Sunday of the Passion, 2006. Reference Mark 15:1-39.

“Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.” How are we to understand this? Does Jesus die and become as dead as every other human being? Does the Christ – the Messiah – die with him? Well, yes! No longer breathing, but totally dead, the body and soul of Jesus the Christ will be taken from the cross and placed in a tomb. Virtually everything that constitutes a human being dies; not one single aspect of Jesus Christ eludes death.

I believe this. The earliest Christians believed this. But some later Christians did not. And now, thanks to the National Geographic Society, their television channel, and the channel’s promotional staff, these “some later Christians” will be widely heard again. By “some later Christians,” I mean devotees of Jesus who lived in the first through fourth centuries, who were known as “Gnostics.” One of their Gospels, attributed to Judas, will be the subject of tonight’s National Geographic special.

More about Gnostics later, but for now, let me say that for Biblical scholars and students of Patristics – i.e., students of the Early Church Fathers – this “Gospel of Judas” is a welcome and not totally unexpected find. It’s welcome because it sheds more light on Gnosticism. It’s been expected because Irenaeus, a second century bishop, referred to it in his treatise called, Against Heresies -- and because there are something like twenty-one other “Gospels” that did not make it into the collection of books we call the Bible. For instance, in 1945 Egyptian peasants found a set of long-lost Gnostic texts buried in an earthenware jar near the town of Nag Hammadi. Among them were over a dozen entirely new versions of Christ’s teachings, including the so-called Gospels of Thomas and Philip and a Gospel of Truth. Now we have the Gospel of Judas.

Note that National Geographic, at least, calls it the Gospel of Judas instead of the Gospel according to Judas. It makes it sound as though the good news is about Judas, rather than about Jesus Christ according to Judas. The one really new thing in this Gnostic gospel, so far as I can tell, is that it defends Judas. It makes him out to be a hero who conspired with Jesus to have Jesus killed and thus, to release a spiritual Christ within him into life on a supposed real, spiritual plane of existence. The key passage comes when Jesus tells Judas, “You will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” In other words, Judas is going to see that Jesus is killed, and thus do him a favor: Jesus will at last get rid of his material, physical flesh, thereby liberating the real Christ, the divine being inside. Gnostic Christians, had they been able to attend Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of Christ,” would have cheered while the rest of us cringed. Hey, those Romans were doing Jesus a favor!

But now, to Gnosticism. (It will help you to know this if you don’t want to get sucked in by tonight’s special.) Gnosis means ‘knowledge’ in Greek. That immediately set Gnostic Christians apart from orthodox Christians. Gnostics knew; the orthodox believed. In fact, you could say that orthodox Christians are literally agnostics -- in the Greek, meaning “non-knowers.” But the Gnostics “knew” that there was an ultimate source of goodness, which they thought of as the divine mind, outside the physical universe. And humans, they “knew,” carried a spark of that divine power, but were cut off from the divine mind by the material world around them. This world, as the Gnostics saw it, was the work of an inferior creator rather than of the ultimate god. Accordingly, in the very first scene of the Gospel of Judas, Jesus laughs at his disciples for praying to “[their] god,” meaning the disastrous god who created a disastrous world. This, of course, was a complete repudiation of the Genesis story of creation, where “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” (1:31)

Gnostics proposed that ordinary people could become connected to the true God – that is, to the ultimate god who didn’t dirty his hands by creating us. All people had to do was awaken the “divine spark” within their humanity and they could hook up with the divine mind. However, to do so required the guidance of a teacher, and that, according to the Gnostics, was Christ’s role. His role wasn’t to die upon a cross, but to teach the hitherto secret of the divine spark, to impart the knowledge. And what do you know, but according to the Gospel of Judas, the one and only of Christ’s disciples to get it was Judas. Accordingly, this Gospel begins “The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week three days before he celebrated Passover.” Secret, because no other disciple ever heard of such a revelation; no other disciple ever received this knowledge from the lips of Jesus! Too bad, because those who learned and thus knew what Jesus knew could become as divine as Christ himself.

