Over the West Wing series we've looked at questions for which there are no absolute answers. Issues such as capital punishment, asylum, responses to terrorism, and whistleblowing are all so multi-faceted that we often find our own views challenged and expanded by the sincerely-held views of others. Even on the sensitive subject of homosexuality and Bible, we often encounter people who are honest and sincere in the position they hold. We may challenge their understanding of facts, we will see it as part of our mission to highlight the prejudice in their opinions, but their view is often held with a high degree of personal integrity. Acknowledging that fact is often the key to opening up a rational dialogue.
And on most ethical issues, our Christian faith provides us with no absolute answers. It certainly influences our thoughts and opinions, but on most of the major moral issues of our time there are many rationally-held views which claim their basis in Christianity. This is perhaps why it can be rather uncomfortable, even a bit destabilizing, for Christians who have developed some confidence in their faith to stray into these open-ended dilemmas. We are comfortable when we have the security of an absolute answer: but sometimes we have to stretch and re-assess our faith when we are asked to function in that zone of uncertainty where facts are few and judgments can be wide and diverse. There is a sense in which I hope the West Wing sermon series has made us feel somewhat uncomfortable as it has led us into that zone of uncertainty.
In today's clip, Toby, the Communications Director, is discovered to have been the source of an information leak to the press. In every other aspect of his work in the service of President Bartlet we have been shown a Toby who is loyal, highly intelligent, able to think strategically, and well-equipped to unravel complex situations without losing any of the threads of the argument. However, beneath the surface of this man we have also seen a powerful and driving belief in a set of ethical values, underpinned by a potent mix of his Jewish faith and his liberal politics, which sometimes cause him to seem a harsh critic of his less certain colleagues.
On the issue behind the information leak, he parts company with his colleagues and believes he has no choice but to release information which he expects will force the President's hand. As the episode develops, we are drawn powerfully into the sincerity of his motives and the inner battles he endures with his conflicting loyalties; but he eventually arrives at the decision that he only has one option. And he leaks the information.
The immediate reaction from his colleagues, who don't discover that Toby is the source for many weeks, is that they have been betrayed. Toby cannot come clean about his actions, and suddenly he finds himself psychologically isolated and in a very lonely place. He wonders continually whether his actions, and the outcome he has achieved, justify the guilt and isolation he instinctively feels.
The role of whistleblower, even when undertaken for the very best of motives, is never a comfortable place to be. It can be our only moral and ethical option, but it always requires tremendous reserves of courage and resilience. And the most painful aspect of the process is that others involved will accuse us of betrayal as they apply their own ethical values to the case.
'Betrayal' is such a convenient label for the uncomfortable revelations of others. Our own insecurities tend to keep us on the lookout for betrayal. It can also be a convenient way of offloading our own guilty involvement onto someone else.
It is really interesting to look at the guilt that our Christian tradition offloads onto Judas Iscariot, not least because most of the apparent evidence would fail to get him convicted of the claims which our scriptures make. Indeed there is a powerful argument which suggests that Judas believed himself to be a whistleblower. But in the absence of any reliable history from the time, we have only the gospel interpretation of him as the Betrayer with a capital B, which we so often seem to accept without challenge.
I chose the reading from Matthew today because he goes further than the other gospel-writers in gathering evidence which condemns Judas as a traitor to his Master's cause. Matthew compiled his gospel around 60 years after the events he describes. Matthew was not an eye witness and wrote down a composite version of events which had been passed down to him. We know he based much of his text on the Gospel of Mark as well as introducing much material from his own sources. So, by around 70AD in the case of Mark, and by around 90AD in the case of Matthew, we have a fully-implicated betrayer who was specifically responsible for engineering the arrest of Jesus. That's where the guilt lies - that's who our scapegoat is to be.
Yet, there are so many features of the extended story of Judas, which we have by the end of that first century, but which just don't hang together convincingly. Paul was the first writer to put down anything which has come down to us about the life of Jesus. Before his first letter, he spent time in Jerusalem with Peter and James who were leading the Christian community there after Jesus's death. Yet he says nothing about a specific betrayer. The most he says is that on the night before his death Jesus was 'handed over'. The frequent translation of that phrase as 'betrayed' (presumably with some unnamed person in mind) is widely thought to be a bad translation of the original Greek. If the tradition of Judas the Betrayer had been there within the Jerusalem church when Paul visited those who were eye witnesses, would Paul really have ignored it completely when he writes of the night of the arrest?
Many other parts of the Judas story can be traced to Jewish prophecies surrounding the long-awaited Messiah. The thirty pieces of silver are foretold in a prophecy from the Book of Zechariah, chapter 11, where the character called the Shepherd King of Israel is betrayed for 30 shekels of silver which were eventually hurled back into the temple treasury - just as they are in Matthew's narrative. It does seem that this piece of drama found its way into the Gospel tradition as a way of reinforcing the claim of Jesus to Messiahship which his followers wanted to develop as justification for their growing movement.
Also we are asked to believe that Judas betrayed his Master for the princely sum of around six pounds - that's what 30 pieces of silver comes out at. We blithely accept that Judas was driven by greed, but it doesn't really make sense when we understand the absurdly low value of the bribe involved.
Many scholars would now argue that, if Judas did have any shady dealings at all with the Jewish authorities, he probably saw himself as a whistleblower. He may have thought he was forcing Jesus's hand, or even that he was carrying out Jesus's deeper, unspoken wishes. There are suggestions that he sympathised with the cause of the Zealots and that his own passionate understanding of the coming of the Messiah needed more vigour and confrontation than the passive resistance and message of unconditional love which characterised the life and teaching of his Master. Jesus had to be brought to the centre of the arena so that he could challenge the corruption of the Jewish authorities and truly take up the leadership of the revolutionary new Kingdom of God. When Jesus spoke of his forthcoming death, surely that would be the death of a martyr for the cause of Jewish freedom - the glorious death of a hero.
Of course, we now know that the events after Jesus's arrest were a catalogue of political intrigue and injustice which led to anything but a hero's glorious death in its outward appearance. And out of that collection of frightening and panic-filled events came an oral tradition, eventually committed to writing, in which the whistleblower became a betrayer about whom nothing good could be said.
So, whether we focus on Judas Iscariot, a shadowy figure from 2000 years ago, or on Toby Ziegler, a character from our 21st century political drama, the lesson seems to be that ethical choices and moral judgments can lead us into very strange and lonely territory. We find ourselves in that zone of uncertainty where there are no absolutes to cling to, and where our faith tradition can inform our judgments but cannot make them for us.
There is no magic formula in Christianity where Choice 1 plus Choice 2 always equals Outcome 3. Life is open-ended and full of choices. The most we can ask is that the guiding principles of our faith, drawn from the life and teachings of Jesus, will shed some light on the path we might best choose.
Amen.
(Philip Jones)
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.