Our names for God, our concepts of God, our doctrines of God are not God. They are tools. Tools whose sole purpose is to bring us near to God.
The space between the logs. I think that is where we find the Holy Spirit. It is in the deep breaths between actions. It is in the silences between words and music. It is in the rocks turned into snowflakes.
But if Judas was actually a good guy who was just misunderstood, the story of our redemption loses something else. It no longer includes the kind of betrayal that really happens in this world. And in some ways, such a betrayal really can be a culmination of all sorts of forces that break our lives and our world apart. There are questions of power and money and violence and loyalty and so much more wrapped up in the character of Judas. And he wasn’t just one of the hundred sheep in Jesus’s fold. He was one of the twelve closest people to Jesus. One who, according to Matthew, felt remorse, tried to give the blood money back, and, when he failed, took his own life.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives the disciples his commandment, “that you love one another as I have loved you.” After eight years here, I hear Calvary’s commandment: that I go out into the world and love as I have been loved here.
At the end of the day, love is grace. Endless, undeserved, unexplainable grace for ourselves and others, for our quirks and mistakes. Grace.
But what I do trust is that we were brought together by the Holy Spirit, whose reconciling work in the world happens through our hopeful and failing selves. The church is one of those rare places in the world where we voluntarily enter a room with people we just don’t get. You sit down by strangers and hear that those who do not love do not know God, and sometimes you you feel deeply the implications of such a belief — you fearfully declare it the Word of the Lord. You look around the room and wonder if you’re up to the work. You look inside yourself and find a heart capable but not always willing, itself a maze of excuses and excesses and anxieties that keep you from knowing your true self — the one beloved and redeemed by God.