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.
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.
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