June 26, 2007 by djackson.

This is what I get for having 1) no knowlege of art and 2) a wife who is way on yonder smarter than I am.  One of those things I could do something about.  The other is just the way it’s gonna be.

I wrote last week about Tintoretto’s “Last Supper,” specifically about Judas’ bored body language and all the spiritual insights to be gained from it.  Well, I thought I was talking about Judas.  I ran the seating chart from the gospels:  John was reclining against Jesus’ shoulder (I know, I know, but I’m so much more comfortable with that than “bosom”) on the right, so that one’s easy.  Peter was next to John so he could kibbutz - easy again.  Jesus gives the dipped bread to Iscariot so I figure the betrayer has to be the first disciple stage left.  Easy again.

What I missed was that on the other side of the counter, dressed in red and minus the regulation halo, is a guy squatting on the ground talking to the bored guy.  This squatter is plenty close enough for the Lord to hand him a nosh.  I checked it out online and discovered that, sure enough, the con-o-sewers all agree that’s old Thirty-Pieces-of-Silver himself.  And to make matters worse, he doesn’t look bored in the least.  He’s sort of gesturing toward Jesus as if to ask the bored guy what gives.  (Significantly, he gestures with his left-hand, probably an example of Euro-centric sinistrophobia.) 

So I wonder - are all my musings about boredom invalidated?  Or is the bored guy just bored with Judas, attempting to signal subtly and politely (which never works with a genuine bore) that he is trying to concentrate on what the Master is saying and doesn’t want to hear the accountants’ latest conspiracy theory about how the Galilean disciples always get special treatment? 

Let’s look at the bored guy for a moment.  Probably Thaddaeus.  Why Thaddaeus?  He just seems the type.  His name only appears in two out of four Gospels surveyed and even then only when the Evangelists are announcing the starting lineup.  True, he does make the first-string, but after the booming voice calls his name over the loudspeaker and he runs onto the field we never hear it again.  Thaddaeus was on the offensive line of Team Apostle.  Peter, James, and John are the backfield with Matthew and Andrew at wide receiver and tight end.  Thad hunkers in three-point dependability and only gets attention if he holds or busts the snap count.

In fact, Thaddaeus probably wasn’t his real name.  Most scholars equate him with a different disciple named by Luke and John.  So Thaddaeus was a nickname.  It may come from the Hebrew thed, or “breast.”  In some later manuscripts Matthew says they also called him Lebbaeus, from leb, meaning “heart.”  This has led to speculations ranging from “Dear One” to “Bold One,” but personally I think I know what it means:  Sucker.  Thaddaeus was the soft-hearted disciple, the one whose mother taught him to be nice, the soft-touch for obsessives and nut-cases. 

It reminds me of a line from Frederick Buechner’s novel Lion Country where the narrator, Antonio Parr, first meets the Texas tycoon whose oil millions will finance the shady evangelistic enterprises of Parr’s father-in-law.  Antonio recalls the encounter.

Herman Redpath took an immediate liking to me, and as soon as I saw him, I could have predicted that he would.  All my life it has been that way.  The boy with the worst breath in school, the aunt who has made ouija board contact with Lillian Russell, the person who has recently had his gallstones removed and is carrying them around in an envelope - I have inevitably been the one they felt drawn to. 

Personally, those lines resonate with me.  All my life I’ve been a magnet for the iron filings of social settings, the shavings scraped off the main body by firmer, more decisive people.  Oddballs have an unerring instinct for people too weak to fend them off.  They pick up our scent like hyenas sniffing out lame gazelles on outskirts of the herd.  Look for me at most parties and you’ll find me cornered on a couch by someone who has no barometer for acceptable personal space or uncomfortable levels of eye contact. 