If any of this sounds remotely familiar to you, even though you’ve never heard of Gnosticism before, that’s because there are some recent rough parallels, or modern versions. The first one that comes to mind is the Heaven’s Gate cult. Remember it? In 1997, their guru, Marshall Applewhite, convinced thirty-nine followers to commit suicide so that their souls could take a ride on a spaceship that they thought was hiding behind the comet Hale-Bopp. Members believed themselves to be “extraterrestrials” – people who were not meant to be of or in this corrupt world, whose true being was outside this world. A difference, though, is that the Heaven’s Gate cult accepted the physical or material aspect of life, albeit elsewhere, while the Gnostics rejected physicality altogether. The Heaven’s Gate cultists would board a spaceship to another planet, while the Gnostics would wind up no place, because in a purely spiritual existence, there is and can be no place.

If it sounds as though I’m discrediting Gnosticism, I am. It’s neither credible nor helpful for life as we experience it. But it can be attractive to our lesser angels, if pursued to its logical implications. For one thing, you don’t have to feed people Sunday Supper, since doing so only prolongs their life in this disastrous material world. Better to teach them the secret knowledge, and then let them starve. Also, you don’t have to wash another’s feet, or even your own, for that matter, since such an example of servility is postulated on the notion that the body matters. Feet! The dirty, useless, impeding things! In addition, you can pride yourself on being a member of an “in-group,” realizing that you know and a whole lot of others don’t. You can be as proud as you want to be, and to heck with all the other cardinal sins, too. Forgiveness? Who needs it!

So it should come as little or no surprise that Gnosticism is enjoying a little bit of resurgence. For instance, there is a “Gnostic-dot-info” website, where you can learn about “out-of-body” experiences that the site claims substantiate Gnosticism. To the site’s credit, it cites The Encyclopedia Britannica, to wit: “[The] little Gnostic sects and groups all lived in the conviction that they possessed a secret and mysterious knowledge, in no way accessible to those outside, which was not to be proved or propagated, but... anxiously guarded as a secret.” So the site laments, “Unfortunately, the Gnostic’s form of ‘knowledge’ is not always (or even very often) available to most people.” Talk about exclusive. (“I’m in. You’re out.” “I’m informed. You’re not.” “I’m knowledgeable. You’re stupid.”)

Against all these pretentious and pernicious notions, Jesus died – “was crucified, dead, and buried.” The Gospel according to John – the Fourth Gospel which seems so different than the other three – is also against these pretentious and pernicious notions. In fact, the Fourth Gospel was written to confound Gnostic Christians. In his prologue, John says, “…the Word became flesh…” -- not clothed itself in flesh, but became flesh. Jesus the Christ became what Gnostics regarded as dirty, rottable, corruptible, stinking, no-good flesh, just like the rest of us. John says this was because God “loved the world,” disaster though it might be. On Maundy Thursday, says John, this Word-Become-Flesh got real intimate with the flesh of others, washing his disciples’ feet. And finally, from the cross, “Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her,” and he said to his mother, "Woman, here is your son" and to his disciple, "Here is your mother." If you’re a Gnostic, you don’t have this feeling for relationships. They’re material – physical – and don’t matter; you’re just glad to think you’ll be out of here!

So, was Jesus glad to get out of here? Not according to the four Gospels accepted by Irenaeus and later by the whole Church. They say that Jesus agonized in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before. They say he felt abandoned, feeling no connection, but saying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” They say that with his last breath, he gave a loud cry from the cross -- and it wasn’t “Hallelujah!” As completely and thoroughly as you and I, Jesus was a human being from the moment of his birth. As completely and thoroughly as you and I, Jesus dies. Which is the only fact and truth that makes next Sunday and the Resurrection authentic Gospel – truly good news for you and me.

Meanwhile, Gnostics tell secrets. But Christians think the real news is too good to be kept secret: they “publish glad tidings” and “go tell it on the mountain, over the hills, and everywhere.”