What If It Never Took in Me

This is the last chapter of the hard half, and it’s the one you’ve been waiting for and dreading, because it’s the question you’ve never asked anybody out loud.

What if none of it was ever real in me?

Not did I fall away. Something worse and quieter. What if I was in the room the whole time and it never actually took. What if I was going through motions from the age of nine. What if the reason it fell apart so easily is that there was never anything there to hold it.

Let’s go to the man everybody points at, and let’s be careful, because he’s a person and not a device.

Judas was in the room for all of it.

Every mile. Every sermon. He was there for the storm on the lake and the bread on the hillside and the man coming out of the tomb at Bethany.

He was commissioned with the others. Matthew’s list of the twelve who were given authority over unclean spirits and to heal every disease has his name on it, at the end, with the note about what he’d do later. But the authority was given.

He carried the money. Nobody tells us how he came to have that job, but a man does not end up holding the bag for a group of twelve because they are all watching him closely.

And on the last night, when Jesus got up and took a towel and washed twelve pairs of feet, he washed his.

Peter said something later that I can’t get past. When they were choosing a replacement, he said of Judas: he was one of our number and shared in our ministry.

Not he was a plant. Not we always knew. He was one of ours and he did the work with us.

Proximity, position, and real ministry, all of it genuine, and none of it was the thing.

Now here’s why I said we’d be careful.

The version of this chapter you’ve heard was designed to scare you, and I’m not going to write that one. Fear is a poor foundation and it doesn’t hold, and anyway you’ve already got plenty of it, which is why you’re on this page.

So let’s look at what actually happened at the end, because it is not what you think, and it’s the only part that matters for you.

When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. “I have sinned,” he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.”

Read that carefully.

He was sorry. Genuinely, physically sorry, the kind that doubles a man over.

He gave the money back. All of it.

And he made a confession that was completely accurate. I have sinned. I have betrayed innocent blood. There is not one false word in that sentence. Theologically, factually, morally, it is correct in every particular.

He had remorse. He had honesty. He had restitution.

And it wasn’t repentance.

That isn’t me being clever with the English, either. The word Matthew uses for what Judas felt is not the word the New Testament uses for repentance. It’s the word for regret. For wishing it undone. They are two different words and Matthew picked the other one.

Because there was one more thing available to him that night and he did not do it.

He didn’t go back.

Somewhere in that city there was a room with the others in it. Frightened, scattered, ashamed men, most of whom had run, one of whom had denied him out loud three times in a courtyard a few hours earlier.

That room would have had him.

I believe that all the way down. That room was full of failures and it would have taken him in, and if he had walked into it we would have a completely different chapter of the Bible.

He went off alone instead. And what he did next he did by himself, with nobody anywhere near him to say it wasn’t the end.

I’m not going to say anything clever about how he died. A man in unbearable pain made an irreversible decision alone, and every generation since has used him to make a point, and I don’t want to be another one of those.

I want to say the true thing about it, which is that the tragedy is not that he was too far gone. It’s that he never found out.

So set the two of them side by side, because they happened the same week.

Peter denied him three times, publicly, with cursing, after swearing he’d die first.

Judas handed him over for money.

Both betrayed him. Both knew immediately. Both were destroyed by it. If you had been standing there on Friday morning you could not have told me which one was going to be all right.

The difference is not the size of the failure. Don’t let anybody tell you it was, because the sizes are closer than the story usually admits.

The difference is that one of them went back to the others and one of them went off alone.

Peter’s whole restoration required him to be in a room where he could be found. He was on a beach with six of the others when Jesus showed up with breakfast. If he’d been off by himself somewhere, that scene doesn’t happen.

Go back to the room. That’s the entire lesson of this chapter and I’d rather you take that than anything else in the book.

Now let me answer the question you actually came in with, and I want to do it plainly.

You’re afraid it never took in you.

Here’s what I’d point out. And I’ve thought about this for a long time and I believe it.

Judas never asked that question.

He says it once at the supper table, and only as a denial. Surely you don’t mean me. There is no moment in any gospel where he turns it into a real question, where he wonders whether he’s actually in, whether he believes it, whether the whole thing is hollow in him. He goes from the money bag to the garden to the priests to the field without ever, one time, turning the question on himself.

That question is not a symptom of being far away. It’s a symptom of caring whether you’re near.

The people who lie awake wondering whether it was ever real in them are not the people that question is about. Somebody who has genuinely walked away doesn’t wonder. They sleep fine. They have other things on their mind.

The fear is the evidence. It’s uncomfortable evidence and it’s not the kind you wanted, but it’s evidence, and I’d stake a good deal on it.

There’s one more thing in that last supper scene that I’ve never heard anybody preach and I think about it more than almost anything else in the gospels.

Jesus knew.

John says so directly. He knew who was going to hand him over, and he had known for a while.

And he washed his feet anyway.

He got down on the floor in front of a man he knew was already committed to selling him, and took his feet in his hands, and washed them, and dried them with a towel.

If you want to know what the disposition of God is toward a person whose faith might not be real, there it is on the floor of an upstairs room, holding the feet of the one man in the world who was definitely going to betray him.

He did not skip him.

Here’s your move, and it’s the only one in this book with no writing in it.

Go back to a room.

Not a church. I’ve told you from the start this book isn’t going to work you toward a building, and I’m not going to sneak it in on the last page of the hard half.

I mean a room with people in it who knew you before. Anyone. A brother. Two men you used to work with. The friend you stopped calling in 2014 because it got too complicated to explain where you’d been.

Call one of them this week and get in a room. You don’t have to say anything about any of this. You don’t have to have a conversation about God, and I’d almost rather you didn’t the first time.

Just be in a room where somebody knows your name and knows some of your history and isn’t running the arithmetic on you.

Because the thing that will kill you out here is not your doubt and it is not your record. It’s how long you have been alone with them.

Judas had a few hours and no room to go to.

You’ve had twenty years and a phone in your pocket.

Part Two ends here.

You’ve got the bags out on the floor now. The public failure, the record, the marriage, the empty hands, the two audiences, the anger, the doubt, the silence, and this last one, the one underneath all of them.

Nothing has been fixed. I want to be honest about that. You’ve read thirteen chapters and your history is exactly what it was on the first page.

But the man in the parable walked into a party with every one of those bags still in his hands, and the robe went on over them.

So now we have the actual question. The one Luke never answers and the reason this book has a third part.

You’re inside. Nothing about you changed.

What on earth do you do Monday morning?