A kiss the
sign of betrayal! Why, Judas, why? Is it just one more ruse, aimed at
catching your prey wholly unawares until the very last second when,
lightning-like, the cobra strikes? When one considers what Jesus has meant to
you until recently, and you to him, your tone of ruthless self-determination
fairly chills the blood. Now, finally, it is you running the show,
running him in fact, literally shaping his earthly destiny. You have
become wholly depersonalized, rather like a meticulously poised, infinitely
accurate nuclear missile hurtling unstoppably toward its target. And yet your
language and gestures retain all the outward symbols of reverence and
friendship. In advance, and with clever premeditation, you have instructed
those who hate your Master: The one I shall kiss is the man; seize him. But
why do you approach him this time surrounded by a mob? Never before were you
afraid of the dark, in his company. Is even your own blood chilled by your
betrayal?
Moreover, how can tender kissing (an action
of love) and violent seizing (with intent to destroy) become one and the
same thing in your heart? How can you affirm such conflictive actions within
the same promiscuous sentence? Is this, then, the key to your whole person and
tragedy, namely, this intolerable contradiction in your heart, this colossal
collision in your breast between the Disciple and the Betrayer? In that case
how very fittingly you embody us all—all of us, I say, who started off as
seekers of the Light, as joyful servants of Highest Truth. But then all too
often we betray the deepest tenderness and yearning of our heart and must,
naturally, set out to destroy the very Source of Love that had so powerfully
seduced us, drawing us to his Heart. Are we not often tempted to look upon
ourselves as arrant fools for having entertained for even a moment the dream of
our souls’ betrothal to the divine Bridegroom? And, ah, how well we know
that we save for our own heart our cruelest, our all-obliterating violence, in
order to punish it for having been so gullible as to be duped by a phantom
divine seduction.
Yes, indeed, Judas. Much more than a simple
practical ruse must motivate your action of concealing betrayal with a tender
kiss. By doing away with Jesus, the object of your erstwhile devotion, you want
to wreak vengeance on your own former naïveté and force a poisoned kiss to wipe
out every vestige of innocence from your heart, as in an atomic holocaust. For
you have now become a Political Realist and your Realpolitik has no
toleration for personal feelings of tenderness or the quiet satisfactions of
friendship and a shared life of devotion. All that is surely for the weak, for
the pansy-souled. Yet are you not the first true victim of your new-fangled
hatred for both human and divine tenderness, and for the mystical universe of
joyful communion it represents? Jesus is but the exterior occasion of your
self-destruction, the objectification of your own self-hatred. Some people
commit murder because they feel unworthy of their victim’s love, and to be
unconditionally loved with persistence only reminds them of their shameful unworthiness.
But why, Judas, am I intent on holding this
distressing dialogue with you? Do you think it is to point my finger accusingly
at you? Quite the opposite, my friend! It must be because you are, in turn, the
projection of my own flight from the commitment required by intimacy and deep
love. How I toil to construct for myself a new, stainless-steel identity based
on hard-nosed, this-worldly “realism”! For only such realism is reputed to
produce results. And yet this titanic self-determination is such a hollow
pretense that, in its wobbly insecurity, it cannot abide anything that reminds
it of its sham, and so it must destroy all evidence that truest strength
lies in fidelity to the Beloved, even in his weakness, dishonor and defeat. True
strength of character is to be sought in purity of heart and in steadfast
interior devotion to the object of my love.
The Taking of
Christ, Michelangelo
Merisi da Caravaggio, 1602, 133.5 x 169.5 cm., oil on canvas, National Gallery
of Ireland. Meditation by Father Simeon.