Today's passage is Matthew 27:1-10.
When Judas sees that Jesus has been condemned to death, he feels remorse and tries to return thiry pieces of silver. The chief priest dismiss him, he throws the money into the temple, and hangs himself. The priests use the money to buy a burying ground for foreigners.
When Judas confessed his sin to the chief priests, they were duty bound to follow the laws of Moses and deal with him as a repentant sinner. Instead, they made themselves as guilty as Judas by betraying God and his word to them.
And unlike Judas, they showed no sense of guilt and no remorse.
As Pilot would do with Jesus, the priests washed their hands of Judas, condemning themselves, refusing to be their brother's keeper.
And despite being learned in the Scriptures, they couldn't connect themselves to Jeremiah's prophecy. They more than fulfilled Jesus' criticism of them as blind guides.
In my work as school principal, I cannot wash my hands of students who fail or teachers who fail.
Their failures are my failures and I'm responsible. I cannot say with the chief priests, "What is that to me? It's your responsibility."
I have to be able to say, "It's all my fault" and mean it.
I have a daughter who is 35.
In wordly terms, she is a failure and still living in the mess she's made of her life.
She's living with a man worse than she is.
He is not divorced because he says he can't find his wife to serve her with divorce papers!
He has no driver's licence because he has not paid the huge fine he owes the government.
With a driver's licence he could get a job. But he makes no effort to pay that debt.
He has a severe back problem for which the government pays him a disability allowance.
One of the conditions of the government money is that he cannot work.
So he has chosen to live on the government money for years.
He drinks and smokes.
This year he will have an operation on his back and be able to work after recovery and rehabilitation. He does not live near his family.
My daughter does not live near her family in the city either. She smokes and drinks.
She too does not have a driver's licence because she has not paid a big fine.
She has a 12 year old son she sees every summer because the man who fathered him has custody of the child in America.
My daughter graduated from high school, started to go to college but dropped out and ran away.
She has worked in restaurants as a cook since she ran away.
At last she has decide to go to college to become a chef.
She can't afford the cost of the college, so I am paying.
The one hopeful thing in the life of my daughter and the man she is living with is that they are recovering their worship.
My daughter has had a suffering life because of me.
She bore the brunt of her mother's alcoholic abuse. Because of my denial of my wife's alcoholism, my daughter could not come to me for help.
Instead of repentance and reconciliation with her, I set impossible standards for her to meet and she ran away.
When she ran away she became involved with a man who was separated from his wife but undivorced.
She hoped things would work out and they could be married. But they didn't.
She got pregnant and gave birth to a son a few months after my daughter was born to the woman I was having an affair with after the death of my alcoholic wife.
Even though the hospital was only a hundred kilometres away, I didn't go to see her and her newborn.
When the man did not divorce his wife and marry my daughter, she had to leave the States and return to Canada.
I didn't visit her there either.
She was an angry young woman who couldn't manage her life and, just like the chief priests, I said, "What's that to me? It's your responsibility."
I did not accept any responsibility for her situation.
All the members of the family tried to help her out at various times with various degrees of help, but eventually everyone stopped.
They'd given up on her. She didn't change, she didn't get better.
She was angry, bitter and full of fear, desperate for love and acceptance, unable to find her way out because she couldn't find God.
My problem was that I never accepted her from the beginning.
She was conceived in anger as a punishment to my wife, who suffered greatly during her pregnancies.
She was always in trouble at school. She didn't have my academic brains and I never made the effort to love her truly and help her find her way to God and to life.
Yes, I took her to worship but I didn't train her and guide her in a godly way.
Having a child outside of marriage at almost the same time as I did should have shown me that she was my creation, echoing the angry muddle of my own life.
Like me, she went from disaster to disaster until she ended up in a village far from her family but recovering her worship at last.
Like the chief priests with Judas, I tried to throw my daughter away.
Now I'm repenting and shouldering my responsibility.
Belatedly, I'm helping her by God's grace.
Unlike my other children, she and I can talk about suffering, about her mother, about God.
I loved her instinctively before and now I'm loving her with acceptance and objectivity.
I will see her at Christmas and I pray to deepen our reconciliation when we meet.
Lord, keep me from being a careless, rejecting chief priest. Give me your Holy Spirit to help me repent the way I need to. Guide me, Lord. Teach me to love.
