NOT I, RABBI SURELY? (Matthew 26.25). Ah, but that’s the point. There’s no surely about it. Not I, Rabbi? Thus said Jesus’ disciples. Not I, Rabbi? And thus say you and me. And there’s danger in anyone’s thinking (or being persuaded by others) that their faithfulness is a better, truer kind than everyone else’s. There’s danger in anyone’s thinking that their discipleship is more open to life-giving relationship with God than another’s. Danger: because our own “certainties” wrong-foot us.

When push comes to shove we’re not very brave! When push comes to shove we’re too quick to cover our own base. And we get by that way until the inevitable day when the tables get turned. Someone else’s certainties are hell bent on disposing of us. That’s warfare – and war seems to us as cruel as hell when bullet and bomb are headed in our direction. Terror consumes us when we find ourselves on the wrong side of any fence when the heat gets turned up. Not I, Rabbi surely? – said Judas. And very shortly afterwards he hung at the end of his tether, tragically unable to spend his wages.

“The Son of Man is going to his fate, as the Scriptures say he will.” How do the Scriptures know? Because they’ve been written by men too quick to say Not I, Rabbi surely? – by human persons, like you and me, who have always known, deep down, that any person’s insistence on being absolutely more in the right than another will, sure as eggs are eggs, lead to sons of men going to their fate. Until we stop kidding ourselves.