So that look on Thaddaeus’ face, that slumped posture and vacant stare - it isn’t boredom but calm resignation.  He’d like to listen to Jesus; he’d rather pay attention like the smart kids who get ducky stickers on their papers at test time.  He hungers to hear those majestic words of life spoken for the first and only time by the one who is both host and menu:  This is my body. . .this is my blood.  Instead Senor Soft-Heart gets an earful of Long Judas Silver’s ADD monologue about some irreverent irrelevancy.  Nobody comes to his rescue.  Nobody else notices.  Nobody offers to clock in and baby sit Judas for a few minutes.  The others on his side of the table peer past him trying to pin down the transubstantiation or prestidigitation or whatever it is Jesus is doing over there.  Thaddaeus can’t find it in himself to tell Judas to hush up for once.  He just doesn’t have the heart; or else he has too much.

But maybe Thaddaeus is right where he should be.  Because maybe the kingdom hasn’t really come until every potluck has a place for betrayers, or even just misfits so hungry for attention that they can’t even sit still for an act of God.  And maybe for that to happen, someone has to be the blotting paper that soaks up the spilled ink of their socially awkward overflow.  Maybe nobody else could have been fully blessed by the eucharist if good old Thad hadn’t been willing - however unwillingly - to lend an ear to Judas. 

And that’s the other reason I think the disciple in question is Thaddaeus:  because, if you run a data analysis on the various spread sheets of the apostles you find that the Thaddaeus of Mark and Matthew is almost certainly “Judas the son of James” from Luke’s list.  John does what he can to rehab the title, calling him “Judas, not Iscariot,” but you can still see why a nickname seemed in order to the early church.  But perhaps, once it was all over, I mean - once the shiny slivers of silver had gone dancing across the temple floor and the feet of the betrayer had gone dancing in the thin air above Field of Blood - perhaps then, in some quiet moment of reflection as he waited with the rest in the upper room for something he didn’t understand and half doubted would ever happen. . .perhaps it was then that Judas realized he’d been singled out by Judas because there was more Judas in Judas than Judas really wanted to see. 

So Thaddaeuses of the world, take heart!  We also serve who only stand and listen to the bores so everybody else won’t have to, and so the kingdom can truly have come.  And let us not grow cocky or cast ourselves as martyrs worthy of a white robe and a futon beneath the altar.  Our work should also remind us that those who single us out probably know what they’re doing, and we should seek our faults and flaws in the mirror their maniacal pupils provide. 

And though Iscariot slipped into the night - a dark night, we are specifically told, and yet one that the blackness of his heart could manage to darken farther - let us remember that Judases sometimes repent before they get to Gethsemane’s kiss.  Who knows?  It could be the simple loan of a listening ear that turns the trick.

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June 19, 2007 by djackson.

A friend recently returned from a brief sojourn in Italy.  (I’m going to Houston next week!)  She dithyrambed on a bit about the sites - Venice in particular.  What stood out amidst the standard fare of obligatory gondola rides and St. Mark’s Square was a visit to the church of San Giorgio Maggiore where, in the chancel, she saw Tintoretto’s “Last Supper.”  She recommended I check it out online.  (http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/t/tintoret/2religio/l_supper.html) 

Even pixilated on a flat computer monitor, the canvas is impressive.

The whole thing, especially the half-spectral angelic hosts boiling down from the rafters, justifies the artist’s sobriquet, “Il Furioso.”  Color, movement, and energy burst from the canvas.  I like Peter (I presume it’s Peter), on his feet and evidently in the act of helping the Lord serve the bread and wine properly.  Or perhaps making sure John, seated between him and Jesus, uses the right fork.  There is a Navajo word for busybody which literally translates as “one who tells a sheep which weed to nibble.”  The Big Fisherman strikes me as that sort.  The servants (yes, there are servants; Tintoretto, like most medieval and Renaissance artists, is gleefully anachronistic - the joint looks like a 16th century inn) don’t even glance toward the action at the table:  a burly woman in the foreground hands a plate to a busboy as a housecat takes advantage of this distraction to lick leftovers from the dirty dishes.

Judas intrigues me the most.  At this holy moment he slumps in his seat just to the left of Our Lord, both elbows on the table, his head cradled in his open hand, and glances with mild interest at the inauguration of the eucharist and the vivid portrayal of God’s bankruptcy for our redemption.  He looks as if he wishes he’d brought his iPod. 

