Beautiful and Terrible--March 25, 2021

Beautiful and Terrible--March 25, 2021

Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priest in order to betray him to them. When they heard it, they were greatly pleased, and promised to give him money. So he began to look for an opportunity to betray him. [Mark 14:10-11]

I suppose it depends on your position.

I supposed it depends on the question of from what point in space you are looking at it, whether it is good… or bad… or both. The black hole, I mean—the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

I am no expert on such matters, but as I understand it, those who are experts on our galaxy—namely, astrophysicists, astronomers, and other scientists with impressive titles—are convinced that at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy there is a super-massive black hole, around which the whole galaxy, all 100,000 light-years in diameter of it, spins.

Black holes, in case you have forgotten that day of science class, are so massive and so dense that nothing—not even light itself—can escape their gravitational pull (hence the name “black hole”). They are believed to be the corpses of exploded stars that collapse in on themselves. And of course, as a black hole pulls more and more surrounding matter into itself, crushing it into near-nothingness, the black hole becomes more and massive, heavier and heavier, and increasingly dense. And that means that they become “hungrier” over time, too—sucking in more and more of the mass and energy of the stars or gas or galactic “stuff” around it.

All of this means that if you are zooming in your camera lens very near to the center of our galaxy, the black hole is unquestionably terrible and destructive. It is essentially an annihilation machine, powered with merciless efficiency by the laws of physics. A black hole is a destroyer of worlds, a devourer of stars, literally tearing apart anything that becomes trapped in its pull, bending the fabric of space itself, and again literally sucking the brightness out of everything it reels in. In all seriousness, we do not need to imagine monsters in sci-fi movies to populate the universe—there is a very real monster lurking at the heart of our galaxy. And it is utterly dark at its core, infinitely heavy, and undeniably awful (in that original sense of being a thing of awe, as well as wreaking awful havoc with anything that comes near it).

Now, that said, if we zoom our camera lens out to be able to see the whole spiraling galaxy from a distance, we will see something different. While it is true that the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is ripping things apart and is devouring even light itself, it is also true that all of that destruction gives off a lot of light, too (something to do with x-rays heating up the gas just at the outer edges of the black hole’s reach, I believe). And even more curious, the black hole’s immense mass is at least part of what hold the whole galaxy together. The gravitational pull of the black hole is at least one factor in why the galaxy keeps spinning and stars like our sun don’t go flying off in random directions. At one and the same time, this one phenomenon is unquestionably destructive (from the close-up view) and undeniably holding the galaxy together—preserving, holding, and stabilizing all those hundreds of billions of stars inside it. Huh…

So, if you were to ask the question, “Is the black hole at the heart of our galaxy a creative force or a destructive force?” or "Is this thing beautiful or terrible?" or to be even more crude about it, “Is the black hole ‘good’ or ‘bad’?” the answer is, “Yes.” It is both, always and at the same time.

Now, let me pose a similar question from the Gospel of Mark. Is Judas’ betrayal of Jesus—and the cross to which it directly leads—a creative force or a destructive force? Is it good or is it bad?  Is it beautiful or terrible?

The answer is… yes.

Both are true at the same time, without letting Judas off the hook for his hellish betrayal of the Son of God, but also without forgetting that Jesus himself saw that he was headed for a cross all along and in fact said that he had come “to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). Both are true.

You can’t get past the fact that, close up, Judas’ betrayal of Jesus is just about the most awful thing a person can imagine. It is terribly painful to live through one of the small or medium-sized betrayals we encounter in life—the co-worker who throws you under the bus to your boss, the family member who lets you down, the dear friend whose words cut you to the quick, the spouse who cheats and treats you as disposable. But imagine now someone betraying Jesus—the perfectly loving Son of God—and doing all that to him. It is unspeakably awful. Judas is responsible for his actions, and there is no getting around that. And to top it all off, the guy takes money for it. It is—and I mean this literally—a damned shame, what Judas does.

And yet… (and isn’t that always God’s way with us, to keep adding “and yets” to our tragedies?). And yet it is by this very betrayal that Jesus gives his life away for us, offering himself in perfect love and complete surrender. “Love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be…” goes the old hymn, “But oh, my friend, my friend indeed, who at my need his life did spend!” It is Jesus’ death on the cross that holds everything together. And I mean everything. “Through [Christ] God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross,” says Colossians 1:20. The cross—that unspeakable injustice and horrible destruction of the Son of God, in which God the Son cries out in utter godforsakeness and darkness—is simultaneously the single event which holds the universe together and binds it all up to restore it to God. Judas doesn’t stop being responsible for his actions, but those actions do not stop God from also redeeming even the betrayal to make possible the preservation, the salvation, of the world.  It's a moment that is both beautiful and terrible at the same time.

Both are true. The betrayal of Jesus by Judas is a moment of terrible injustice in human history, and yet it makes possible the justification of us all—the redemption and reconciliation of “all things” through the cross and resurrection of Jesus. Both are true. At the same time. Such is the God we have, and such is the infinite creativity of our God, who can build galaxies with gravitational wrecking balls called black holes, and who can restore and redeem creation through the betrayal and death of Jesus. Words fail here. Perhaps all we can say from here is, “Thank you, God. Amen.” Perhaps that is enough.

Thank you God, for the cross of Jesus, and what you did with it. Amen