On the night he was betrayed

How knowing we are not alone gives us hope

I read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child. I was thrilled at Aslan, broken at his sacrifice in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, convicted at Eustace’s outcome in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and wished I were part of the Pevensie family. This summer I am rereading some of the books with the teenagers in our church youth group, and I didn’t expect to be as affected as I was when I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe again. Some of the more famous passages, such as when Mrs. Beaver tells the children that Aslan isn’t safe, but he’s good, still pierced my heart. Yet I was surprised to find that the passage that made me cry was near the beginning of the book, before all of the children have even made it to Narnia.

At this point in the story, Lucy has gone to Narnia, met Mr. Tumnus, and come back. She has told her siblings about Narnia, but they don’t believe her. Then one day, while playing hide-and-seek, both Lucy and Edmund end up in Narnia. They get separated. While Lucy looks for Mr. Tumnus, Edmund meets the White Witch, who woos him with Turkish Delight.¹

As the two children head back to the wardrobe, Lucy says, “Oh, Edmund! I am glad you’ve got in too. The others will have to believe in Narnia now that both of us have been there. What fun it will be!.. What a lot we shall have to tell them!”

When the two children are back in the Professor’s house, Lucy calls out to their older brother and sister.

“Peter! Susan! It’s all true! Edmund has seen it too. There is a country you can get to through the wardrobe. Edmund and I both got in. We met one another in there, in the wood. Go on, Edmund, tell them all about it.”

“What’s all this about, Ed?” said Peter.

When Peter suddenly asked him the question [Edmund] decided all at once to do the meanest and most spiteful thing he could think of. He decided to Let Lucy down…

“Oh yes, Lucy and I have been playing - pretending that all her story about a country in the wardrobe is true, just for fun, of course. There’s nothing there really.”

Poor Lucy gave Edmund one look and rushed out of the room… It was not surprising that when they found Lucy, a good deal later, everyone could see that she had been crying. Nothing they could say to her made any difference. She stuck to her story…

I, too, felt Lucy’s anguish and I did not find it surprising that Edmund’s behavior drove her to cry in despair.

Photo by Jacob Diehl on Unsplash

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Because of our experience in ministry, my mind and heart are quick to turn toward reports of spiritual abuse by pastors and other Christian leaders, especially those who are well known. It is hard to keep up with all of the Christian leaders who have disqualified themselves from ministry. Sometimes I have to ask my husband, “Is [insert famous Christian’s name here] still OK?” because I don’t want to quote them or recommend their books if their name is associated with wrongdoing or harm.²

I was reading about a situation that involved a pastor whose books I have recommended. A woman named Emily Hyland had filed a complaint of workplace bullying against this pastor. She did a podcast interview with the Roys Report, hosted by Julie Roys. They are discussing the impact of spiritual abuse and harm within the church.

Julie says:

I’ve heard that repeatedly from people who have been victims of spiritual abuse, church abuse, retaliation, bullying… That they can handle that there’s one bad apple… What they can’t deal with is that everybody got in line with that guy. Everybody stood there silently, while they were excoriated for false charges against them, whatever, and that the average person stood by and did nothing. And this is why I think spiritual abuse and church hurt is far worse and more fundamental than other kinds of abuse… there’s something about this that just goes to the core of your belief system of who you think people are.

Emily’s response stopped me in my tracks.

…when you take communion… it starts with “on the night he was betrayed.” You can just stop right there and say, “Jesus knows what it’s like to be betrayed, and forsaken by everyone who you thought was for you and with you.” I mean, to identify [with that] is a thread of hope you can have because Jesus knows betrayal.

We take communion every week at our church, which means I have taken communion over 200 times just since we’ve lived in Georgia, not to count all the times before that. And yet in the words of institution, the Scripture the pastor reads before we take communion together, that one phrase—

on the night he was betrayed

—has always gone right past me. I never stopped to think about how betrayal was a fundamental part of the events that led to the death of Christ. The Pharisees could have arrested Jesus without the help of Judas. But what made it more painful and terrible was that one of Jesus’ friends took part in his arrest. Judas betrayed him. And ever since, the Church has remembered that betrayal when we remember the Lord’s death.

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Our family has been attached to a paid ministry role for fifteen years. We have been part of five churches over those fifteen years. It is difficult to know how to write about some of our painful experiences, even though I want to, because there are adjacent stories that are not mine to share. To be completely honest, while I think some of the people involved don’t deserve privacy, there are others whose identities I don’t wish to disclose.

What I can say is that what has hurt the most every time was not the harm directed at us by a person in power but rather the behavior and responses of other people we thought we could trust. In some cases, these were people who knew most of the details about what we were experiencing and yet chose to be silent or to accept the false narrative. These were people I had considered friends. I think they loved us, but to speak up or to stand with us publicly would have been costly. They chose not to pay that cost.

But there still had to be an accounting. Someone had to pay the cost, and in almost every case, the someone was us, and the cost was expensive. We have not paid with dollars and cents but with broken trust, burned bridges, and damaged relationships.

I shared the quote from that podcast while talking with a friend, and my voice broke as I retold the story of how I felt betrayed by several people who for many years I had considered close friends. I didn’t understand why they would believe another person over me. It felt like they were covering their eyes and putting their fingers in their ears in order to ignore the truth. And why? Because it would be too costly. To open one’s eyes and ears and look at the truth requires a cost, a dismantling of a narrative that someone has chosen to believe because it benefits them in some way. When that narrative is gone, the person is left to figure out how the pieces fit together and then to deal with the ramifications of having believed things that were not true.

It was after this conversation that my mind turned again to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and that scene with Edmund and Lucy. I realized that the reason it had made me weep was because Edmund’s response was, at its heart, an act of betrayal. Lucy thought she could trust Edmund, because he had seen Narnia with his own eyes, and she was confident he would join with her to tell the others what was true.

But Edmund didn’t want to pay the cost. When Lucy exclaims, “What fun it will be” to tell the other children about Narnia, “Edmund secretly thought it would not be as good fun for him as for her. He would have to admit that Lucy had been right, before all the others…” He is not willing to pay the emotional cost of saying he was wrong.

Photo by Jacob Diehl on Unsplash

When Peter and Susan find out that Lucy was telling the truth, the first thing Peter does is apologize to her for not believing her. And yet, we don’t fault Peter and Susan too much, because it is not surprising that they didn’t believe there was a magical realm beyond the wardrobe.

What is surprising is when Christians aren’t willing to believe that sin is real, that power corrupts, that whole systems can be caught up in a web of harm and abuse—despite report after report after report and substantiating evidence that shows it has happened, it can happen, it does happen, it is happening.

For a painful and powerful description of what often happens in systems where spiritual abuse is rampant, please read this post by Joy LaPrade: Your friends won’t want to help you.

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I am tempted to crumble into a heap and live under a rock for the rest of my life. Under that rock, no one will be able to hurt me. When that doesn’t appear to be an option, the next best thing is to build a very high emotional wall by which I protect myself from potential harm and betrayal.

But God speaks a different word to me, a word that hurts me to believe sometimes, but a word that I know is true.

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

I have to believe that I have what I need to keep living each day, even amid the pain of betrayal. I have to believe that I can’t protect myself, but Jesus can protect me.

Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.

When others falsely accuse me of saying or doing things that aren’t true, I can plead my justification before the Judge who sees the entire situation. He knows all the details and everything that has ever happened behind closed doors. I don’t have to litigate whether or not I am right before other people.

Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.

Here in the words of Paul there is hope for the betrayers and for those who have been betrayed. For those who have failed to pay the cost of siding with the truth and have harmed others in the process, they can realize that the cost has already been paid. Jesus was betrayed, and he had never done anything wrong, and in his death he bore the cost that weak sinners are unwilling to pay. They can admit their sin and find that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

And those who have been betrayed can know they are not alone, and that one day everything sad will come untrue. On the night he was betrayed, Jesus said, “This is my body, broken for you.” In his broken body we see that sin is real. And in his resurrected body we see that betrayal will never have the last word.

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The following two songs have been meaningful to me over the last decade, and it is probably not surprising that both songs have verses that deal with betrayal.

The words of We Will Feast in the House of Zion first ministered to me after a painful betrayal by the pastor of our church 10 years ago. He disqualified himself from ministry in a way that was most painful to his family, but as the only other staff family at the church, it had an excruciating impact on us as well. What a comfort to know that I could trust Jesus to be the faithful one.³

I have clung to this song through several painful seasons, when people who I trusted and who I thought would stand with me against harmful behavior chose not only to be silent but also to turn against me. It didn’t feel fair. And yet, “to this I hold: my Shepherd will defend me.” He may not vindicate the truth on this side of heaven, but above all Jesus defends me to the Father, who knows all things.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness… And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

1. My boys, who are both in the youth group, asked what Turkish Delight was and we looked it up, and they determined it looked gross. I don’t disagree. The White Witch would have needed some Reese’s in order to capture my attention.

2. While I am not always able to discern the full truth of any one situation, I tend to err on the side of those who are alleging harm, for reasons that will become clear in this post.

3. This is the situation I reference in my post, “The Night in the Psych Ward.”