguing why the very actions that disgusted us were the epitome of righteousness? How many times do you think Jesus could do that before we stormed off to the chief priests to hand him over?

The fact is that all of us are like Judas. Even though we weren’t there to betray Jesus 2000 years ago, we have all betrayed Jesus by how we’ve treated other people. Whenever we fail to show mercy to others, we disrespect the mercy that Jesus died to show us. But the good news is that Jesus is not keeping score. He knows that we too have been betrayed. Every one of us has been a victim of betrayal in some form or another, whether it was a misunderstanding, a slight, or an act of vicious cruelty. Some of us have very deep wounds that make it very difficult not to spend the rest of our lives lashing out at other people in bitterness.

Jesus can’t undo the wounds we have received from other people; all he can do is offer us his own wounded hands in solidarity and teach us how to transcend the endless cycle of betrayal by letting mercy have the last word. Mercy is the only antidote to betrayal, because when we accept Christ’s mercy, we can resist being defined and shaped by the betrayals we have suffered. Jesus did not let Judas’ betrayal define his relationship with Judas. He knew what was going to happen, but when he broke the bread and passed the cup in his last supper, he offered his body and blood to Judas no differently than the other eleven disciples just as he offered his body and blood on the cross for Judas’ sins along with the rest of humanity. Jesus died to liberate us from the ways that we have betrayed others and from the ways that we have been betrayed. We can share in his victory over betrayal if we live our lives in mercy as a grateful response to his mercy.