JUDAS: THE TRAGIC DISCIPLE
Text: Matthew 26:47-54; Matthew 27: 3-7

I have in my office at home a framed picture of a rooster. It is there to remind me of Peter’s denial of Jesus, he in cowardice denying he even knew Jesus. Jesus had told him it would happen before the rooster crowed. Peter protested, but later that night he denied knowing Jesus three times. Then the rooster crowed, and he wept bitter tears. The rooster is there in my study to remind me how close my own cowardly denials are every day.
Should I also have a bag with 30 pieces of silver to remind me of Judas - - and of a different kind of betrayal?

I

There was quite a stir this spring when the long lost Gospel of Judas was released by National Geographic. It had been mentioned way back in the late 2nd century by Ireneus of Lyon in his work Against Heresies as exhibit A in the gnostic heresies to avoid. But it had been lost to history until 1983 when it was discovered in Egypt. A broker put it up for sale for 3 million dollars - - no takers. The manuscript passed through a number of hands, suffering deterioration along the way, until this past spring when National Geographic published it with great sensation in the Easter season when things religious get more attention.

It is an exciting and important discovery of a form of gnosticism we had known only by its opponents - - which is not the best way to know anything. (It’s like learning about Hillary Clinton from Rush Limbaugh.)

The Gospel of Judas does not give us a more historical picture of Judas or Jesus, but rather a first hand glimpse of one form of gnosticism - - Sethian gnosticism, named after the third son of Adam and Eve, Seth.

If you want to know more you can read the two books Chris McLachlan and Pieter Moes have given to the church library: The Gospel of Judas by Kasser, Meyer and Wurst, and The Secrets of Judas by James M. Robinson.) They are fascinating reading.

In the Gospel of Judas, Judas is the 13th disciple. The other 12 do not know who Jesus is and where he comes from. Judas does! In this gospel it is Judas who makes the supreme declaration of faith:

I know who you are and where you come from. You are from the immortal realm of Barbelo. And I am not worthy to utter the name of the one who sent you.
In Sethian gnosticism the true God has only to do with the spiritual reading beyond the earth. There are a number of spiritual realms created by God, and Barbelo is the spiritual being appointed by God to rule the realm of Barbelo.

The earth, the material realm, is an evil realm created by an evil god. The earth is not the Lord’s but the devil’s. Salvation consists of knowing that this material world is a evil prison and escaping it by shedding our material bodies so we can enter the spiritual realm. So Jesus says to Judas who is about to turn him over to the Romans:

You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.

So in this “gospel,” Judas is not the villain but the hero. He knows the truth about the spiritual realm and releases Jesus to it. This form of gnosticism is one of many, so many and so different that scholars such as Karen King say the term “gnosticisim” is no longer useful as a description. (It’s like the name Baptist. If Jessie Jackson and Jessie Helms, Jimmy Carter and Jerry Falwell can be Baptists, what’s a Baptist?)

II

Now to the Judas presented in the New Testament gospels. The passion accounts stress that all 12 of the disciples abandoned Jesus:

- - “You will all become deserters,” Jesus said.
- - “All of them deserted him and fled.”

But the gospels single out two figures in the way they betrayed Jesus: Peter and Judas.
First his name. Judas is the Greek spelling of the Hebrew name Judah, a very popular name then. Iscariot may mean he was from a town in Judea named Kerioth. If so, he was the only disciple from that southern region around Jerusalem.

This might have led Judas to a special hatred of the Romans who occupied God’s holy land and holy city. And it may have given him an especially fervent hope that the kingdom of God Jesus preached would lead to an overthrow of the Roman overlords and freedom to God’s people.

In his famous book The True Believer, Eric Hoffer described the “true believer” of 20th century mass movements:

- - He’s a fanatic, needing a Stalin (or a Christ) to worship and die for.
- - He’s the mortal enemy of things - as - they - are, and he insists on sacrificing himself for a dream impossible to attain.

Was Judas a “true believer” type?

Judas could well have been a zealot, one of the radical political parties of his day which urged the overthrow of the Roman oppressor, and lived by the slogan: “Only Yahweh is king!”
He had a keen moral/ethical conscience, especially on behalf of the poor. Remember when Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus with expensive perfume? Judas said, “Why the waste!? The perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor.”

He was a trusted member of the 12, the one charged with keeping the treasury, the C.F.O. of the group.

At some point he decided to betray Jesus. We do not know why.

Perhaps, this was it: He watched the growing conflict between Jesus and the powers-that-be. He was thrilled with Jesus’ pronouncements of the kingdom of God: God alone is king! He was less thrilled with Jesus’ words about loving your enemies, and turning the other cheek, and when a soldier asks you to carry his bags one mile, carry them two!

