May 12, 2024 “Jericho and Judas”

John Bellaimey

Jericho and Judas

Rev. John Bellaimey, May 12, 2024, Seventh Easter, St. John’s Church, Minneapolis

 

Slide In the name of Mary of Nazareth, and in honor of all the mothers in our lives, thank you for the innumerable blessings you gave us, sometimes with great suffering. Amen.

My question this morning is “what does it take to make and keep a friend?” Some of us are talented at it, like the mother of our three sons. Others find friendship to be a real challenge. Jesus told us, in last week’s reading, that after he’s gone, friends is what he wants us to be to one another. It’s a worthy goal.

The old saying goes: unlike our family, we get to choose our friends. When we’re little, it’s not a conscious choice. Jimmy Maxwell and Tommy Kosier lived on my street. We were three or four years old. We played in each other’s back yards until our moms called us home. We came inside for a little something to snack on. We kept out of Myrtis Haley’s yard. Tommy’s dad had been in the service, and he knew how to play army, so we murtalized the Gerries. We held imaginary bazookas. We dug trenches in sandboxes. They were probably 12 inches deep.

In elementary school, we learned give and take. How to share and take turns. To say I’m sorry. In junior high, the risks of friendship increase. Coolness and popularity become the measuring stick, not just fairness or whether you liked the same games. Like most of us, probably, I wasn’t in the popular crowd, but I wasn’t an outcast, either. I knew how bad that would be. That would be Randy Davidson, who was weird but had such good handwriting that you could name a font after it.

But Jesus loved the outcasts. I imagine he was sometimes treated like an outcast himself on the playground in Nazareth: who’s your real dad, huh, Jesus? Not Joseph. He just adopted you so your mom wouldn’t get stoned to death! As an adult, I imagine, Jesus followed the rules, kept kosher, said his prayers, and obeyed his parents. But as an adult, he kept deliberately making friends with outcasts, people like Matthew, the hated tax-collector. Going to his house, to the houses of Roman soldiers and people in quarantine with leprosy. He became a holy man hanging out with unholy people. His friends warned him to stop. But Jesus made friends with them all the same.

Slide of Judas and Jesus {detail from a painting by Master Trecentesco, 14th Century, Italy}                                         

At some point, Jesus picked Judas as one of the twelve apostles, and trusted him with the group’s money box. At the Last Supper, Jesus even sent him out to ‘do what he had to do.’ The others thought maybe he was going to buy more bread or give some money to the poor.

In our teenage years, if we are lucky, we discover what a true friend is. Someone we can tell everything, and someone whose everything we want to hear. I was lucky enough to get put in a group of fellow sophomores to put out the school paper. We became pretty inseparable. We were workmates at the typewriter, light box, and copy machine, but we were also playmates at frisbee, baseball, and football. Even soul mates, a few of us. 

Slide of Cubs  

Four of us, since just before covid, have a monthly conference call which became a zoom. We’re turning seventy soon, left to right: a psychiatry professor, a poetry professor, a chaplain-musician, and me, a chaplain-teacher. Coming from a family that enjoyed discussing anything except emotions and relationships, meeting these guys was a revelation. The progressive Jesuit spirit of our school and the encounter group culture of young America in 1970 also had a lot to do with it.

As people get older, we search for a life partner, we build something like a living and if we’re lucky, it’s a career with a mission that helps us live a meaningful life. We make friends at work who maybe become real friends, and we make friends with lovable neighbors like Marybeth and Ed Crandall. If our church or synagogue or mosque is healthy, it helps us connect with new friends who share at least some of our ideals, and secular organizations do, too.

Slide of Judas and Jesus again  

But back to our villain. Why did Judas quietly slip out into the night and narc on his friend, Jesus? Was it for the money? 30 pieces of silver? Judas led the thugs out of the city, halfway up the steep hillside to Gethsemane, and told them, the one I kiss–he’s the guy. After the ironic kiss, Jesus looked him in the eyes for the last time. “Friend, do what you have come here to do.” Friend? Yes. Still.

Judas wasn’t at the table for Jesus’ long explanation of how to love one another. About being friends to each other, and also servants. Maybe  Judas just wanted money, but that same night, he ended his life when he realized what he’d done. The money was too dirty for anything but buying a burial ground for other outcasts.

One of my sons is still very close to his childhood best friend, which sometimes amazes me and Lynnell, because they had some rough going in high school. We don’t know whether their estrangement involved any betrayal, but the vortex of social competition blew them apart for years. We admire them both for patching things up. 

