Then Peter pulled Jesus aside to set him straight. You can imagine the lecture. “Jesus, enough of this ‘I’m going to die!’ talk. Yes, things are tense, but you’re the Messiah! God promised you victory! You’re our king, our mighty warrior. We’re going to go to Jerusalem, and you’re going to crush the enemies of God! We’re all behind you.”
Jesus rebuked Peter with the famous phrase, “Get behind me, Satan!” (v. 33).5
For Mark, it was impossible to understand the kind of Messiah Jesus was until he saw him crucified. This is why, throughout Mark’s Gospel, Jesus warned people not to tell anyone he was the Messiah.6 And it’s why the moment after Jesus died, a Roman soldier at the foot of his cross exclaimed, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” (Mark 15:39).
The Twelve could see Jesus’ messianic identity, but not clearly. They needed more than just that confession to see the kind of messiah Jesus is. They needed a second touch, and they’d get it at the cross.
But Judas wouldn’t be there because of how Jesus smelled.
THE ODOR OF BETRAYAL
The key moment for Judas gets almost no attention in the church. You won’t find it on most timelines of Holy Week, and it sometimes doesn’t even get its own italicized header in study Bibles (that’s how you really know it doesn’t matter). But immediately after Jesus was anointed at the house of Simon the Leper, Judas went to the chief priests to betray him. Why would this anointing be Judas’s turning point?
The tensions the Twelve experienced during Holy Week are nearly unimaginable. Jesus staged the triumphal entry to make a mockery of Pilate and his Roman legions. To any Jewish people watching, the signals were clear: Jesus was declaring himself to be the Messiah, here to challenge Rome’s power and authority.
But instead of confronting Rome, Jesus turned on his own people. He cleansed the temple and challenged the chief priests and scribes, publicly humiliating them. Even privately, the Twelve must have thought Jesus was acting strange. He cursed a fig tree for not bearing fruit, even though figs weren’t in season. And when the Galilean peasants marveled at the glory of Herod’s temple, the envy of nations and gods all over the world, Jesus announced it would be destroyed—not one stone left on another (Mark 13:2). His description of the Day of the Lord—the day of the Messiah’s coming conquest, foretold for centuries by prophets—was not a vision of victory but of devastation.
For the Jewish people, the temple was the bridge between heaven and earth, the religious and ideological center of the universe. If God’s throne is in the heavenly throne room, the temple was God’s footstool, where the physical presence of God lived among God’s people.7 The temple was the Jewish people’s source of life, hope, and security. They could not have imagined a messiah ruling without a temple. So Jesus’ prediction of the temple’s destruction—just days after he led a victory march into Jerusalem and in the midst of dangerous tensions with the religious elite—did not sound like a brave new world. It sounded like Jesus was giving up, like he thought his messianic mission was doomed to fail.
And then Simon hosted a banquet for Jesus. We know little about Simon and less about the mysterious woman who anointed Jesus. According to Mark and Matthew, Simon was a leper. Presumably Jesus had recently healed him—a great reason to throw a party in his honor. The woman simply appeared at the fringes of the party. We never even learn her name.8
The woman broke a jar of nard over Jesus. The Twelve claimed to be angry at the cost of the nard, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of a year’s wages. But the nard she used was a burial ointment, as strong perfumes were used in funeral rites to cover the smell of decomposition.
This means that, for the next several days, Jesus walked around smelling like a funeral parlor. No wonder the Twelve were upset. The woman essentially poured gasoline on a smoldering fire. Worse, rather than rebuke her, Jesus praised her faithfulness, again embracing the possibility that he was going to die soon. For Judas, this proved to be too much. Mark tells us that immediately after this event, Judas decided to betray Jesus.
TRUE BELIEVER
We can’t imagine how one of Jesus’ inner circle could betray him, so we project onto Judas. We assume he must have been a snake from the beginning; he was nothing but evil from head to toe. By ignoring the story Mark is telling, we miss what drove Judas to do the unthinkable.9
What if we assume Judas saw himself as a faithful follower of Jesus? Can we imagine that he was wholly committed to Jesus’ messianic mission? What if Judas’s sin wasn’t that he was a mole or a wolf among sheep, but rather a religious idolater? As Mark hinted, Judas may have been faithful, but to the wrong messiah.
The Twelve gave up everything to follow Jesus. They left their families and their livelihoods, and they abandoned their place in the world because Jesus promised them a new world, a better world. They believed him, they followed him, and they came to realize he was the long-awaited Messiah.
For the Twelve, messiah meant conquest and glory, not shame and defeat. But during Holy Week, Judas watched Jesus crumbling. We who live on the other side of Golgotha recognize that, even then, he bore the weight of his impending crucifixion. But to Judas, it looked like Jesus was giving up, losing faith in God’s promises. The scene at Simon’s table sealed Judas’s suspicions: Jesus allowed himself to be anointed for death and went around for the next few days smelling like it. It’s like that scene in Westerns where the town undertaker starts measuring the hero for a coffin the day before the big gunfight at high noon, except this hero was helping pick out his coffin. Jesus had embraced his death. Judas could not.
