I speak to you today in the name of God, Father (+), Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Palm Sunday begins Holy Week, which is the final culmination of the season of Lent.  Holy Week is THE most important week of the Christian year.  There are special services all week to help us journey with our Lord toward the cross, and then beyond.  Most of Lent has been a quiet time of reflection with little or no excitement or fanfare we put away some of the more glorious music and prayers so that they have more impact and meaning when we encounter them again.  But today we have glorious music and procession.

There is a subtle shift in the liturgy today.  We begin in happiness with the triumphant entrance of Jesus into the holy city of Jerusalem.  But the readings today also speak of our Lord’s passion upon the cross.

There is a character in the story of Jesus who, I think needs to be explored more fully than he usually is.  He is integral to the story without him the story would be quite different.  But we would rather not talk about this man.  We would rather not talk about him because he scares us; and what scares us we often avoid.  However, I believe, what scares us just might be what we really need to look at.

“Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, ‘What will you give me if I betray him to you?’  And they paid him thirty pieces of silver.”

Judas is a difficult person to think about and to contemplate.

Why is he difficult?  For me it is because I have been bumping into him all over the place; and it is not in other people that I have seen him; it is within myself and how I react to, think of and relate to others.

I have jumped ahead of myself here, though.  Let’s look at the man and see what we can glean from him.

Before we are told his name we are told what he means to Jesus.  This character was one of His inner-circle of friends, one of His chosen twelve whose name is added almost as an after-thought.  As if who this person is actually is unimportant, it could have been any of the twelve.

This person did have a name and it was Judas Iscariot. 

We respond to that name in many ways, it holds a lot of emotions for each of us.  Some people I have talked to have nothing but pity for Judas.  Others are angry with him.  Others hate him because of what he did.  And others think that he was just a puppet doing what he was destined to do.  But who was this man?  Where did he come from?  What do we really know about him?

Jesus’ betrayer was probably from the village of Kerioth, this made him the only Judaean disciple among the Twelve, and, according to the Gospel of St. John, he was their treasurer.  The Bible tells us nothing concerning the circumstances of his call or his share in the ministry and miracles of the Apostles.  And it is significant that in all of the Gospels he is never mentioned without some reference to his great betrayal.

And, as I learned from Archbishop Terence Findley – a speaker at a clergy gathering I attended a couple of years ago, Judas was also a member of a particular sect of Jews known as the Iscari – translated as, The Knife Men.  These men were professional revolutionaries whose mission was to protect the Jewish people at all costs.  They were not above killing other Jews to further their own ends either.  If some hapless Jew got in their way, or threatened the safety of the whole Jewish people they were quietly done away with.

So, we have a person who was ardent and passionate about the Jewish people; we have a person was good with money, who kept the common purse, and Jesus called him to use his skills for the common good of the group. 

And he will have a huge decision to make.  Now whether that decision is because Jesus asked him to do it; or he was acting on his life as a protector of the Israelite people it does not really matter – he still had to make the choice and the decision to do what he did.

What do I think of Judas?  How do I react to him and his actions? I believe that Judas was nothing more than human; and nothing less than human.

What we must remember is that Judas had a choice to make.  Just as you and I have, Judas had a will of his own which he was permitted to use as he saw fit.  The choice he made seems a strange one to us, to be sure, but he made it nonetheless and it was his to make. 

God should no more stop Judas from making this horrible decision than He should have stopped those who decided to destroy the World Trade Centre Buildings in New York.  For, I believe, that God gave us the gift of free will and God should not simply take it away from us when the gift he bestowed becomes inconvenient.

What God does do is use what we choose to do in order to show His grace and mercy in this world.  And this is where we find the Good News in the person of Judas.

God used Judas’ decision to betray Jesus – this most drastic of sins – to show the world how it can be redeemed.  Judas betrayed Jesus, this caused the death of our Lord, and God took hold and used Judas’ choice and its consequence as a means of grace and poured mercy freely from it.  By raising Jesus from the dead to prove that death is dead and there is no more dying.  God used the worst of sins to give us the best gift of all!

Earlier I said that I have been bumping into this person.  I have been looking at myself through this person.  How do I react to others?  What choices do I make?  What sins do I commit toward my fellow human beings?  How do I let God work through me and through the choices that I make?  These are hard questions.  I have not really put any answers of my own to them of yet.  They are the kinds of things I have been reflecting upon because of who this man was and what he did.  What I have learned from him is that God’s grace and mercy can come to the world through the decisions we make.

God takes our everyday decisions and their consequences and works through them.  For me, I have been betrayed and I have betrayed.  What I have to do is allow God to speak to me through these experiences so that I can feel and show God’s grace and mercy. 

When I have been betrayed I must react and when I react I can be assured that God is reacting with me.  When I betray I must learn that the person I have betrayed will react and God will be reacting with them.  God can work despite our so called “bad” choices, and enable us to live through and beyond the consequences of those choices.  God can also reverse the effects of “bad” decisions, even truly evil decisions.  The one thing God will not do is make our choices for us.  They are ours alone.  God can point us in a direction but it is up to each of us to choose that direction.

In the end my friends, is Judas all that different from you and from me?  No.  In the end my friends, the decision he made was his.  The decisions we make are ours.  We have to be open to the greater possibilities of God and trust in the grace and mercy that can be afforded to the world through our every decision.

For what we should remember during Lent, Holy Week and always is without Judas’ betrayal God could not have worked the greatest miracle of all – the salvation of each of us and the means of destroying the power of sin and death.

To that end, let us pray.

Almighty God, allow us to show your face and love to the world through the decisions of our lives.  Help us to discern your will in the decisions of others.  Help us to love those that betray us knowing that your will shall be done in this world.  We ask these things in the name of Jesus, your son, and our Saviour.  Amen.