Broiled
Luke 24:36-48

April 26, 2009


I am really happy that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, agrees with me. A few years back I offered the opinion that the newly released Gospel of Judas is not a read worth getting all holy about. Good to see that the Archbishop thinks along the same lines in an article that appeared also on Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006, in The Mail On Sunday newspaper in England. Well, at least we think the same way simultaneously.

All right, the Archbishop does say it a little better. Talking about the plethora of such early gospels - Thomas, Mary, Joseph, Peter - he noted that “People who weren’t satisfied with the sort of thing the New Testament had to say spent quite a lot of energy trying to produce something which suited them better.” Perhaps ours is a similar age, a time when there is a desire for something more exciting and self-serving. The DaVinci Code and the gnostic gospels sound more fun and entertaining than the fare the New Testament has to offer. Or is it that what the New Testament Gospels offer is too blunt and too demanding to take seriously?

A couple of pastorates ago a just retired couple invited some friends to come to our church. But after a couple of services and a home visit, I didn’t see the second couple anymore. I asked our resident couple about it, and they replied, a little embarrassed, “Well, they said they wanted ‘something more.’”

Something more. I am not going to pretend we were anything but a good solid traditional aggressively friendly congregation with pretty decent music, spirited singing, preaching weekly from the Biblical lectionary, a congregation that cared for one another and did their fair share of fighting with one another. Perhaps we were boring, but we were real and honest. I gathered that couple who wanted something more were looking not so much for more as different. Did they expect an evangelical spark that would catapult them out of their pews? Perhaps they wanted me and our congregation to be more religious, more holy, more uncompromisingly passionate. All they got was us, and well, they needed something more.

The guys who wrote the Gospel of Judas were among those who seemingly figured that the regular gospels needed something more. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were deemed deficient in the right stuff. The story was incomplete and dangling with loose ends, the characters were not bold enough, and Jesus was not Jesus Christ Superstar, but a plain human being whose life was too painful to relive. God Incarnate has to have a lot more passion and mystery.

A few decades ago the appearance of such a lost work as the Gospel of Judas would have electrified the media and fascinated the Christian Church, as did the remarkable discoveries at Qumran of the Dead Sea Scrolls and at Nag Hammadi of the Gnostic Library that included the only copy of the Gospel of Thomas. People held their breath as they expected to have to rearrange their Bibles, and many scholars believed that would definitely be the case. It definitely wasn’t. There was a lot to learn about the early centuries of the Christian movement from these scrolls, but the story did not change.

The idea that Judas became the traitor with the encouragement of Jesus, that Judas was the strongest disciple, is not an original thought for us. Nikos Kazantsakis in his 1953 novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, portrays Judas in just such a light. I doubt Kazantsakis had read the lost Gospel and his Judas is a believable, humble person, hesitant to take on the task, but obedient in the end, an odd kind of christ-figure. In Judas’ own gospel, the issue is whether Jesus is a Christ figure or some other kind of preferred spiritual leader.

If you come to the Gospel of Judas looking for a story, you will be disappointed, as with many of the gnostic gospels. There is a sort of narrative in which Jesus appears and disappears with his regular 12 disciples and then in serious aside conversations with his 13th (!) disciple, Judas. Several of the conversations are about dreams that the 12 disciples had had and one dreamed by Judas, to which Jesus gives complex, allegorical interpretations. These lead to detailed descriptions of gnostic mythology with semi-gods and numerous super angels who attack, murder and have sex with other denizens of the upper realms. If you have read the entire Bible, you have never heard of these characters and goings-on.

Jesus is not a particularly nice guy, for on several occasions he laughs at and mocks his less-enlightened disciples. There is an edge to this Jesus that is unfamiliar from the four regular Gospels. The author reveals here a saviour who is perhaps the kind of person the author wants to be. This is gnosticism, an inside gospel for those who are “in-the-know.” If the Gospel of Judas unveils for us the true “lost” Jesus, then if it doesn’t sound too harsh, this Jesus can easily get lost again and we would be none the worse for wear.

Luke’s version of the sudden appearance to the disciples after the resurrection is fairly close to the report John gave us last week, minus the person and concerns of Thomas. They just saw him standing there and he offered the traditional greeting, “Peace be with you,” and it terrified them. They thought they were seeing a ghost. Jesus knew exactly the problem and proceeded to demonstrate to them that he was flesh and blood, un-ghost-like, bearing the ugly marks of the cross on his hands and feet.

There follows a remarkable phrase that is both paradoxical and yet true of how human beings deal with something truly lost but now found. “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he asked them, ‘Have you anything to eat?’” How can you be joyful and disbelieving and still wondering all at the same time? It is actually pretty easy when your brain has not caught up with your emotions and physical senses. The solution to fear is food. They give Jesus a piece of broiled fish and watch him eat, and become real to them. Everything is done around eating and food, including resurrection. Eating is the way to a person’s soul, for it proves we are human and part of the human community.

Jesus did not laugh at these hapless disciples or ridicule them, he simply “opened their minds to understand the scriptures.” Rowan Williams has a delightful way of expressing what happened here. “[Jesus] doesn’t suffer fools (especially religious fools) gladly, but he has all the time in the world for those who are thought to be failures. He is a straightforward, not a cynical man.”

People who love “lost gospels” and love even more the so-called conspiracies to hide and suppress them, who believe something else will suit them better religiously, something more, do not normally like straightforward people. Or straightforward, plain, boring Gospels that really will change your whole way of being if you actually try to live the plain demands of love and compassion, service, and letting go of one’s ego and arrogance and sense of superiority over the fools.

Fortunately, you and I are mostly failures, terribly all-too-human, sinful beings, so, he has all the time in the world for us. The point of having a Jesus is that you in turn should have all the time in the world for those who have failed next to you.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan