Judas

Judas's words in the Gospel for today always strike me.... "What are you willing to give me......?" His betrayal of Jesus did not result from any sort of thwarted political dream he cherished and hoped Jesus would at last fulfill, nor was it disillusionment that crept upon him, or that he suddenly stopped believing that Jesus was the Messiah. We always want to give Judas a graver, weightier reason for betraying his friend; to try to make sense of it. But in the end, the betrayal came because of a shiny bauble that caught his eye -thirty pieces of silver. What are you willing to give me? What a grubby, little question sets in motion the Passion of Jesus. We simply cannot believe it.

St. John gives us a hint as to this ‘grubbiness’ when he says in Chapter 12 of his Gospel.

“But Judas Iscariot said, ‘Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?’ This he said, not that he cared for the poor but because he was a thief, and as he had the money box he used to take what was put into it.”

John’s words are hard. Not only did Judas often help himself to the money box; he also upbraids Jesus, himself, with feigned dismay at the wasted oil that could have brought in a pretty penny - for his own greedy little fingers later on, when he was alone with the box. Judas was a thief. A petty thief at that. And John seemed to know it, or at least to have had his suspicions.

Grubby, petty worldliness that has seeped into a soul can make that soul live for baubles and betray for them. I find that scarier than hatred.

Stuff. Money. Position. Passing praise. Using others to get ahead. Richard Rich's ‘Wales’. We all have our persistent and petty little sins. It should give us pause that it is precisely those kinds of sins that betrayed Jesus. Judas never seemed to get beyond the shallows even though he followed Jesus for three years. He saw the same miracles, he heard the teachings, he watched Christ forgive others over and over. He saw all the poor who could have benefited from the common purse and blithely dismissed their need when he felt tempted just one more little time to skim some off the top. It is a great lesson for each of us. Do we betray Him or one another ….for baubles? We who confess that we know Him and say we love Him? It’s hard to admit that something so small and petty, given into over and over, might very well lead us to the most unfeeling betrayal. But it can. All those little envies, thefts, and habitual, little white lies that pile up in our souls and weigh it down imperceptibly, until we collapse into something so much worse. This is a cautionary tale indeed.

It only gets worse. There is a moment when Judas feels the weighted depth of his betrayal. A real sense of sin overwhelms him. A sudden, deeper understanding of what he has done all this time, little by little, that has led to an unthinkable end; a crucial moment when love at last might trump his pathetic, sinful greed. He is so RIPE for conversion. But, alas, he goes to the wrong place to find it.

Judas returns to the Pharisees with the silver and desperately confesses his guilt out loud before them. "I have betrayed innocent blood!" And they coldly reply: "What is that to us? Look to it yourself." At this moment, the word Jesus uses for them fits so perfectly: viper.

They had taken full advantage of Judas's weaknesses with greed and used them for their own ends. He was a mere tool that had been used and was now only this loud nuisance exposing their own plotting souls by admission of his guilt. They, as Jesus said, enter not the gate to heaven and they bar the door so that others cannot go in either.

These elders of the law swept him away from themselves with those awful words, "Look to it yourself." Judas’s sin was great....but theirs was greater. They left a man in the depth of his despair. They made him "look to it himself"....and there was no help there. Blind guides.

What if one of them had responded to Judas’s remorse with a sudden pity understanding? What if one of them had repented his own part in the plan after hearing Judas's loud and earnest confession of guilt? They could have helped him and themselves back to the light. But they left him to himself. How terrifyingly cold and hard and dark must have been the envy in their souls. To dispose of a poor, wretched man so easily to get what they wanted - the death of Jesus.

It made me realize we must "look to it together." Not alone. We must not break a bruised reed, no matter how petty his crimes. Recognize true sorrow and not dismiss it impatiently, but help it to grow by our own humble admissions of guilt. We must never be shocked by one another’s sins, even if we have been hurt by them. Nor should we take advantage of another’s weakness to further our own ends, which we might be tempted to do. We must each admit our petty, little grubbiness and overcome it with the purifying fire of grace, and we must always have someone to tell us in our darkest hours "Look to Christ. No matter what, look to Christ." No matter the sin, the guilt, the overwhelming sorrow - look to Christ.