Have you ever felt betrayed?
If you’re lucky, it’s been a small betrayal - a co-worker or friend who just wasn’t what you had believed, a public figure who betrayed our hopes, the ordinary losses of innocence that are part of growing up.
Those betrayals don’t feel small when they happen, but they turn out to be, later.
Some betrayals, though, are fatal - to trust, to a relationship, even to life.
It’s that kind we are talking about today.
It’s that kind that we grieve today.
Good Friday is full of betrayals:
Judas turns Jesus over to the authorities.
Peter denies even knowing him, betrays their friendship, Jesus’ trust.
Today we grieve for those.
We listen or watch in horror as Jesus is sold out, then abandoned to his fate, by those he loved and led.
Today we remember with pain our own capacity to betray God’s trust,
to turn against God and one another in fear or greed or pain or indifference.
Tonight, as we hear Jesus’ story again, we face our own selfish or unthinking sin.
That’s one reason we face the cross together today:
because we all betray God from time to time.
We do it alone, and we do it together, when we focus on other things, protect ourselves, duck responsibility, or stay silent.
So tonight we face the cross, face our own sins of betrayal, face the consequences,
and give thanks that Christ’s love is stronger than our failings, and that the pain and darkness of that death are filled with grace.
And then — sometimes — as we hear this story and face the cross, we face another betrayal, too.
Tonight, lurking in the cracks of the story, is the pain of feeling betrayed by God.
Judas and Peter both felt it.
One was lost when the Messiah he’d been counting on turned out to be a rabble-rouser, marginal and troubling, not the conquering king, bringing freedom and peace, that God’s people had been expecting for so very long.
The other was lost when the teacher and leader he counted on “gave up,” quietly submitting to derision and death - and exposing his friends to those same dangers! - instead of challenging the authorities and protecting his followers.
That happens to us, too.
We can be let down, even feel betrayed by God.
People die too young, despite our prayers and our love.
Life is brutally unfair, no matter how hard we work, how well we attend to Christ’s teaching, no matter how fair we try to be.
Pain increases even when we’ve prayed for relief;
sometimes we find ourselves alone with temptation or fear;
and mean or petty or horrifying things are done in God’s name by faithful people we thought we could trust.
That betrayal, too, is at the cross tonight.
And we have to face that, too,
admit the pain we’d rather deny,
and prepare to forgive our own hurt as we ourselves have been forgiven.
And again, as we face the cross,
we give thanks.
Thanks because Jesus’ faithfulness in the face of betrayal and death is a promise that we can never be wholly abandoned by God. We give thanks for the revelation of a divine love that is greater than anything we’d ever hoped or prayed from God - a love that cannot be broken by any betrayal, cannot be broken by death, or driven away by grief.
So as we face the cross tonight, face our sin and our pain,
we find ourselves also and always face to face with love,
and give thanks.
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