Tuesday Lenten Reflection IV, Reaching Out Amidst Betrayal: Why Christians Stay

“This is the what makes Christians walk away.”

I was talking to a friend about a particularly difficult situation that had erupted in the parachurch organization I was a part of. It had ended badly. Our group had skipped over the sheep’s clothing bit and gone straight for the wolves. I was allegedly the young pup in the pack trying to take over from the lead wolf – who advised me that it would be best for me to step away from the group and focus on my studies. And I did. All I had wanted really was students to have more input in the ostensibly student-led group, and for people to stop getting hurt by esoteric and out-of-touch leadership decisions. And who knows – maybe part of the accusation was inadvertently true. I am largely rational, team-oriented, and friendly when it comes to working with others – but when I feel someone I love is in danger, I see red. I still haven’t disentangled all the threads in processing the gnarled and hopeless knots of the situation – there is evidently a story on the other side too. But I raise the matter, not to untie knots, but to talk about hospitality. For treachery – however it comes about – is perhaps the single greatest threat to our capacity for hospitality over against hostility. Betrayal makes it hard to trust again, ever – and hospitality is impossible where there is no trust.

Since that event, I have been isolated and guarded, never quite sure who to trust, and always a little wary regarding my obligations to others – if possible, I want them spelt out on paper, and I will not risk going beyond that. Going beyond that is venturing into that territory where we can hurt others and others can hurt us. I know firsthand how the ethic of a certain kind of ostensibly progressive liberalism produces deep loneliness and isolation in the way its policies micromanage our interactions with others, but I also know why it has come about – someone somewhere along the line has abused the informality and freedom that is part of relating to others, and the gut response has been to pull back, to cordon off and lessen all spaces where informality, freedom, and relationships might occur. Whereas many blame a certain kind of politically correct uptightness for this phenomenon, it is worth bearing in mind that it is also a response to trauma and real pain – if you have been hurt in some of the horrific ways that some have been hurt in these spaces, why wouldn’t you cordon them off and close them down? It is an odd commingling of pain and political correctness, of rules made by bureaucrats and rules clung to by those who only have rules left. If it is a place of smugness sometimes, it is also a place of survivors.

Yet whomever or whatever is responsible, and however empathetic we may be toward the motivations, it makes hospitality difficult. This is because it is in the home – whether metaphorically or literally, whether yours or that of the other – that the deepest pain can be inflicted and felt; the domus that is the site of hospitality can all too easily become the site of domestic violence. The stakes feel too high – and it is something we feel as keenly in modern times as writers and thinkers have in the past. Judas and Brutus and Cassius are at the very bottom of the pit of Dante’s hell gnawed on by the devil precisely because of this – to them the Psalmist’s words are applicable: “Even my bosom friend in whom I trusted, who ate of my bread, has lifted his heel against me” (41:9 RSVCE). Shakespeare’s treacherous Iago is Satanic, countering the meaning of the Tetragrammaton with the chilling phrase, “I am not what I am” (Othello, 1.1.67). And there is a reason viewers and readers of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series find the “red wedding” episode particularly chilling. The most devastating and disorienting thing in the world is a friend who is in fact only a “friend.”

And while it would be lovely to take the moral high ground and claim that the only reason we retreat from hospitality is our encounter with the treason of others, we know deep down that it is also the other way round – we have the power to inflict similar pain on others, because we know that in the past we have, whether by intention or neglect or happenstance or confusion or fear. Our hearts are so much murkier than our neighbours can tell. It is bad to invite them in when there is the chance of being betrayed, but far worse to let them in when we know we might be the assassin. Hospitality can erupt into long-hidden hostility at any point – why should we even take the chance?

It is a dark and meddlesome question, and one I don’t want to pass over lightly – it is still a struggle in my heart, and I feel keenly the effects of treachery and betrayal daily. Yet I can’t help thinking that the Christian response is so close to us we almost miss it:

“The Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed took bread…”

“Thou preparest a table before me, in the presence of mine enemies…”

“Peter, do you love me?”

Betrayal is at the heart of the gospel. But also at the heart of the gospel is the only one of us – Christ – who knows how to be fully hospitable in the face of danger, open in that place where so many of us close out of fear. And he knows that we – the ones in love with Him – will also be precisely the ones who will betray Him and each other at one point or another. We are inclined to a particular kind of closing off of ourselves, the kind that considers our capacities to hurt and be hurt, and chooses the gallows of Judas. But the point of the Eucharistic table is that there is always another way. As with St. Peter, it will be for us in the eating with and feeding of sheep that we find our salvation – in the cup and bread about which we gather, traitor and betrayed alike, those in need of forgiveness, and those in need of learning how to forgive. We know what it is to be traitors and betrayed brought together in His body and blood around His table. Treachery may be potent and deadly. But it is this – what we share around His miraculous table, and the impossibility of an alternative – that draws Christians to stay.