New view of Judas; Rwandan genocide survivor finds forgiveness

In Tuesday’s RNS report Stacy Meichtry analyzes how new views of Judas reflect new views of evil: Every great story deserves a great villain. For Christians who consider the Easter story one of the greatest ever told, there are few evildoers out there who match the sinister nature of Judas Iscariot. Rarely, however, have opinions […]

In Tuesday’s RNS report Stacy Meichtry analyzes how new views of Judas reflect new views of evil: Every great story deserves a great villain. For Christians who consider the Easter story one of the greatest ever told, there are few evildoers out there who match the sinister nature of Judas Iscariot. Rarely, however, have opinions been so divided about whether Judas deserves his foul reputation. When Pope Benedict XVI recently seized upon a weekly audience to underline the disciple’s legacy as the “traitor of Christ,” he wasn’t simply restating the obvious. When the National Geographic Society publishes the first edition of a long-awaited fourth century “Gospel of Judas” later this month, it will present the gospel’s main truth: that Judas was fulfilling a divine plan by handing Christ over to his executioners. Behind this push to revisit Judas’ historical legacy lies a deeper trend. Judas is not just one villain among many. He is the model upon which Western society has based much of its understanding of how good and evil function. So if interpretations of Judas shift, so do society’s views of evil.

Bob Smietana looks at the memoir of a young woman who survived the Rwandan genocide and learned to forgive her family’s killers: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Immaculee Ilibagazi says those words haunted her during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. As she relates in her new memoir, “Left to Tell,” Ilibagazi was a 22-year-old university student visiting her family during the Easter holiday when a plane carrying Rwanda President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down on April 6, 1994. His death sparked a “pandemic of violence,” Ilibagazi says. “It was a disease, an epidemic of hate.” Ilibagazi’s parents, two of her brothers, and hundreds of her friends and neighbors, all Tutsis, were hacked to death with machetes by armed mobs of Hutus. She found refuge in the house of a Hutu pastor who hid Ilibagazi and seven other women in a tiny, spare bathroom. A wooden wardrobe, slid in front of the bathroom door to hide its existence, was all that stood between her and certain death. Out of that darkness, she eventually embraced the only way to the light, through forgiveness.

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