Good Response to the Gospel of Judas

From Bishop Basil of Sergievo

Christians should not be trying to escape from the material world
Credo by Bishop Basil of Sergievo

Much has been made recently of the Gospel of Judas, a Coptic text whose Greek original dates back to some time in the second century AD.

What characterises this text is its reinterpretation of the life of Christ in a Gnostic manner, its picture of the sardonic, “laughing Christ”, and the important role assigned to Judas in bringing to fulfilment what Christ had come to do. Had Christ not died, His revelation of the inanity of this world would not have been complete.

The Gnostic position, which we know not only through the refutations of early Christian Fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyons, who was writing in about AD180, but now also from the library of works found in Nag Hamadi in Egypt in the late 1940s, was that this world which we perceive with the senses is a lower, faulty creation brought into existence by an inferior and even evil god whose nature is quite different from that of the true God to whom we should relate.

The most striking distinction, however, between the Gnostic Gospels and the four canonical Gospels is that they do not focus on Christ’s betrayal, crucifixion and resurrection as the central events in His life. They focus on teaching and knowledge: those things that can be grasped by the discursive, reasoning mind. In Gnosticism, it is knowledge that saves.

The Crucifixion, however, tells us that the material world is important. It tells us that death is important. What happens to us in this world is crucial. We are not here to allow ourselves to be lifted out of this world into a realm of the spirit, but to find ourselves in this world and to be saved within it. The whole structure of Lent points in this direction.

After 40 days of fasting and intensified prayer that are designed to allow us to see ourselves more clearly, to establish distance between ourselves and our ordinary lives, we are then plunged into the intensity and chaos of Holy Week.

We face human weakness and sin, criminality, betrayal, political and social tensions, a violent, occupying power, messianic hopes of national salvation, a burning expectation of the end of the world and of human history.

What we do not do is move gracefully from fasting and prayer to resurrection. Between us and resurrection stands the Cross.

Not because God wishes to punish us. Not because it is a good thing to suffer, and that the more we suffer the better our reward will be. Not because the greater the pain, the greater the gain. But because in order to move on to resurrection, something has to die in us. And this is our involvement in and complicity with the fallenness of this world, the very world that brought about the death of Christ.

Yes, human life in this world is not what God wanted it to be. But the reason for this is not some outside force, some second-class divinity who in his or her ignorance has got things wrong. The cause of the mess in which we find ourselves is to be found within ourselves.

And if the cause is in ourselves, no amount of externally derived, objective knowledge about the aeons and upper reaches of creation will save us. To be saved we must change, and this change must begin from within, and will inevitably involve our desire and our will.

One of the most vivid images of the Christian life as understood by the tradition of the Church is provided by the Song of the Three Holy Youths preserved in the Greek translation of the Old Testament that is sung as part of the Easter Vigil in the Byzantine Church.

The three young men have been cast into the “burning, fiery furnace” because of their refusal to bow down and worship the Babylonian gods. As they walk about in the flames, they are protected by an Angel of the Lord who turns the heat of the flames into a “moist and whistling breeze”. The point here is that God did not remove them from the furnace, but he did enable them to survive.

So too the thrust of the Gospels is not that God wishes us to leave the world, but that we should be saved within the world and within history while we wait for ultimate salvation in the Age to come. This the Gnostic Gospels do not tell us. They teach us that we must escape, that our place is elsewhere.

While in a sense this is true also for the Church, in that our true citizenship is in Heaven, we are told at the same time that our salvation must be worked out here.

It is in the mess of our incarnate, enfleshed being that God wishes to see us saved. And our salvation is bound up with the story of Christ, with his betrayal, crucifixion, resurrection and continued presence with us here, in this world, until the end of the Age.

Bishop Basil of Sergievo is head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain.