One of the Twelve

He has told the story about forty times and he has never once told it properly.

It is a good story now. It has a shape. It goes: there was a hard stretch about six years ago, the business nearly went, they came very close to losing the house, and they got through it, and it turned out to be the making of them in ways he can list.

People find it encouraging. He has told it at a men's breakfast and twice in a small group and once, badly, at a wedding.

And in every version, the thing that happened is described in the passive voice.

Money went missing. There were some irregularities. We had a problem with the accounts.

Money did not go missing. His brother took it. Over about fourteen months, deliberately, and covered it, and when it came apart he lied about it for three more weeks before he stopped.

They are fine now. That is the strange part and it is genuinely true: it was dealt with, it took two years and a great deal of help, and his brother has paid back what could be paid back and they were at the same table at Christmas and it was a good Christmas.

So the editing is not bitterness. He would say, and he is right, that his brother's name is not his to hand round a men's breakfast.

But there is a cost he has started to notice.

The story he tells is not the story he lived. And the encouraging shape of it, the bit people find useful, is built on the passive voice, and every time he uses it he feels the same small thing go through him, which is that he is protecting somebody at the price of telling the truth about what he came through.

The record names him as one of the Twelve, every time

Let me defend the editing before I say anything else about it, because it is not cowardice and it is not spin.

Your brother's name genuinely is not yours to hand round a room. A man who tells the whole thing at a men's breakfast has taken something that belongs to two people and spent it on one evening's usefulness. Your instinct there is right and you should keep it.

The trouble is that you have been solving that with the passive voice, and the passive voice does not only hide him. It hides you, and it hides what was actually survived.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as permission: the account you were raised on does not use the passive voice about its own worst internal wound. That is not my kind reading of six years, it is what stands written all through the gospels, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it has been at every one of those forty tellings.

Read how the betrayer is introduced, and then notice that it happens again and again.

Then Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, went to the chief priests to betray Jesus to them.Mark 14:10

One of the Twelve.

That phrase is not necessary. The narrative works without it. And it is attached to his name repeatedly, across the accounts, as though somebody wanted to make sure nobody could ever read it as an outsider slipping in.

It would have been so easy to write it the other way. A hanger-on. A man on the edges. Somebody who had never really been one of them.

Instead every account keeps him inside the circle, at the table, with the money bag, named.

So this is yours right now rather than pending your working out how to tell it: what you are inside of does not hide its own internal damage, because the written word names the betrayer as one of the Twelve and never once explains him away, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that the version with him at the table is the one that survived.

Now the honest boundary, because this house does not overclaim. That detail is an argument about invention and it is one consideration among several. It does not settle everything and people weigh it differently, and it should never be handed to anybody as a proof.

And the second boundary, which matters more to you: naming Judas is not the same as naming your brother. The record is telling its own story. You would be telling somebody else's.