Was Judas bad, or just disappointed?

How many Christians gave up on God and became atheists or agnostics? And why? I guess we could all argue our reasons as rational, scientific and honest. I am part of such a generation. I had very real, profound spiritual experiences in my late teenage years. I was captivated by a call to change the world (not motivated by a fear of being sent to hell, as some of my friends were). I could see this Way was an ‘all in’ proposition, not a part time hobby. And so, I went all in.

Fast forward. 

Years later I remember someone telling me about the prophet Jeremiah and the force of his rage against God. Like me, called at a young age, he went ‘all in’. He felt he was on a mission from God. He had something to say. He wanted to be heard. He wanted to make a difference in the world. He expected that with God’s call on his life that, whilst tough, he would make a dent in the issues of social injustice of his day.

But it didn’t go like he expected. In his pain and disappointment with Living Presence[1] he rages in the most shocking language. He says,

                  “You enticed and seduced me Living Presence

                  and I was enticed and seduced.

                  You were stronger than me and you prevailed.

I have become a laughingstock all the day long.

All of them mock me[2]”

That’s how I came to feel.

That’s how a generation of us felt.

Any many gave up their faith at that point.

I thought about Judas yesterday morning. He too gave up and went a step further. Unlike the Apostle Paul who was an advocate of violence against these people of The Way, but became one of them, Judas was a follower of The Way Jesus was preaching and turned to violence against him. Why? Disappointment and rage. We know Judas was motivated by the possibility of money out of this Jesus project. To an extent it seems he was getting it[3]. Until it became clear that Jesus was a financial liability. There was going to be no financial security down that road.

What Judas must have experienced was profound disappointment. “This is not what I thought I was signing up for”. Disappointment is laden with sadness and pain. Sadness and pain can either lead us to a far deeper engagement with ourselves and the Divine, or to anger or, in the case of Judas…….

At the very least, as many, many of my friends attested, whatever the rational explanations, we could see that disappointment with God hurts. A lot.

I realise, all these years later, that I felt I had made secret, unconscious bargain with God – “I’ll do this, if you do that”.

Judas had a Judas-shape to his bargain and I had a Trevor-shape to mine – fill the father-wound, be the divine-breast to make me feel good about myself, be the pathway to people respecting and admiring me, provide ongoing adventures in my life and when life gets very hard, pull rabbits out of hats.  Of course, I shaped my side of the bargain around my personality, my pathology and my complexes…my ‘stuff’. That bargain failed. 

I guess for whatever reason, I have felt that whilst I frequently and understandably felt the strong urge to bail out of the faith journey with my friends, I sensed it was too easy a route to take. 

The bargain had failed. Definitely. But that didn’t make the deeper questions of life disappear any more than it would make my ‘stuff’ disappear. The truth is that whether I was on a faith journey or not, I was full of all those maturity challenges anyway. Whether faith or no faith, atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, or whatever, I was bringing those hungers, needs, perspectives into my marriage, my work and into life, regardless. The fact that life has patiently and systematically stripped each one of these deep issues in me down to their core, needed to happen whatever.

I have always needed to grow up. The question was simply ‘how’.

So, as far as I can see, the difference between Judas and Jeremiah was what they did with their disappointments. Judas disappointments derailed him and made him vengeful against the one he thought was to blame, against his call and the caller. Jeremiah channelled his disappointment and rage into speaking out, courageously confronting the transcendence that lies beyond, beneath and within all the personal crap we carry, to find a new, authentic version of a faith, to replace the version that hadn’t worked.

My reflections also called me back yesterday to re-read C S Lewis masterful allegory 

‘Till We Have Faces[4]. Orual, the main character, is ugly and is told so repeatedly from birth and so never looks in the mirror. By the end of the book, she demands an audience with the Divine to hear her case, her honest, angry disappointment. As she does so, something happens. In her raging she catches her face in the mirror, and she glimpses that she is now beautiful. She is transformed by honest engagement, not by giving up, or avoiding. In every case where the disappointment and rage are brought into the intimacy of a real honest conversation, we get changed in the process. We discover the real truth about who the pearl is inside us, that the ‘stuff’ had been hiding. The swapping of the bargaining, for …a bargain. 

Facing into the unwelcome conversation makes all of us more honest, more mature, and more real, more humble, messy, faltering and open, people of The Way.

[1] Yahweh actually translates as Living Presence…we use the word God, as it’s the shortest word to name the unnameable

[2] Jeremiah Ch 20 vs 7

[3] John Ch 12 vs 6

[4]  C S Lewis 1985     Till We Have Faces     HBJ Books