The Lost Gospel

M9

Acts 10:34-43
Ps. 118:1-2, 14-24
1 Cor. 15:1-11
Mk. 16:1-8

“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain”
1 Corinthians 15.

On a rainy day last week I met my friend Cliff in a Berkeley coffee shop. In our conversation, Cliff described himself as “kind of a loser” back when we were in high school. It seems pretty obvious to me that now he is a loser for Christ. Cliff is my friend who is a congregational minister and who was recently released after serving a prison term for trespassing during a protest of the School of the America’s in Georgia. With a passionate voice he reminded me that the prison system in this country has expanded fourfold over the last twenty-five years. In our free society we use incarceration to solve many problems that other countries address differently.

Cliff believes that the Christian churches should be sending missionaries into prisons, not as chaplains who work for the system and carry keys so that they can lock up when the guards are off, but as fellow prisoners. Recently Cliff was invited to preach at the First Waldensian Church of New York City. Don’t look it up when you visit. After surviving eight hundred years of persecution in Europe, this congregation of immigrants refused to merge with the Presbyterian church back in the 1920’s. Now they have no building and gather only once a year on the Sunday closest to February 17th and reminisce about Pastor Janavel from their wheelchairs. Whether it is to people who have lost their freedom or elderly immigrants who have lost their culture my friend Cliff ministers to people who have lost something important. He cares for losers.

I guess this makes us all eligible for Cliff’s attention. We are all in the process of losing something. What we are losing can never be replaced. The public has lost its sense of security. Nuclear proliferation in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere along with climate change could lead to the extinction of everything we know.

But there is also private loss. Look around this room. The people sitting next to you have lost fortunes, friends, husbands, wives and children. Perhaps you yourself are losing the job that defines your identity. Maybe you learned from a note on the kitchen table that your spouse was leaving you. If you pause to think about it, your children’s childhood is quickly slipping away. Others of you have lost your health and soon will lose your life.

The losses I am talking about are not trivial. Imagine the woman who crosses the street with her daughter every day to go to her mailbox. One day she hesitates to pull a few weeds out of her garden. Her little girl waits for permission before going across the street for the mail. She gets a few bills out of the box and asks if it is safe to cross again. Her mother glances up and says yes. But a car she didn’t see kills the small child. Without some kind of miracle this mother will never be able to forgive herself, she will never be whole. If you think it is difficult to believe in Jesus’ resurrection, try believing that losers like us can have hope.

In Jesus I have been blessed beyond imagining and found strength in the face of my losses. I know what it feels like to have hope, to be saved by him. For millions of others around the globe faith is the experience of finding oneself in the person of Jesus Christ. Although what we have lost can never be restored, we find our lives transformed in him.

So much about Jesus has been lost in history. It seems like a small miracle to discover something new. This is exactly what happened last week when the National Geographic society announced that it had found a Coptic translation of the Gospel of Judas originally written some time before the year 180 A.D.

News accounts about this fall into two categories. The manuscript was discovered during the 1970’s in a cave by Egyptian farmers. The first kind of newspaper article focuses on the greed of the antiquities dealers who took so long to bring it before the public. This kind of article asks ethical questions, whether this is a looted artifact and about the responsibility to share archaeological findings with all scholars.

The second type of article stirs up theological controversy. These writers interpret the text to mean that Judas did not betray Jesus as churches usually teach, but rather that he was under Jesus’ secret orders in going to the police. The most frequently quoted line from the Gospel of Judas is obscure without the context. It has Jesus saying to Judas, “But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” Newspapers ask what the account of Jesus’ crucifixion would mean if none of his friends so blatantly betrayed him. Others simply reject the usefulness of this text out of hand. Officials at the Vatican condemn the Gospel of Judas as contrary to Christian doctrine.

But what does this ancient manuscript mean to us as people who continue to lose what cannot be replaced but who still find hope in Jesus? For me this description of Jesus written more than a century after his death gives a clearer picture of God’s church right now. Most importantly it serves as a reminder that Christians have never completely agreed on who Jesus is.

It doesn’t take more than a few sentences for anyone who has studied biblical history to recognize that the Gospel of Judas was written by Gnostic Christians. The Greek word gnosis means wisdom and these Gnostics saw themselves as Christians. They knew that what most separated them from the orthodox church was their belief in secret teachings about an all-encompassing battle between the material world and the spiritual one.

