"The Butt of Betrayal"

The soccer ball was stopped. "Here's my chance," I thought. "I can kick this sucker, score, and be the Phys. Ed. hero of the day." To see if anyone was going to block me, I looked up and around. Like the application of the defibrillator paddles, I almost yelled, "Clear!" Instead, I again looked down to kick the ball; my foot was already in full swing; I missed and I fell on my butt, the butt of betrayal.

As an assistant physical education director, I was fairly coordinated. The ball had stopped. But an earthquake caused the ball to roll three feet. That is a true story, other than the falling on my butt part.

We may experience betrayal in almost any situation. It is not, necessarily, sourced in broken human relationships, trickery, or tom-foolery. Betrayal does not require a source at all.

Circumstance can betray us just as convincingly as humans. I felt betrayed when my mother left our family of six kids. I felt betrayed when she lay in a coma, then in a coffin, having died at the age of 39. One situation required that someone exercise human volition; the other required none. Both times I felt equally betrayed.

Betrayal, then, has as much to do with our expectation or perception of what we deserve as it does with actions that hurt us. Perhaps that knowledge is what nurtured Jesus' response to Judas. To refer to Judas as a mere protagonist, however, reduces the record to nothing more than theater, an act, in which there would be little useful truth. Rather, what we have is a factual personification of betrayal for all eternity,

The Bible references Judas with words synonymous with Satan himself. There was a person; there was one whom Jesus knew would birth violence; he became the definition of betrayal. Jesus was able to see beyond the person who turned against him to the One in whose purpose Christ found His being. In a sense Jesus was not deceived at all. How might one be deceived if one has prior knowledge?

In this we find our example. Might we know that while we perceive betrayal, there is a principle beyond. "The Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed..." instituted the Lord's Supper. In the presence of his own enemies, he prepared a table clothed with the invitation to come, to believe, to trust, to ingest by faith. He was inviting both the deceiver and those who are deceived to comfort and hope.

Should  this not be our own response to deception? Is this not a pattern for all the elect to follow? "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." Jesus knew, personally, the true deceiver; he also knew, personally, the True One. As we experience deception, we ought also to experience God's foreknowledge. We may, therefore, continue to respond with peace, invitation, love, and hope.