Betrayal

The betrayal of Jesus by Judas is one of the hardest events of the Easter story to understand. How could one of those in the inner circle, one who had the repeated opportunity to hear the Master, one who witnessed his goodness and grace, how could one with those experiences sell out Jesus? It’s easy to understand the religious leaders’ actions. At worse they felt threatened by this upstart who was busy making their job obsolete by dismantling the temple as the center of grace. At best they could have felt outrage at this peasant who would claim to be the Messiah and who was stirring up the people. And, it’s easy to understand Pilate whose allegiance is to Rome. He needs to keep the peace of Rome in this city to keep Rome off his back.

But one of the chosen followers? How can we make any sense of that? It’s unlikely that his actions can be explained by his need for money. He had the purse of the group already and if he wanted money, he could simply take what he wanted. And it doesn’t square with his sense of self-loathing when the consequences of his action cause Jesus’ death. One writer suggests that Judas, being the only Judean in group of Galileans may have felt marginalized and lonely, an outsider who was given short shrift in the group. Maybe.

The musical play Jesus Christ Superstar provides a different answer to which some scholars subscribe. Perhaps he believed that Jesus’ mission would ultimately fail, but only after causing suffering and death of many who would become a part of a bloody insurrection. If he could get him arrested, perhaps Jesus would just be beaten or imprisoned and lives would be saved. Jesus would come to this senses and quit this rabble rousing talk.

Another motive might be just the opposite. The arrest would force Jesus’ hand, make him show his Messianic power and the revolt could begin and when successful, Rome would be overthrown. A lot of scholars like these views. Either makes Judas a more sympathetic character. He just seems misguided rather than greedy and evil. And most recently, the Gospel of Judas seems to make Judas the hero of the story. Jesus asks him to betray him so that he might die as required for God’s plan. Very unlikely, historically speaking.

The truth is we don’t know what drove Judas to take the action he took. He didn’t write the Gospel with his name on it. So, all we ultimately know is he took an action he came so deeply to regret that he killed himself.

In some way, the need to understand Judas is perhaps driven by our need to understand ourselves. While we aren’t of the inner circle the way Judas was, surely we have had our encounter with Christ and experienced his grace as surely as Judas did. And what we know of ourselves is that we too betray Jesus. Not in the same way Judas did, but in just as real a fashion as he did.

On this same night that Judas kissed Jesus to identify him as the one who should be arrested, Jesus commanded his followers to love one another and to do so as he did. When we are honest with ourselves, we know we let far too many opportunities to do that go by. At our worst, we’re not even aware that we are making choices in which we do not love our neighbor as ourselves or when we are unwilling to touch the life of someone in need. We simply act as if we are the unredeemed; we act as if we’d never heard the command to love; we act as if we’d never heard the story of Jesus’ love for others. It’s not that we consciously choose to not love; we just act in our natural selfish way. Is that any less a betrayal than knowing how we should act and failing to do it? In either case, we must break the heart of Jesus.

In the final analysis, we either love Jesus, even with a blundering, inept love, trying our best to be as he would have us be, or we betray him. There is no in between.

Peace,

Jerry+