The animating idea behind the Gospel of Judas is that the disciples of Jesus never understood his true teachings and the church they founded is irrecoverably corrupt. Orthodox Christians regard Judas as a betrayer. According to this text he was the only one to really understand Jesus. In the Gospel of Judas Jesus says, “[L]et any one of you who is [strong enough] among human beings bring out the perfect human and stand before my face.” And only “Judas Iscariot… was able to stand before him.”

Reading this text is like leafing through the books in the Rosicrucian Library at the Egyptian museum in San Jose which is a kind of new age bookstore on steroids. Like those authors, this writer seems so confident in his intentional obscurity. It seems deliberately unclear in order to create an aura of mystery. This recovered gospel includes a lengthy account of Judas’ secret vision. Jesus teaches him about the “enlightened divine Self-Generated,” about the angels appointed to control the “aeons and the heavens” and about the other angels who rule over “chaos and the [underworld].”

Orthodox Christians rejected Gnostic teachings about Jesus from the very early days of the church. The whole reason I knew about the existence of a Gospel of Judas was that orthodox Christians such as Irenaeus (130-202) mention it.

I think that they were right to exclude texts like this for use in worship for two reasons. Apart from being unclear and its one-dimensional portrayal of Jesus, The Gospel of Judas makes it seem as if some people really are special, perfect even, immune from the losses that define our humanity. According to the Gnostic picture of the world only the wisest, most intelligent people can attain true faith. This effectively reproduces earthly hierarchies in heaven. The orthodox church was right to resist the power grab that lies behind pictures of religion as a form of secret knowledge.

Second, I believe in the incarnation. That is another way of saying that I believe in a God who creates the world and is still involved in it. Jesus was a real person with real earthly needs, desires and sufferings. But Jesus is also still here. The church is the body of Christ at work in the world.

In summary, the Gospel of Judas increases my appreciation for the vivid stories about a human Jesus in the Bible and its promise that God’s love always exceeds our tribal instincts and is really part of our world. Discovering the Gospel of Judas reminds me that we can never own Jesus, our historical connection will always be a question for us.

An example from today’s readings makes this clear. Most scholars that I know are pretty certain that we do not have the ending that the author of Mark’s gospel wrote. The gospel concludes with these words about the women who discovered the empty tomb, “and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Experts who study the Bible believe that a scribe at some point supplied a longer ending using words, a style and a theology that were alien to Mark. You should look at the text yourself. The longer ending sounds completely different from the rest of the gospel even when you read it in English.

This probably isn’t common knowledge because this kind of thinking upsets some people. A modern church that condemns the Gospel of Judas as heresy, or an ancient sect that claims that what really matter is a secret knowledge for spiritual elites, or for that matter an atheist who regards religion as merely a belief about God all fundamentally get it wrong.

Beliefs about Jesus will come and go. But ultimately what you believe isn’t what really matters. The spirit of God is not something that we can own like a possession. Our job as Jesus’ followers is not to convince everyone else that their ideas are wrong.

Instead the life of faith is the process of being transformed by Jesus. It means beginning to pray like he prays, to love what he loves. It means having the same kind of relationship with God and other people that he had. It means beginning to be defined by our hope that God gives life even in death rather than identifying ourselves with our fear of loss.

In conclusion, not so long ago Midwest farmers at the first sign of a blizzard would run a rope from the back door to the barn. They all had heard stories of people who had lost sight of home in a whiteout and frozen to death in their own backyards. Our modern blizzards, our public disasters and our private despair leave us in danger of losing our very selves. But like my friend Cliff we are beginning to be losers for Christ. The Bible, the church and our prayers together teach us about Jesus and he connects this home on earth to our home in God.
______________________
I don’t know what names the kids call each other these days, but when I was in high school “loser” was one of the words they used. We probably didn’t think about this word too much. Our classmates used it to describe my friends who hung out smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. What is a loser?
It isn’t the opposite of being a winner because that wasn’t an adjective we used to describe people. Maybe it was someone who didn’t have complete control over how others perceived him or who just didn’t care about what others thought really mattered. On the other hand perhaps the word only says something about the person who uses it.
February 17 is the anniversary of the Edict of Emancipation.
I read this in a sermon preparing for 5 Lent.
“How the Gospel of Judas Emerged,” New York Times, 4/13/2006.
John Noble Wilford and Laurie Goodstein, “In Ancient Document Judas Minus the Betrayal,” New York Times, 4/7/2006. More recently both themes are addressed together. Peter Steinfels, “A Debate Flares on Betrayal,” New York Times, 4/15/06.
“Papal Preacher Blasts Da Vinci Code, Judas Gospel, ”Reuters 4/14/2006, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/entertainment-pope-davinci.html.