So perhaps Judas’ act of betrayal was the desperate attempt to force Jesus’ hand. If Jesus was arrested he would call down God’s legions of angels, gather the freedom fighters and lead a holy war against Rome.

Jesus entered Jerusalem as people cried out Hosannas! Now was the time!
The powers-that-be were afraid of Jesus’ popularity and his threat to their fragile peace. They needed a quiet way to arrest him.

Judas gave them the way, leading them to the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus was praying.
Matthew’s account says that he greeted Jesus, “Hail Rabbi” and kissed him. And that Jesus said, “Friend, do what you are here to do.”

When they laid hands on him, one of Jesus’ followers drew his sword and cut off the ear of one of the arresting party. Jesus said, “Put your sword back in its place. Those who live by the sword, die by it.” Then he said, “Do you not think I could appeal to my Father and he would send 12 legions of angels?” This is exactly of course what Judas hoped.

“But then how would scripture be fulfilled?” Jesus said. His way, God’s way, would not be by conquering sword but by sacrificial love. It is still the ____________ way.

If this scenario is close to the truth imagine the horror in Judas’ heart. He had bet everything on his hope of a political kingdom and an emancipated Israel. How could he have been so wrong?
Matthew’s gospel records that he realized what he had done, repented and tried to give back the 30 pieces of silver the officials had given him. They refused the money. Then Judas went out and hung himself from a tree.

In the Book of Acts his death is reportedly differently: His stomach split open and his blood and bowels spilled on the ground. This could have been a picture of his falling on his sword - - as sometimes soldiers of slain leaders did.

The details are different but the meaning of his death are the same: Judas out of despair and guilt committing suicide. It is a tragic ending to a tragic life.

Judas demonization began in the New Testament: His act of betrayal made the greatest sin and his way of death the path of damnation. How do we respond to Judas, and to the Judas within us all?
We are tragic figures when the worst comes from our best intentions. We are King Creon facing off with his niece Antigone when she defies him and the law to give her brother a decent burial. We are the characters in the The House of Sand and Fog each with high ideals, both moving inescapably toward destruction and death.

This is how I sometimes betray Christ and my truest self: I think I’m doing the right thing, but I’m not. My own neediness, my own desires for success or approval, or my own hidden selfishness lead me to betray Christ, my best self, my deepest values. I at the time justify the actions but they are false justification. How could I have been that wrong?

We then sometimes fall into hopelessness and despair, guilt and searing shame. We are tempted to end it all, to fall nobly on our own swords - - ah, the vanity of self-destruction.

We are tempted to give it up - - if not our lives. Then any dream of some better, nobler life. We are sinking.

Then I think of Jesus and how he came to his disciples after the Resurrection, to these same ones who had forsaken him and fled. How he forgave them and called them again - - ready or not - - to be his disciples. I think of the homely store-front church in Ann Tyler’s Saint Maybe named “The Church of the Second Chance.”

There’s a line I love in Jan Karon’s latest novel: “Every saint has a ‘past’ and every sinner has a future.” Only Judas didn’t know that, couldn’t believe that.

Here’s the final tragic dimension of Judas’ life: He didn’t, couldn’t, hang on long enough to experience the forgiveness of the Risen Christ, killing himself before Easter could happen. Peter, who sinned no less, hung on and experienced his Easter. Judas couldn’t hang on any longer.
There’s an old tradition I love: Of how Jesus after his death in the world to come went to find Judas - - like a shepherd going after a lost sheep. He tapped him on the shoulder, “Friend” he called him and kissed him, returning Judas’ kiss of betrayal with a kiss of peace, of forgiveness, of restored relationship.

“Friend, you’ve been in this hell of yours long enough,” Jesus says, and leads him home to God.
It’s just a tradition. No one can know what lies beyond this life. But it sounds like Jesus, doesn’t it? It feels like the gospel, a gospel not for this life alone, but for the world to come and all eternity.
Judas has been demonized, and as in the Gospel of Judas made a hero. But his final hope - - and ours - - is not in the re-writing of our stories so that our acts of betrayal are turning into acts of heroism, that is in revisionist biography. Our hope is in the miracle of forgiveness. Christ’s, our own. Our capacity to forgive Judas and to forgive ourselves for our most faithless, cowardly and misguided acts. The big ones and the thousand little ones. Let’s bring Judas back to the family table.

The gospel is what Joseph said to his brothers who had sold him into slavery: You planned it for evil, but God planned-it-over for good.

The gospel is that there is no place the love of God cannot go.

I do not know what it takes for us to believe that, and to trust our lives to its goodness. But I wish we could. Maybe we still can.