If Judas believed Jesus was God’s promised Messiah, and if Judas believed Jesus was losing faith in himself, he had only one option. Judas grabbed the wheel of history for himself. He betrayed his master and his messiah to the powers, confident that God would not fail, that at Jesus’ arrest the very skies would open and the armies of heaven would swoop in to destroy the enemies of the Messiah.
Except that’s not what happened. Jesus was not that kind of messiah then or now. Judas’s picture of him had no room for suffering—only triumph. Judas could not conceive of a messiah who lost; his messiah could only be a victor. Judas committed himself to the wrong cause, and his legacy is eternal infamy.
I’M A LOSER, BABY. SO WHY DON’T YOU KILL ME?
Judas’s story should give us all pause, especially when our picture of God is as triumphalist as his was. This God-who-wins isn’t called Baal or Marduk or Ganesh. We call this God “Jesus.” We claim he is the god to whom the Scriptures bear witness. This is despite Jesus’ declaration in John’s Gospel that God is most fully glorified when the Son is lifted up on the cross.10
Christians love to look toward the second coming to affirm our triumphalist narrative of God. As one popular megachurch pastor reflected on Jesus’ appearance at the battle of Armageddon in Revelation 19, he gushed, “Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. . . . I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.”11
In this line of thinking, the cross is an embarrassment, an unfortunate hiccup in God’s otherwise hypermasculine character. A god who dies must only allow this, because in the end, he’ll get what’s his.12 Many cannot imagine worshiping a god who loses. This has been the case since the beginning. It’s why Paul had to declare to the church in Rome, “I am not ashamed of the gospel” (Romans 1:16). But we are removed from Paul, and Christianity has become the dominant lens through which Western culture views the world. Crosses have become decorations and jewelry and tattoos.13 We don’t find it strange to take pride in the cross—but that’s because the cross is no longer a tool of execution used by a hostile empire.14
But occasionally the smell of death makes its way into our carefully air-conditioned churches. On July 4, 2016, prominent Christian rapper Lecrae tweeted a picture of a group of black slaves standing in a cotton field. The caption read, “My family on July 4th 1776.”15 Immediatel
y a fan responded, “Done supporting you bro. You make everything a race issue lately instead of a gospel issue. You promote guilt instead of love.”16 His response was only the first of many similar reactions from white Christians who were angry that he had dared suggest a connection between race and Jesus’ good news.
White Christians often react with hostility to the introduction of race into religious conversations. We feel threatened because our position has been one of cultural privilege and power, and we view racial justice as a loss for white culture. And our triumphalist faith has not taught us to be prepared for loss. Our whitewashed Savior invites us to let him die for us so we can skip the cross and go straight to the resurrection.
The Jesus who commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves must care about race and racial inequality as well as how those inequalities—inherited from institutionalized slavery and Jim Crow—shape other institutions like criminal justice, education, access to healthy food, and even churches. We teach our kids to sing, “Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight.” So we cannot, when confronted with the reality that all are not precious in the eyes of our culture, declare that race is not something God cares about.
Race is a difficult, delicate, divisive issue. But we cannot ignore that Sunday morning continues to be the most segregated hour of our week. White Christians like me cannot turn our backs on our brothers and sisters of color for the sake of a privatized, individualistic religion. We triumphalists want to pretend that our churches fell out of the sky twenty years ago.
It’s painful to acknowledge that our culture is built on a bedrock of imperialism, slavery, and genocide. The bodies of the oppressed lie rotting, and whenever the scent of death begins to waft up into our lives, we turn to religion to make it go away. Whenever a person of color insists that her life matters in a culture that acts otherwise, we gather in our segregated worship spaces to remind ourselves God loves us, and as long as we talk about Jesus, we don’t have to talk about anything going on in the world.
Race is only one area where our churches are uncomfortable with loss. We could talk about gender inequality. Or the consumerist church-shopping our competing activities encourage. Or our discomfort with basic spiritual practices like charity and service. We made church easy so as not to offend, lest our flock seek out greener pastures and find out the shepherd across the way has a better light show and funnier jokes.
Have we strayed far from Judas? Like Judas, we have no room in our picture of God for death, for loss, for weakness. We commit to our picture of God not because that picture is true but because our God tells us we’re good and moral. This God doesn’t require us to change, to consider the possibility we are wrong. This God doesn’t ask us to pick up our crosses and follow him anywhere. He calls us winners and assures us that he will battle on our behalf and vanquish every foe.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
What are we to do? How can we be certain we have not created a false god? Mark gave us the antidote: As with the Twelve, we must follow Jesus to the cross. Rather than flee from the smell of death, we must embrace it. Death takes many forms, but among the most painful is the death of our certainty.17
The triumphalist god loves certainty—the conviction that we are purely, wholly, unassailably right. When someone challenges us, we rush to defend our position, to consolidate followers, to cover over the discomfort, and to remind ourselves that we’re right and God is still on our side.