Giving Your Life

M8

Jer. 31:31-4
Ps 51:1-13
Heb. 5:5-10
Jn. 12:20-33


“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” John 12.

This poem is called “Ask Me,” by William Stafford (1914-1993):
“Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.”

Is what you have done your life? What difference have those who love you and hate you made?

Jesus says, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jn. 12). He puts into question what it means to live or die. He makes us less certain what our life really is. I believe that it takes someone with the power of Jesus to dispel our most persistent illusions. Some fantasies can be so widespread within a culture that it can take generations to understand the truth.

Between the years 1570 and 1630 Western Europeans burned between thirty and fifty thousand people to death as witches (only a comparatively tiny number of heretics were burned during this same period). In Trier, Germany 368 witches were burned in twenty-two villages over only a six-year period. In two of these villages the persecution did not stop until there was only one woman left.

Amazingly enough during the preceding so-called Dark Ages there was little or no witch persecution and canon law even specified that “whoever believes in witches is an infidel and pagan” and “unchristian.” Then in the fifteenth century these convictions changed. A professor at the University of the Sorbonne wrote in 1601 that the existence of witches could be disbelieved only by those of unsound mind.”

Perhaps one of the most extraordinary features of this cultural hysteria is that historians can find no evidence to suggest that ritual devil worship actually happened in Western Europe. The historian Margaret Miles convincingly writes that, “Witchcraft seems to have been neither a religion nor an organization, but a massive collective fantasy.”

Why did this happen? The recent invention of the printing press made it possible to circulate thousands of pamphlets which included details about what witches did and how they were punished. These broadsheets told people that witches caused disease, impotence, accidents and crop failures. Because more than eighty percent of the people who were burned to death were women, misogyny probably was a contributing factor in the persecutions. Historians also believe that a connection existed between the use of judicial torture and the intensity of this hysteria. England was the only country that did not use torture for either crime or witchcraft and persecution was less a part of life there.

But these reasons cannot explain the deep anxiety in the mind of that generation. I wonder what behavior we take completely for granted but that may seem equally baffling to future historians. What is our massive collective fantasy? What fears inform our actions and what do they tell us about our life and our commitments? (I wonder which of our attitudes concerning drugs, children, terrorism, healthcare, immigration, globalization, incarceration, work, etc. will make sense to another generation).

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus became famous as a defense witness in court trials of people who were accused of sexual abuse on the basis of repressed memories. She points out that there is no scientific evidence that what we call repression really exists. Scientists study various kinds of amnesia closely. Some people may forget what happened in a traumatic traffic accident, but they are conscious that a memory is missing. Those who believe in repression claim that we can have no sensation of having forgotten some of the memories that are most important to who we are. They also seem to overestimate the reliability of our memory.

On August 18, 1967 at Boston’s Fenway Park Red Sox outfielder Tony Conigliaro was at the plate facing California Angels pitcher Jack Hamilton. On the first pitch Hamilton threw a fastball that crushed the left side of Conigliaro’s face. Conigliaro never completely recovered from his injury. He left baseball in 1975 and died at the age of forty-five. That moment changed Jack Hamilton forever too.

In 1990 when Conigliaro died, Hamilton gave an interview with the New York Times in which he recalled what happened that day. “I’ve had to live with it,” He said,”I think about it a lot. It was like the sixth inning when it happened. I think the score was 2-1, and he was the eighth hitter in the batting order. With the pitcher up next, I had no reason to throw at him.” Hamilton remembers visiting him in the hospital that afternoon. He also remembers wondering whether he should return to Fenway for the next series of games that season.

