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I am considering
these two works together as I happened to read them one after the
other in the midst of Lent, this timing was, at least consciously,
accidental – but clearly they speak into that season.
With the Last Days
of Judas Iscariot the effect of reading the text of a play is of
course distinct to the experience one would get attending a
performance.
It is a play set
somewhere in the anterooms of heaven, in a courtroom where the
eternity destination is considered. It echoes with the words of the
prayer of King's College London, which we said daily in Chapel, in
which we remembered the “strict and solemn account which we must
one day give before the judgement-seat of Christ”, although perhaps
the courtroom of this play is not quiet the set up the authors of
that prayer had in mind.
The play deals with
an appeal hearing against the eternal damnation of Judas.
Consideration of the fate of Judas is a powerful proxy for the wider
question of the nature of God's love and mercy. Most of our
traditional understandings of Judas' fate would appear to place him
beyond the reach of God's love and mercy – but this is a scandalous
conclusion, as if true then the God we believe to be infinite is in
fact finite and the ramifications of this can quickly be an
unravelling of anything worth believing in. But it is not actually
that simple to grant Judas mercy, because then we risk creating a
dynamic in which actions have no consequences, which don't seem right
either.
The play is funny,
the courtroom receives a range of characters, biblical, historical,
fictional, most of whom are hamming it up for laughs, I enjoyed it,
but if I am honest I didn't actually find much substance in it –
until suddenly, toward the end, the tone changes, and perhaps the
power of what happens next hits home in part from its juxtaposition
with the fluff of the preceding bulk of the play.
We get an encounter
between Jesus and Judas, there is intense anger – Judas is angry,
unable to bear Jesus' words of kindness – there is some subtle use
of biblical images, Jesus asks Judas to “feed my lambs” - words
from the Gospel when Jesus restores Peter after his denial. But Judas
slips away, back into a “catatonic state” - Jesus pleads “Please
love me, Judas.” and you want to weep at Judas' response “I
can't.”. The plays concluding action is Jesus washing the
comatosed Judas' feet – a sign that even in the midst of our
ongoing rejection Jesus will continue to love us.
Meanwhile, “Missing”
plays with the interesting comparison between the 3 days that the boy
Jesus was “lost” in Jerusalem (following a family passover visit
to the city) and the 3 days between crucifixion and resurrection.
The idea is interesting but I am not sure that the execution is
entirely successful.
At moments
Falaschi-Ray is highly imaginative in fleshing out the stories,
especially with the childhood tale where the Gospel account is hardly
even a sketch, and yet there were also a number of times where the
narrative becomes clunky in order to shoe horn it into the biblical
structure. Also I didn't actually feel the connections that were made
between the two stories were particularly interesting – mostly it
seems in the childhood tale we were just being given elaborate back
stories to fairly insignificant details of the Gospel accounts of the
Passion. We are also given a “plausible” scenario for the legend
of Jesus' visit to England – which personally I found distracted
from my ability to invest in the narrative.
The second part of
the book, exploring the Passion, is more successful, and this
success, such as it is, is largely independent of its pairing with
the earlier part. The account of the Harrowing of Hell (somehow
appropriately Chapter 13) gives we have another meeting of Jesus and
Judas – but the moment of forgiveness is a little too easy...
“'Of course I
forgive you. However, I can't help the fact that throughout the
future you're going to have a really rubbish reputation.'
Judas smiled through
his tears; at least Yeshua hadn't lost his sense of humour.”
There is something
authentic that I like about the idea of Jesus making a quip like this
at such a moment, but after the gut wrenching encounter of “the
Last Days” it simply isn't enough.
And so after
considering this two works where do we get to in relation to that
central question about the love and mercy of God – both show God's
desire for Judas, they reject any notion that there is a limit to
love. However I think “Missing” is in danger of losing sight of
consequences – it is just a little too tidy whereas “the Last
Days” success is in showing that even with God's infinite love
forgiveness is not easy. We can probably all think of times when
someone we love has stretched our capacity to love them to the limit,
some may even have times when their capacity was broken. Maybe it
doesn't make sense to talk of stretching God's limitless love to the
limit – but if ever that idea is intelligible it is within the
encounter in “the Last Days” - and that seems the only way to
reconcile our understanding of Judas.
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