Loyalty, Betrayal, and Transformation
Breaking up is hard to do. You know that it’s true. It’s almost Biblical. Don't take your love, away from me. Don't you leave my heart in misery…. See what he was talking about was one kind of loss and disappointment, think of all that we've been through, he sang with a slightly too-sunny attitude. What we had was good yesterday, so it would be good tomorrow, and gee it’s too bad to lose it, because wouldn’t it be fun to still be in a relationship. And maybe it’s a little surprising because I wasn’t expecting it. See, I think this pleasing tune is missing the point. Breaking up is hard to do, not just because it’s disappointing, not just because there’s some foregone pleasure, but because it’s a promise broken, and when it’s a promise of love, breaking is a deep betrayal. It’s not just heart-breaking news; it’s soul-shaking disloyalty. All enduring and rewarding relationships are about promises, and loyalty is the slippery virtue at their heart.
Right, and it’s not just the romantic kind of break-up that’s complicated. Friends, groups, communities can bind us powerfully, and sometimes it is surprisingly hard to be separated. Like, has anyone here ever left a job they’d been really invested in? Has anyone ever had to walk in and tell your boss and the people you work with that one this particular day you were done and not coming back? Maybe it was a struggling little non-profit you told you were running away to divinity school, or maybe it was a congregation you told that you were going to become a professor, or maybe it was another school that you told the University of Chicago looked more glamorous to you….
Myself, I remember leaving one company, to go on to an irrefutably better job with a competitor. It took me a week to build up the courage to tell my people. And then having convinced myself that those feelings were pathological, I did so with the most business-like and reasonable attitude I could muster. But in speaking the words, I felt the immediate pain anyway of betraying my own devotion. It was a disorienting moment creating a kind of dissonance between want and action. And then I got calls at home, with colleagues asking, how could you? And bosses asking, is it something we did? It wasn’t a romantic break-up, so why should it have been so personal and so hard? But it was. It stung of the rupturing of the unspoken bonds that we had all believed would last.
I think we are naturally inclined toward loyalty and that we need it. Total commitment frees us from distraction and the drudgery of deliberation. It gives the kind of liberty we require to live and work together in ways that best fulfill human possibility. So maybe, it turns out that if the break-up doesn’t hurt a little, and then there was something missing in that relationship.
This all having been said, pledging our allegiance to one another seems to have become rare in our lives. How odd and almost alarming it is now for someone to request our open declaration of loyalty. Have you ever started a job and had to take a pledge or had your boss say to that they expect total loyalty? Or started dating someone who quickly asks for your explicit pledge of fidelity? Has a minister ever given you a clear talk about not running around in other Churches? These would feel alarming, indeed to many of us.
Loyalty declarations have been preserved as if in amber in only a few particular places. We pledge allegiance to the flag. This one has even grown, with the new “under God” part added not so long ago, though what meaning beyond the subliminal could this quasi-voluntary promise possibly have in the fourth grade? Oaths of office and other ceremonial pledges have this same feeling of being frozen and lifeless artifacts.
Pledging mutual unending loyalty at our weddings, it seems like a natural and sure-fire fit. But now, even in these rites of passage, it is not unheard of for the couple to pause, when preparing the vows, to be faithful…until death do us part? What if we don’t like each other sometime in the future? It would be bizarre to stay together. Let’s not be irrational and grandiose, some say. So true and practically wise, but we can feel the twinge of loss of a beautifully dangerous and irrational proclamation that has a magic of its own.
So I ask: how often do we consciously pledge our allegiance to anything, whether silently and alone or aloud in community? These may be prelude either to the pain of betrayal or to radical fulfillment. I want to raise the possibility today that pledges and betrayals both may be way-stations on the path to all kinds of life-giving transformations if we stop and make good use of them.
The primary reason loyalty has fallen out of favor, is not our moral decay, but our intellectual evolution. Perhaps we’re jaded and accept the perpetual impermanence of things. Perhaps we don’t believe we are much in control. Perhaps we don’t see virtue in loyalty, but childish irrationalism, instead.
For this reason, as Henry Gates observed, the standard 6-step psychological model of moral development has “loyalty, trust and gratitude” as stage 3, a middling and defective stop. This ladder ends in the Kantian perfection of the individual operating under the guidance of universal and impersonal principles. Loyalty is a virtue this story goes, but an adolescent one at best, as we develop we move on to something higher—less personal, but more exalted.
It is right to take careful note of one peculiar claim of loyalty—the intention to conduct ourselves in non-rational ways. Loyalty means acting with deliberate and sustained bias in favor of that to which one is loyal. There can be lesser and greater loyalties. There can be bounds and balancing, but there is no escaping a commitment to subordinate other values…merit…fairness …prosperity…kindness…collective welfare…at least sometimes. Putting it this way might make us uncomfortable. Herein lays the paradox of loyalty: It is a character virtue we would all likely profess a desire to possess, but resolve not to practice with any force.
Let’s be clear too that a so-called virtue of loyalty, and the pressure to swear our loyalty, have time and again in history resulted with the many worse-off than we would have been. Loyalty to clan and cult has resulted in bloody conflict. Loyalty to family has resulted in nepotistic rewards for the few and incompetent governance for the many. Loyalty to business has resulted in the value of money being tragically placed over the value of life. This is the paradox of loyalty—Virtuous character and action for the individual and sometimes toxic effects for the community.