Although Hamilton probably thought about this day many times his recollections were almost completely wrong. The accident didn’t happen in the sixth inning but in the fourth. The score was not 2-1 but 0-0. Conigliaro wasn’t the eighth hitter but the sixth. It wasn’t even a day game so Hamilton couldn’t have visited him in the hospital that afternoon, and there were no other games in Boston that year for him to wonder about whether or not he should go back there.

It should come as no surprise to us that our memories are unreliable, that we can get important details wrong. A cognitive psychologist asked forty-four students the question, “How did you first hear the news of the space ship Challenger explosion.” He asked them the morning after the explosion and then two and a half years later. Although they described the memories as vivid during this second interview, none of their memories were completely accurate and one third of their memories were what the researcher called “wildly inaccurate.” Many of these students couldn’t believe that their revised memories were wrong. “This is my handwriting, so it must be right,” said one student, “but I still remember everything the way I told you [just now]. I can’t help it.”

Not only can we be completely wrong about past events, we can remember things that never even happened. Psychologists have studied the ways that false memories can be inadvertently and intentionally implanted in someone else’s mind. One student did this by asking his fourteen-year-old younger brother to write a paragraph each day on four events that he described. Three of the events actually happened as part of the family’s history and one was a fictitious story about being lost at a mall. By the end of the week the younger brother could describe details about something that never happened.

Earlier I mentioned Elizabeth Loftus as a psychologist who studies memory. She is not an uncontroversial figure. Some people absolutely hate her. It may be partly because they believe she defends criminals, but even this is not enough to explain the vehemence of their response to her work. I have a theory. I think that it is partly because her research undermines some deeply held assumptions about who we think we are.

In modern times there are so many subtle ways of not believing in God. One of them is to understand ourselves as a kind of videotape that summarizes our past, to think that in a significant sense we are our memories. If this is the implicit picture that someone has of himself, a psychologist’s claims that the tape is unreliable can seem like an attack on his identity.

For me this way of understanding our selves is in contrast with the Bible. According to Christian tradition we do not have an existence that is independent of God. Who we are does not derive from who we were. Our life is not something that came about accidentally because of the lust or love of two other human beings a long time ago. We don’t earn our life. Instead we constantly derive our life from God. Who we are is a gift from God that we receive every day.

In the Old Testament God speaks to us. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it in their hearts; and I will be their God” (Jer. 31). Our existence is a constant expression of God’s love. At the deepest level of who we are is not a memory but God.

I’m having a hard time saying it, but what this means is that you are fundamentally safe. You do not need to worry about losing your job, your spouse, your health, the respect of the other kids in school. The self that you are is not something that you achieve through some kind of work. It is not something that comes into existence because of what you think. This self is safe from the world

Perhaps what Jesus means is that the part of ourselves we are so afraid of losing isn’t really us anyway. When the Greeks come, they want the same thing that I do. They tell Philip that they want to see Jesus. He says to them, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

The novelist Ernest Hemmingway writes about a father in Spain who wanted to be reconciled to his runaway son. The father takes out an advertisement in the Madrid paper El Liberal. It says, “Paco, meet me noon on Tuesday at the Hotel Montana. All is forgiven! Love, Papa.” Paco was a common name in those days. When the father showed up he found eight hundred young men looking for their fathers.

The way that Jesus speaks through the Bible is like this. Right here we have a whole church full of Pacos, of children returning to their father. We are not our memories, our thoughts or even our actions. Like California pitcher Jack Hamilton and the witch hunters of the sixteenth century we will make minor mistakes and some terrible life-changing ones.

But none of this changes the truth. You can ask me if what I have done is my life or about the influence of people who have loved and hated me. But that is not what I am. We are children of God who Jesus calls to return. And one day he will lift us all up into the fullness of divine joy.
___________________
Published in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Ed. Dana Gioia, David Mason, Meg Schoerke (NY: McGraw Hill, 2004), 530.
Margaret R. Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 296-7.
Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketchem, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 75.
Ibid., 91-2.
Ibid., 97-8.
Thomas Tewell, “The Things We Dare Not Remember,” Thirty Good Minutes, 16 November 2003. http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/tewell_4707.htm