Easy Heroes, Easy Villains

Mark 14:32-50

This week, Christians are approaching the annual observance of the story of Christ’s “Passion,” which includes the events beginning with Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on a colt, the foal of a donkey and ending with his crucifixion. In most cases, Christians tend to observe this dense story all within a single week we call “Holy Week.” But at our church we have been stretching this story out over the entirety of Lent in worship. On our last Sunday in Lent this year that is coming up in a few days, we will freeze-frame the moments that find Jesus and some of his friends—Peter, James, and John—in the Garden of Gethsemane.

This is a widely known story. Jesus goes to the garden to pray desperately for something different to happen than the inevitable, and is repeatedly disappointed by his disciples’ inability to stay awake with him into the night. And then Jesus’ betrayer is revealed, leading to Jesus’ abduction by Roman Soldiers in the dead of night. When we hear this story, I think it can be very easy to almost sneer at these disciples and judge them for their inability to stay awake with Jesus. And it can be easy for us to hate Judas deeply.

This year in worship where we have been slowing down the telling of the story of Christ’s passion, I have found myself repeatedly reflectig on the humanness of all of the characters in this story. The human way the crowds flip flop in their enthusiams and allegiance to Jesus. The human way that people in power who feel threatened by Jesus try to trip him up and trap him (and fail). The human self-righteous superiority of the disciples judging the woman that anointed Jesus’ feet. The human way the disciples could not handle Jesus’ washing of their feet. The utterly human way the disciples couldn’t stay awake even though Jesus asked them. The familiar humanness of Judas’ betrayal.

One dangerous thing about us looking at this story thousands of years into the future is how easy it can be for us to judge these characters and think to ourselves, “how could they not stay awake when Jesus himself asked them to?” Today, we Christians have millenia of inculturated Christian tradition with established theologies naming Jesus as God, and establishing him as the highest authority in all of the cosmos. We forget that this same understanding wasn’t what the disciples or anyone had about Jesus. We couldn’t imagine ourselves behaving in these ways if we had the chance to be around Jesus now.

But don’t we though? We fail one another all of the time. We judge one another unfairly all of the time. We betray one another all of the time. To be human is to be incredibly complicated and “imperfect” (perfection is not a real thing but a human attempt to make sense of the life around us we cannot understand, by the way).

And when we don’t dig deep into these stories and find ourselves identifying with these characters, even Judas the betrayer, we wrap a narrative around ourselves that there are “bad guys” and “good guys” in the world. And then we find other “good guys” to surround ourselves with. And then the “bad guys” become even worse. The heroes are easy to find, the villains are easy to fight and life becomes less challenging to understand.

And, predictably, violence results. Harm results. This isn’t a hidden phenomenon—I think this plays out all around us. Whether its in politics. Our families. Our work relationships. Our churches… We like simplicity—there are good people and bad people. There is white and there is black. Easy.

But friends, that is simply not true. Judas is no less a beloved child of God than you or me. And any single one of us is capable of Judas’ betrayal and failure. I wonder about our ability to have compassion on the tragedy of Judas who ends up betraying Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, presumably for a price, rather than writing Judas off as the easiest villain to spot in scripture.

I learned recently that Judas is a word that can be translated simply as “Jewish man,” or a “man of Judah” from Hebrew. We have seen the fruits of Christians writing “Judas” (and all Jews more generally speaking, when we consider how the Gospel of John is often translated) off simplistically as a bad guy across Jewish history. From Russian pogroms to the Holocaust, we can find Christian teachings being used to defend atrocities committed against them.

Anti-semitism and Islamophobia are on a steep rise these days in the aftermath of the heinous acts of violence and degredation on October 7 committed by Hamas, followed by the heinous and relentless destruction of Gaza and the taking of tens of thousands of lives of Palestinians by Israel in the following months. Sides have been taken. Simplisitc narratives have emerged. Jewish kids in schools in america are finding themselves targets of anti-semitic taunts from their friends. Muslims in America, especially Palestinians, feel the familiar betrayal of being a Muslim in America first acutely felt in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

The easy hero, easy villain paradigm is feeding our desire to universalize the enemy as a member of a certain religious group, rather than confronting the unbelievable complexity of what is happening and has been happening in the middle east for years. It just feels like we want to be angry and protest rather than confront how powerless we feel in America about what is happening in the Holy Land, and how overwhelmingly tragic and incomprehensible the loss of life and total destruction truly is.

How can we have a deeper willingness to understand those who are easier to label as a “bad guy” in our own lives? And what would happen if we chose compassion and a deeper willingness to listen and understand viewpoints that seem offensive and unbelievably evil to us?

For myself, that might be the hardest spritual work I would ever have to do. And I don’t think I am alone.