It was warm and then it was cold again. I don’t like it. I’d like to be able to put away my midweight coats until November, thankyouverymuch. My classmates and I were chugging along nicely, wearing capris and dresses, even shorts, and then it *snowed* Tuesday night?! Not a fan. Why is it that when we’re comfortable with something, it has to change? I used to get really really bad, very frequent nosebleeds for two years, but just April-October. I figured out the trigger was inconvenience. Back to the cold- Is there some kind of cosmic Murphy’s Law at play here? Is it in league with the groundhog?
Yes, I know the weather is uninfluenceable, and I know that’s not really a word. But people aren’t uninfluenceable. Just when things are going along hunky dory, one of your friends betrays you after your Passover seder, bribed by 30 pieces of silver. We make jokes about New England weather changing at the drop of a hat, but what about each other? Judas was so ashamed, he hung himself; he’s now become a cultural trope for betrayal, a bit like Brutus or Benedict Arnold. We gloss over his remorse, his heartache at what he’d done. It’s hard to have compassion for the guy who led the guards to Jesus, after all. We see Jesus telling him “Friend, do what you have come here to do,” but moments earlier we also saw Jesus weeping and praying, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me”. We have a much easier time forgiving Peter for his trio of denials that we do Judas for his betrayal, yet both of them are forgiven in God’s eyes. Would you be able to welcome Judas to the table? To share communion with him? Jesus did.
This is a short post today; I’d like to share a poem by Rev. Milton Brasher-Cunningham, from his blog Don’t Eat Alone. It’s about how the Wednesday of Holy Week is called Spy Wednesday, and it really moved me:
it’s the name I found
when I went looking
for what happened
on Wednesday of the
Week we’ve labeled
Holy — using capital
letters as though there
were some sort of scripted
suspense instead of a simple
day of preparation for Passover,
for supper together, and the
selling of one friend by another.
No cloaks. No daggers. No
hidden microphones in camel’s
ears. Just a lot of getting ready.
I have to get ready for Judas
to leave the room tomorrow night;
it breaks my heart every time
because he didn’t last the
weekend. He never heard the
news he was forgiven.
Love was lurking through
it all like a thief in the night,
or a spy on Wednesday.
The (Mostly) Daily Devotional 