Read a Nittany Lion Excerpt

Read Mark 14:43-50.

“The betrayer had arranged a signal with them: ‘The one I kiss is the man; arrest him and lead him away under guard’” (v. 44).
(v. 33b).

Considering the weather at the time, using sideline heaters for the first time ever certainly seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t.

The Nittany Lions met the Oregon Ducks in the second-ever Liberty Bowl on Dec 17, 1960, in Philadelphia. Conditions were less than ideal, especially for the Ducks. “Oregon never has played on a field even encircled by snow,” said head coach Len Casanova as he cautiously eyed the huge drifts that rimmed the field.

What concerned the head Duck was fourteen inches of snow that had fallen recently. Temperatures dropped into the low 30s, and the wind swept through the stadium at 25 miles per hour. A crowd of 16,624 extremely hardy souls showed up in the 100,000-seat stadium. They wound up both frozen and bored.

That’s because the weather apparently didn’t bother the Lions a bit as they romped to a 41-12 win. About that weather. The city provided snowplows to help clean out some of the snow. The bowl’s founder and executive director confessed he “was out there shoveling with everyone else. It was disheartening to say the least.”

In hopes of making the conditions somewhat more tolerable for the players, something brand new was tried: Some infrared lamps were set up a couple of feet over the heads of the players. Expectations were that the lamps would keep them comfortable.

That’s not exactly what happened. “Instead, the players turned medium rare,” one reporter quipped. “After a quarter or so, they felt as if they had been sitting on the beach in Florida.” The lights ultimately made conditions on the sidelines worse by turning them into one big mud hole.

That sure-fire investment you made from a pal’s hot stock tip. The expensive exercise machine that now traps dust bunnies under your bed. Blond hair. Telling your wife you wanted to eat at the restaurant with the waitresses in little shorts. They seemed like pretty good ideas at the time; they weren’t.

We all have bad ideas in our lifetime. They provide some of our most crucial learning experiences.

Some ideas, though, are so irreparably and inherently bad that we cannot help but wonder why they were even conceived in the first place. Almost two thousand years ago a man had just such an idea. Judas’ betrayal of Jesus remains to this day one of the most heinous acts of treachery in history.

Turning his back on Jesus was a bad idea for Judas then; it’s a bad idea for us now.

Bat Day seems like a good idea, but I question the advisability of giving bats in the Bronx to 40,000 Yankee fans.-— Cartoonist Aaron Bacall

We all have some pretty bad ideas during our lifetimes, but nothing equals the folly of turning away from Jesus.