 

Slide of Joni Mitchell    

All this reminded me of a song about betrayal. It’s called Jericho, by Joni Mitchell.

 

I’ll try to keep myself open up to you

It’s a promise that I made to love, when it was new

“Just like Jericho,” I said, “Let these walls come tumbling down”

I said it like I finally found the way 

To keep the good feelings alive

I said it like it was something to strive for

 

I’ll try to keep myself open up to you

And approve your self expression, 

I need that, too

I need your confidence, baby, and the gift of your extra time

In turn I’ll give you mine

Sweet darling, it’s a rich exchange, it seems to me

It’s a warm arrangement

 

I was nineteen when I first heard the song. Such a know-it-all. I wasn’t a psychology major any more, but decided I had just finished my identity crisis and was moving on to the intimacy crisis. But, um, fifty years on, I’m still working on both.

 

Anyone will tell you just how hard it is to make and keep a friend

Maybe they’ll short sell you, 

or maybe it’s you, Judas, in the end

When you just can no longer pretend

That you’re getting what you need

Or you’re giving out anything for them to grow and feed on

 

How hard it is to make and keep a friend. To give so they can grow. Like the Timberwolves this year, generous and fierce, all coaching each other, defending like they’re all Rudy Gobert, because he’s home at the birth of their first child and he’s the greatest defender in the league. Happy mother’s day to his girlfriend Julia.

Mitchell finishes by going back to her pledge. The sort of thing I think Judas used to repeat to himself before he gave up on Jesus and his weird ideas:

 

I’ll try to keep myself open up to you

It gets easier and easier to do

Just like Jericho, let these walls come tumbling down now

Let them fall right on the ground

Let all these dogs go running free

The wild and the gentle dogs 

Kenneled in me

 

Maybe Judas’ wild dog got the best of him. The predator who had decided Jesus was not the real thing. He had to go. Maybe his gentle dog, his domesticated self, won out, the one that liked money and comfort and settling down and not all this wandering Jesus stuff that gets you arrested and dead.

Being a friend is always yin and yang. Wild and gentle dogs, both. 

Freedom and love, both. 

Baring your soul and biting your tongue, both.  

The closer you get to someone, the greater the reward, and the risk, both. 

Slide of Joni now    Mitchell’s work is full of Biblical allusions, but she’s no literalist. Like everyone, she is pulled by domesticity and travel. Intimacy and Freedom. She even wrote a song about the way she sabotages friendships. She called it–what a contradiction–Refuge of the Roads. 

Slide of Judas and Jesus again    I’ve left the Gospel alone this week. Lisa nailed it last week. I’m just preaching about the first reading. Acts of the Apostles. It’s not long after the resurrection. 120 people nominated two men to be Apostle Number Twelve. Friends, Peter says, it’s time to replace Judas, And although Matthew the former tax-collector thinks it’s obvious Judas did it for the money, Peter has another idea:  Okay, he got our teacher arrested. But later that night–remember–I was the one who told people that I didn’t know Jesus from Adam. And then a rooster crowed, and I remembered Jesus predicting we’d all abandon him.  So yeah, Judas did a terrible thing, but there but for the grace of God go I; and as long as we’re talking about God, you know King David, Psalm 55?  The betrayal part?  Everyone starts to nod. They know those lyrics. 

Slide of Lyrics and Judas

It is not an enemy who insults me,

or else I could bear it;

not one who hates me or arrogantly taunts me,

or else I could hide from him.

But it is you…

my close friend in whom I confided. 

 

The backstory is sad: when David’s son Absalom betrayed him, David’s counselor Ahitophel secretly sided with the son. The coup failed. Ahitophel hanged himself. Judas should have known where betrayal leads, Peter thinks. Should have known that the cross would not have the last word. Jesus and David turn out to be alike yet again, and Peter got one more lesson about Jesus’ whole forgiveness thing. “Scriptures are fulfilled” only in hindsight. Judas never got the chance to learn that. 

Peter did. He could have been so mad at Judas. Could have judged him. But he grieved for Judas, and held on to his memory as a reminder that Jesus still called him “friend.” Peter promised himself, I suspect, to resist when temptations said, “it’s over. It’s too hard. It hurts too much. Walk away.” 

Friendship is hard. Peter knew this. Jesus knew it, even as he was kissing Judas. Even as he was dying. But friendship is one of the most beautiful of all loves. That’s our job, friends: to help each other be truer friends, parents, partners, children, and teammates. Just like our moms told us to be.

 

10am Service