Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Act 2, scene 2 of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" Mark Antony:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar ... The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it ...
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,
(For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all; all honorable men)
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral ...
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man....
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honorable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.... Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
Literature professors are fond of telling their students that there are only three or four basic story lines in all of literature.
A little over a decade ago, a Jungian influenced author, Christopher Booker, published a book outlining the seven archetypal tales that make human tell stories. He identified:
Overcoming the Monster, in stories like Beowulf, Dracula, or even Star Wars and the Hunger Games.
Rags to Riches, as in Cinderella, Jane Eyre, and The Prince and the Pauper.
The Quest, as we see in the Iliad, The Lord of the Rings, and the Indiana Jones movies.
There is the Voyage and Return, you see in the Odyssey, Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit or Gulliver's Travels.
And, of course, there is Comedy and there is Tragedy which were the only two kinds of stories used originally differentiate Shakespeare's plays.
Finally, Booker identifies tales of Rebirth, such as we see in Scrooge's character in A Christmas Carol, or in the Beauty and the Beast, and even in Despicable Me.
I would like to suggest that there is an eighty category that deserves to stand on its own, and that is the story of betrayal. I have long believed that the passion story itself, the story of how Jesus was betrayed and murdered, is an archetypal story.
It won't come as a surprise to any of you though I hope our internet audience will bear with me if this seems a bit shocking, but we have no way of knowing how much, if any, of the passion narrative is historical. Mark originated the account of the triumphal entry, the last supper, the arrest and betrayal in the garden of Gethsemane, the trial and execution. Matthew, Luke, and John use Mark's story and add their own color and perspective but they do not challenge the core narrative.
None of them, of course, were eye-witnesses so Mark gets to lay down the tracks but when you turn to the first writer in the Jesus movement, the self-appointed apostle, Paul, he does not mention Judas. Nor does he seem to know anything about one of the twelve elect having turned on Jesus. In fact, twenty years after the crucifixion of Jesus, Paul is still referencing "the twelve." The Matthias story in Acts should not be taken seriously.
No, it appears that Mark was creating a narrative that captures an archetypal story that lives in all of us... the experience of having been betrayed by a trusted friend. If you can't feel the power of the image, then you might need to look in the mirror and see if you are, in fact, the Judas character in your own life story.
The name, "Judas," is a derivative of the name "Judah," that is, Judas is a character created to represent all of Judah, all of Jesus' people, his family, his closest friends.... It was not a single individual who betrayed Jesus, it was, to greater and lesser degrees, his tribe, his family, his disciples, the people he had healed, the people he had saved from persecution, isolation, the people from whom he had removed the stigma of being a prostitute, a leper, a foreigner, an outcast.... They all betrayed him.
I took the familiar funeral soliloquy of Mark Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as another illustration of this type of literature that I would put under the "betrayal" heading.
In the same way that Mark used the historical event of the crucifixion of Jesus as the basis of his passion narrative, Shakespeare took the historical fact that Julius Caesar had been assassinated by members of the Roman Senate and built his story around that historical fact.
In Shakespeare's recreation of the event, he weaves a narrative of false friends and bewildered loyal friends to build up to the moment when the conspirators surround Caesar and they begin to stab him, and as the realization dawns on Caesar that this will be his death, he turns and sees Brutus, a friend he had really trusted and loved, and at that moment Caesar utters the only phase that most Protestants know in Latin, "Et tu Brute?" "You too, Brutus?" You of all people! You, my beloved ally and friend, you are in on this plot too?..... "then die Caesar."
Of course, in real life, a mortal dies from multiple stab wounds, but Shakespeare describes it in the way that it feels... the vicissitudes of life may be whatever they are, but only a true friend can really hurt you.
In my twenty years as an opinion writer for the News-Leader, it was not uncommon for me to receive as many as a hundred pieces of hate mail in a week. I have endured a few fairly serious death threats and a number of stalkers. It has been a year and half since my column in the New-Leader ended and I still have one stalker who still regularly calls and sends threatening letters... the simple minded can't change channels very quickly.
