The Betrayer

It's been too many days since I have sat down to do this, and I can definitely tell a change in myself. Without a conscious effort to keep involved with the Word, life can easily crowd it out. It really all comes down to priorities. Life is not nearly as important of a priority as this, and I have to make a conscious decision to keep my priorities straight.

This portion of the NT has always been interesting for me. First of all, it is very dramatic. The arrest and trial of Jesus is a painful thing to read. If one imagines the environment, all the people, and all the pain, it is a very hard thing to think about. But, second, there has always been, for me, the question of the role of Judas.

Jesus continues to state that all is happening as prophesied. Jesus had to be delivered to the Sanhedrin in some way. The trial and crucifixion places all of humanity in the role of betrayer. We killed Christ. Humanity killed Jesus. His disciples "fled," and one of them is the "betrayer." The established religious system at the time, which Jesus' ideas threatened, was the active participant in the destruction of Christ, but all of this had to occur for the sake of grace, as, Jesus says, it was written.

If the story occurred without Judas's involvement, if there had been no betrayer of Jesus from His inner circle, and if the disciples had not fled, then the Sanhedrin would have had to overpower Him and kill Him and them outright. As Jesus said, had He chosen, no power on earth could have overtaken Him. However, He chose not to exercise His deity, in order for grace to be the final product. So, at some point in time, He was always going to have to surrender, voluntarily, in order to be crucified and fulfill the prophecy. Does it, then, really matter more that Judas betrayed Him than if the story had gone down differently and Jesus allowed Himself to be overpowered without a Judas. The end result would have been the same, and in fact, Judas was the functioning agent for the arrest of Jesus. Someone would always have had to fill that role, or else Jesus would have allowed the Sanhedrin to take Him by force.

So, why put Judas in the role of a "betrayer" if the story had already been written that Jesus had to die? Judas filled a part in a cosmic drama that he was "predestined" to fulfill (if one believes in that). If one does not believe in predestination, then Judas' free will in betraying Jesus is really still pretty insignificant compared to Jesus allowing Himself to be taken and not calling on "12 legions" of angels to protect him. Jesus was "predestined" to die. I don't deny Judas' role as betrayer, but I wonder about the literal interpretation of him as the "greatest" of all betrayers, secondary to this particular betrayal, since the endpoint would have been the same regardless of whether a betrayal occurred.

When I get stuck on these sorts of issues, I have to remember that rationality does not provide the way to faith, it provides a stumbling block to faith sometimes, and it definitely is the fuel for legalistic zealotry. So, at times like this, I have to back off, and have faith in the entire story, but I still wonder about his literary depiction as the greatest betrayer of all time.