Maybe for all of these logical reasons, no one asks for us to pledge our loyalty anymore. Even the nature of what we mean in using the word has shifted. Loyalty has become a neutrally descriptive, rather than a prescriptively normative, concept. The psychological laws of exercise and effect determine our loyalty states rather than our heart and will.
Nowadays we are committed to a brand of toothpaste as a loyal consumer, devoted to a musical group as a loyal fan or at best a football team. We have become the object and are no longer the subject of loyalty. Now I am not going to stand here and preach against football and loyalty going together in a certain pleasurable way—that would be insane.
I am going to suggest we make choices to make the same kind of outrageous, public, and enduring commitments that some people reserve for Sunday afternoons and the stadium, on Sunday mornings in the Church or more importantly every day in our homes. We need to reassert our subjectivity through intentional commitment. We should reclaim this part of our deep religious tradition that has for so long sustained us.
The Hebrew Bible holds the seeds of loyalism with its thick notion of covenant. The deal with the deity from the first is one of a pure gift with some rules that trail along—unsolicited and unearned grace. After the flood which mythically washed away human evil, the deal had changed (Sacks). Human flourishing relied not only upon the abundant grace of God, not only adherence to the laws but reciprocal loyalty to God by humans.
Loyalty, true loyalty is evermore about intention and declaration toward that something of ultimate worth. Loyalty is about full reciprocity. Loyalty in this sense is a spiritual challenge and not just a neutral descriptor after the fact. Loyalty was born out of the recognition of the need for our participation in making the goodness of the world and not just taking it for granted.
Not all loyalties are equal though. Someone once told me: don’t love a company, it will not love you back. I wonder, how many other inert forms do we grace with our loyalty? And where we seem to pledge our loyalty most vigorously, they are places where not only is love not returned, but where it couldn’t possibly matter at all. We might remember Kurt Vonnegut’s clever term from his book Cat’s Cradle, a granfalloon “a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done.” He counted among the most egregious examples, alumni associations and political parties and nations….Which kinds of relationships matter in the way God gets things done? The relationships with those living life right beside you…the relationships to your own deepest self…and the relationships to the sacred. These are the objects that are also subjects and can return love and hope.
The truth though is that this kind of sustaining loyalty can only exist in the shadow of the possibility of betrayal. This is the paradox of loyalty: A total faithfulness that cannot be betrayed is not true fidelity, it is mere captivity. This past week we memorialize annually the paradigmatic tale of loyalty and betrayal in the Christian story of Judas and Jesus. From the 26th Chapter of Matthew: “Then went one of the twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, to the chief priests. And [he] said to them: What will you give me, and I will deliver him unto you? [And] they appointed him thirty pieces of silver. And from thenceforth he sought opportunity to betray [Jesus].”
Now all kinds of things don’t make sense in the story to me. Given the arc of events, what exactly was the effect of Judas’ betrayal? Was the crucifixion reasonably an outcome of the betrayal that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise? Also, that Matthew's passage was the only evidence in the gospels of the specific payment. Do thirty pieces of silver seem like very little or a lifetime’s wealth? Do we believe it was about the money, or should we look for a deeper struggle? We might think about whether Judas made a brave choice in betrayal, and found a kind of freedom from discipleship he could no longer believe. This is the paradox of loyalty: Commitment and betrayal each offer a species of human freedom in the right context.
Some don’t worry about these facts and conveniently use Judas as a simple symbol of evil amidst goodness. More elaborately, some have worked, in service of the necessity of divine foreknowledge to explain loyalty and defection among the disciples as perfunctory.
Some glorify Judas, as specially chosen for the indispensable task; the non-canonical Gospel of Judas gives the full scoop as Jesus confides to Judas: “you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man (the shell of flesh) that clothes me.” Loyalty and betrayal are not good per se, but each plays a necessary role in the fulfillment of the best human reality in line with fate.
And I think this is partly right. There is a codependence of loyalty and betrayal, but its real locus is, I think, human and not divine. Only in the light of Judas’ betrayal does the relative loyalty of the other disciples have meaning. It’s too easy to fall for the magical view of the roots of our faith. I mean if a God comes (and your darn sure she’s God) and stands in front of you and says follow me, how hard is it to fall in line? No, I don’t think it was at all that obvious at the time, standing there in that desert. I don’t personally find it all that clear now. A powerful and wild choice was made by each of the Disciples between loyalty and betrayal, and I don’t think they discerned that life-changing choice through technical calculation and deliberation of the facts before them.
The ultimate defining loyalty moment comes a short time later in the story. That ultimate moment is one thing Easter is about. What was uncertain before the crucifixion amidst all of the noise of society became crystalline at the time when all seemed over and done and lost. The Disciples make the leap to radical and outrageous belief in a messiah risen from the dead.
Some take this as a factual miracle and a symbol of the hand of God coming to conquer sin. I want to suggest that the great human power of this moment lies in its testimony to the practice of reckless human loyalty, as resilient virtue in the face of a sometimes catastrophic reality. Loyalty does not produce a “corrected reality,” but a sustaining faith in its stead. In our own most vulnerable moments, may we have the courage to do the same and be transformed by it in all the days which follow.
May it be so and Amen.