But none of that ever bothered me as much as the loss of any single real friend. The hateful criticisms of strangers don't feel good, but it isn't hard to see that if their response to a well reasoned and persuasive opinion column is vitriol and threats that they are telling you a lot about themselves but what they say about me hardly matters.
But when someone who has been a guest in your home, and you have sat at their holiday table, when you have let down your defenses, confided in them, turned to them for advise and counsel.... When they join in with the assassins to surround you outside of the Senate, when they lean in to give you a kiss in the garden with the Roman guards right behind them... that is when your heart breaks.
I believe that the story of being betrayed by a friend is archetypal because it has happened so often throughout history... when someone realizes that their parents don't really believe in them, or when a beloved spouse finds the arms of another person to be their true home... when someone you have sacrificed for, helped through their own life crisis, for inexplicable reasons, rejects you, turns on you, stabs you in the back... it isn't the nails through the hands and feet on a Roman cross that really kills you, it is the kiss in the garden, the triple denial in the courtyard, it is the friends who run and hide when you need them the most.
To love someone is to make yourself vulnerable to them. It is like putting your heart into their hands. It is only reasonable then, to be pretty doggone selective about who are willing to befriend.
Therein lies the real challenge of forming a spiritual community. Rationality says to be cautious, to protect yourself, to be very choosy. But a spiritual community is intentionally inclusive. What is the price of admission to become a part of the community? Just step across the threshold and you are in! It doesn't matter if you have just been fired, or just been released from prison, if you are homeless, addicted, or terminally ill.... A spiritual community is a welcoming home. But it can be a very one-sided equation.
The faith community chooses then, by our very nature, to accept very real emotional risk. In the old renaissance paintings of the Last Supper or of the disciples in the garden, Judas was almost always portrayed as a dark, hairy, hook nosed, beady-eyed character that anyone would instinctively be wary of ... but in reality, Judas always looks like your best friend... the one you can trust... the one who would never do that to you!
In Shakespeare's story, Mark Antony is able, in three minutes, to change a crowd that was willing to go along with the murder of Julius Caesar into a lynch mob that was ready to go and kill Brutus and everyone else involved in the conspiracy.
Caesar was libeled in the morning and everyone was willing to ignore his assassination. His assassins were criticized in the afternoon, and the mob turned against them.
The disposable nature of relationships, our vulnerability to being swayed by gossip has left the beauty parlor and the barber shop, it has gone beyond yellow journalism, and the tabloid press, and has become a part of our moment by moment participation in social media so that a face book meme or a twitter post can change how you feel about a political candidate, the pope, or your best friend.
What I would like to suggest in the most emphatic way is that recognizing the powerful archetype of the story of betrayal is that you choose to honor love, respect friendship, and choose with all of your might not to be Brutus, not be play the part of Judas. Don't be the kind of friend that should come with a warning label, "Will irrationally break your heart for no apparent reason."
There will be relationships that you need to walk away from but you never, without exception; you never need to intentionally hurt another person. Don't libel, don't slander, don't gossip. Don't be vulnerable to having your relationships with others affected by gossip. And really, it is up to us to choose not to listen to gossip.
And, so far as I am concerned, you never have to come to me to tell me what someone else said about me.... all I would like to know is why the gossip felt comfortable in saying those things about me to you.
We want to have the moral authority to address the climate crisis, to confront our government about the torture of prisoners and about our drone policy.
We want to be able to make a public case for sane gun laws. We want to be able to confront the hypocrisy of the traditional church for its prejudices against gays and scientists. But we have no credibility at all if the first thing people notice about us is that we have a hard time getting along with one another.
Passionate, loyal friendships give us credibility. Healthy, long lived love relationships give us the authority to speak with moral clarity.
Liberals tend to be a bit too impressed with themselves and to give themselves license to dismiss others out of cynicism and hyper-critical standards that are hypocritical and self-defeating. As St. John of the Cross said, we will either pass the love test or we will fail entirely. So, my friends, let's study hard to pass that test.
