Knockin' at the Tabernacle

Here we go, it's the most intense few days of the year...

At mass on Wednesday, Fr. Granados related a story about St. Philip Neri. He went up to the Tabernacle, knocked on it and said,

"Don't trust me! There's a traitor in me."

The idea that there is a little bit of Judas in us all is not novel. We all sin, so yes. But it's more than that. You know what it's like when someone says something you didn't realize other people felt? Fr. Jose said that it was Christ's very love, His mercy, His holiness that Judas could not stand. He rejected it completely. The way Christ loved him probably just ate at him and he thought "Just wait, see what I do to you". Do you know that feeling? I certainly do, and I hate it. The better the person treats you, the more it bothers you, the more you want to run away. Case in point: Sometimes, the more patient and loving my parents are, the more wretched I become with them. I also do this to my roommates sometimes. It's this willful incapacity to receive love. It's just evil; the privation of the acceptance of the gift... Lord have mercy on me!

So how do you get away from that? I wish I had the answer, especially because it's obviously one of the most important things for us all to learn- not to be Judas. It's something to pray about especially today before we celebrate the Lord's Supper, and remember how "Satan entered him." We want to rationalize evil, make it understandable. Like this whole gnostic "Gospel of Judas" thing, we want to think that Judas was not really that bad, that Jesus asked him to betray him. That's much nicer to believe, isn't it? Very comfortable and convenient, to think that it was all a plan. But it wasn't. Woe to him by whom the Son of Man is betrayed...

Lord, is it I?