At What Cost?

Gospel: Matthew 26: 14-25

Judas sells Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, the price of a slave in a system of human trafficking and exchange.  What led Judas to do so?  Was it for financial gain?  Was it because he was disillusioned in Jesus, that he was not the political Messiah for which everyone longed?  Did he worry about Roman severity if Jesus were not handed over?  Perhaps it was a combination of all these things.  Whatever the case, it is an unseemly and horrid thing to do.

And yet we are willing to hand people in droves over for a lot less.  Consider how many immigrants, migrants, refugees, and people from foreign countries regardless of status are readily given over to foreign torture prisons.  Consider our willingness to reject the idea of due process and the idea of innocence before proven guilty - and all in the name of Jesus who himself was the victim of all these things.  While we ponder Judas' motives, we might well ponder our own in selling off great swaths of humanity, people who are God's image, another Christ, temples of the Holy Spirit.

As we continue to re-enact the drama of the final days of Jesus, we come face to face with the reality that we betray, condemn, mock, torture, and execute Jesus again and again in the person of so many people whose humanity and dignity we deny.  In using Jesus' name to do so, we take his name in vain, we commit the worst of all blasphemies.