Sunday 8 October 2017

Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him. – Matthew 10:4


Today’s Scripture Reading (October 8, 2017): Matthew 10

Karl Marx’s gravestone contains these words: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” It is the drive that exists within all of us who look out at our world and see wrong; we want to right that which is wrong. Marx saw several things that he viewed as incompatible with a civilized society. Poverty was wrong. The class divisions within society were wrong. At the heart of Karl Marx’s ideology was the concept that we were all created equal, that we all have an equal right to live and breathe and enjoy the finer things in life. And religion was wrong because, according to the way that Marx viewed Christianity primarily, it promised a heaven that we could wait for while refusing to change the reality in which we live. I have a few friends that still hold to these very Marxian views and very Marxian solutions to the problem.

Ultimately, Marxist ideology fails because it does not get rid of the dividing lines. It does not get rid of poverty, but it changes the ones who are rich. It fails to eradicate class, but rather switches the people who experience power in society, leaving us to continue our struggle with life. Changing power from Christian to Muslim or from White to Black does not take care of the underlying illness of our society, but rather simply changes where it is that we feel the pain.

Jesus came with a different idea. Not only did he attempt to remove the power from those who held it, in his society the religious and political elites that existed in the Middle East, but he also taught his followers that they were not to rule, rather, they were to become the servants of their brothers and sisters. It was not a lesson that Jesus’s followers learned very well. As soon as Christianity came to power under the reign of Constantine in the fourth century, it seems that we immediately forgot that we were supposed to be servants and we became rulers. The problem? We had not, and still have not, even come close to understanding the ideology of the one who we claim to follow – and we still want to fix things that we don’t understand.

Of all of Jesus disciples, Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot may have been the biggest threat to the unity of the apostles and the mission of Jesus. There was nothing intrinsically evil about either one of them. But they both appear to have well-established ideologies separate from their decision to follow Jesus. For Simon, his ideology was that of the Zealots of the first century. The Zealots were committed to the violent overthrow of Roman Kings and the Herodian dynasty and their supporters and restore rule over Israel to the Jews. A little more than four decades after Jesus chose Simon to follow him, a Zealot rebellion would result in the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the horrible destruction, and the massacre at Masada, and the disappearance of Israel from the world for the almost the next 1900 years.

It is entirely possible that Judas Iscariot was also a member of Zealots. His ideology seemed to match. He was frustrated that Jesus was not willing to take up arms against their rulers and restore Israel to the Jews. But he also appeared to be frustrated with poverty and class divisions. Judas Iscariot and Karl Marx held some of the same belief structures. For Judas, Jesus just wasn’t moving fast enough, and that alone made him a candidate for the betrayal of the cause of the one who he served.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Mark 6

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