Is it possible that the worst sins arise from indifference rather than evil?  Could it be that - if I dare quibble with Augustine - pride is not the deadliest of the seven deadly sins?  Indeed, some scholars believe that sloth originally hit lead-off in that accursed roster.  Pride drives Peter to shove himself into the middle of the holy moment; pride compelled Peter to keep his hands clean when they should have been dirty and to try to keep his feet dirty when they needed to be cleaned.  Pride is a problem but Peter’s pride repeatedly pushes him into the presence of Jesus, goads him into leaning his overactive jaw into the left hook of the Master’s rebuke.  If pride goeth before a fall, then it is relatively safe because the fall is what brings about redemption.

The servants don’t get it, of course, but then that isn’t their shauri.  They at least seem set on doing the job they signed on for, on keeping the water glasses filled and replenishing the chips and salsa.  I sometimes wonder if straight-forward plodding is not a powerful spiritual preservative: it can’t save, but it keeps the soul from spoiling until salvation comes.  In Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” Charlie Marlowe avoids being sucked into the seductive vortex of primeval orgies because he has a leaky pipe to repair. 

But Judas - Judas is bored.  Could boredom be the birth canal of betrayal?  Theologians and novelists have debated Iscariot’s motivation.  Money?  Almost certainly not, though to be sure money changed hands.  Judas, the apostolic Shylock, knew the value of shekel.  He’d been keeping two sets of books for quite some time now (John 12.6) and his auditor’s instinct could estimate an offering’s market value with no more than a glance and a sniff (John 12.5).  Judas strikes me as a used ox salesman complete with a polyester plaid toga and a cheesy smile.  Given that he got only low-bluebook for putting the whack on a single-owner messiah (Exodus 21.32), I can’t think money was really the point.

What if the archetypal betrayal arose from indifference?  What if Judas sold out the Son of God simply for something to do?  A heart so hard that it can yawn at the eucharist makes Hell a certainty and Heaven an irrelevance because even in the presence of God I must jazz up my stultified soul by snorting a few lines of sin.  G. K. Chesterton diagnoses the same syndrome when he writes,

There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of “pretending”; when  he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian.  It is then that he torments the cat. . . . The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose.  Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. . . .They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal.  They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.

Interesting that Chesterton locates this boredom chronologically in the afternoon.  Medieval monks referred to accidie as “the noonday demon.”  It slides like a slug across our souls just at that moment when a heavy meal on a hot day makes all our work seem worthless. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, like his mentor Martin Luther, knew the velvety crush of this amorphous indifference.  His biographer Sabine Dramm describes it as the “susceptibility to passivity, the leaden heaviness sometimes experienced in the early church. . . . an acidic bitterness of the soul, the gray odium of an evaporating faith.”  A river may run amock and overflow its banks, but it can be dammed and diked and made to turn turbines and produce power with a purpose.  A swamp simply stagnates and breeds mosquitoes and malaria. 

I don’t like to think about how often my posture and countenance on Sunday morning announce me a Judas.  I worry that professed believers often unthinkingly absent themselves from the Lord’s table.  The schizoid soul that lets me sing half of a hymn while thinking about my household chores hints that I have become innured to the intimations of immortality.  If I can sit unmoved in the presence of God as he reveals himself in the choir anthem, the sermon, the Supper, or even the irritating saint seated to my left, I have slid my foot forward on the first small step of the road to Hakel-dama.

How do we handle this subtle sin?  St. John of the Cross argues that accidie arises from the fact that spiritual things are an acquired taste for carnal beings.  The answer to indifference is to tolerate it until what currently bores us begins to bless us.  We can forgive Judas for his indifference, but must reject the desperate measures he undertook to escape it.  In other words, it is no sin to be bored in church (or when at prayer, or reading Scripture), but it is a sin to let boredom keep you away from any of these things.  (And just a side note:  boring sermons may not be all the preacher’s fault; Judas managed to let his mind wonder as Christ preached through the broken bread and spoke the words of eternal life.)

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