We’ve become skilled at shielding ourselves from the possibility of weakness, from the scent of death wafting into our lives. But if we are to follow Jesus to the cross—rather than run for the hills as the Twelve did, or try to do God’s work for him, as Judas did—we must embrace the pain of death. We must be prepared to receive it as the path to life.
Imagine if Judas had been less certain he was right about Jesus. Imagine if his faith had some room for doubt. Imagine if he had been standing with Peter on that beach when Jesus asked Peter three times whether he loved him, inviting three confessions to match Peter’s three denials (John 21:15-19). How would Jesus have reconciled with Judas? A kiss? An embrace? If only Judas had experienced the forgiveness and love the other Twelve had. Then he would not be the greatest of villains. He would be the patron saint of all those who were too committed to the wrong image of God until Jesus’ death freed them.
The early churches had to deal with many of the same issues we do. They were racially mixed. They operated in a culture that didn’t share their values. And we can see in the New Testament how they engaged these issues (see, for example, Acts 15:1-35; Romans 14:7-13; 1 Corinthians 12–13). They prayed together. They listened to one another. They committed to unity above all else and respected those with whom they had differences as valued members of the same body.
I struggle with triumphalism and certainty; no one has ever accused me of wallowing in self-doubt. I like to say (usually with a smirk), “I think I’m right about everything, but I know I’m not.” I committed a long time ago to listen more than I speak and to work hard to understand someone who disagrees with me. This means I spend a lot of time asking questions and keeping my opinions to myself. Each time I choose to keep my mouth shut, I’m dying a little death to my own certainty, to my idolatrous triumphalism.
Any time I find myself scratching my head and wondering, “How could they think that?” I turn to social media. I find four or five thoughtful people who hold that position, and I follow them. I commit to listen, especially when what they say makes me uncomfortable. I position myself as a student. I ask questions, and I don’t lecture.
Often I still disagree with the people or the position. But I always find a deeper level of respect and—particularly among the people in my congregation—a more intimate sense of community. We love each other not despite our differences but because of them. Giving up my certainty hasn’t hurt me. Surrendering to the death of my convictions has given me more pastoral authority, a stronger faith, and a better understanding of the God who would die for us and calls us to die as well.
Who will we be: Judas, who fled from the smell of death into the arms of Jesus’ enemies, or the nameless, faithful woman, who saw Jesus clearly, who knew exactly what kind of God he was and who played her own small role in his mission?
As we die a thousand little deaths, we follow Jesus toward the cross. Our life becomes, in Paul’s words, the fragrance of death to the world around us:
Thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? (2 Corinthians 2:14-16)
God is the ultimate iconoclast, always bursting through false images of God we construct. Jesus is the God who is beyond all our boxes, the God who cannot be constrained by our false images.18 Instead, when we surrender to this God, when we follow Jesus to the cross, we become a fragrance of life.
INTERLUDE
The Monster
at the End of This Book
We’re getting closer to the end of the book, and we have only one villain left: Satan, also called the devil. In some ways, Satan is unique. He is the only nonhuman villain, and he has unique access to God. Yet in important ways, Satan is the same as the other villains we have encountered. He was created good, then something happened to turn him against God.
Scholars have known for a long time that the most popular story of Satan’s fall—that he is Lucifer, who rebelled before creation—is not a good accounting of what the Scriptures actually say about Satan. (More on that in just a few pages.)
Unfortunately the Bible isn’t clear on exactly what happened—which we should expect to some degree, given that we’re using human words and ideas to express activity in the heavenly realm. That said, what follows is my attempt to ask how Satan
became the devil. Ultimately the answer to this question is unknowable. If God thought it was important, the Scriptures would be clearer on it.
As we’ve done with all the people in the stories so far, we’re going to practice empathy—not for their sake, but for ours. If we can find some empathy even for the devil, maybe we can reach across the aisle and do the difficult work of empathizing with the other side. After all, they’re not the devil—they’re just humans!
So with no further ado, turn the page with me, and let’s meet the monster at the end of the book, the devil who was once Satan, the Accuser.
13
Satan
AFTER THE TEMPTATION
The Accuser landed outside the throne room, his legions in tow. He furled his wings and hurried through the golden columns. He did not wish to compound his failure by arriving late to the Audience.
He heard, “Hail, Accuser!” and turned and saw the Healer rushing toward him across the grand portico. He sighed and strode through the gilded archway, and the Healer embraced him warmly. “You’re late, Accuser! Because you spoke with him, yes? What is he like?”
A strong hand gripped the Accuser’s shoulder, and the Strength’s voice boomed out, “Yes, tell us, Accuser. Do not flaunt your status before us. We are envious enough as it is.” As usual, the Strength seemed moments away from a hearty laugh.
“Status? I spend my days walking the earth. Have you been enjoying wine, Strength?” the Accuser asked.
Empathy for the Devil Page 15
