The Betrayer is Beloved

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

This week, we're in the middle of the Holy Week and Easter observances, the most sacred time of the year. Some of you are hearing this closer to Easter, but the day I’m recording this (and the day the first version is being aired) is Wednesday itself, a day the church has long called "Spy Wednesday." This is the day we remember how Judas Iscariot went to the chief priests and agreed to hand Jesus over for thirty pieces of silver. And whenever Spy Wednesday comes around, so do the myths about Judas.

The biggest myth is this: Judas was uniquely evil, the worst of all sinners, the one man beyond redemption. Dante put Judas in the lowest circle of hell, frozen in the mouth of Satan himself. For centuries, Christian preachers have used Judas as a symbol of ultimate betrayal, of irredeemable wickedness. 

But let's slow down and take a harder look at the story.

First, the Gospels don't actually agree on why Judas did what he did. Mark gives no reason for the betrayal. Matthew focuses on the money. In Luke and John, we are told that Satan entered Judas, rendering his actions not his own entirely. There's no single, tidy explanation, which should make us cautious about building a whole theology of damnation on one man we barely understand. 

And yet, across all four Gospels, Jesus shares the Last Supper with Judas, breaks bread with him, does not exclude him from the table. In John's Gospel specifically, Jesus even washes the feet of Judas. Jesus meets Judas with the same love and care he offers every other disciple, even knowing what is coming. The betrayer is also the beloved.

Second, it's worth noting what Jesus himself says. In John's Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that none of them has been lost except "the one destined to be lost, so that scripture might be fulfilled." That phrase, destined to be lost, has troubled theologians for centuries. But the dominant interpretation among the early church fathers is that though Jesus foresaw the free choice of Judas to betray Jesus, even that freedom is harder to assess than we might think.

Third, and maybe most importantly, we often forget that Judas felt genuine remorse. Matthew tells us he threw the thirty pieces of silver back at the priests, declared that he had betrayed innocent blood, and then went out and died by suicide. Whatever drove him to betray Jesus, he could not live with what he had done. That's not the portrait of a man who had fully rejected Christ.

And here's where the Christian tradition, at its best, has something remarkable to offer: the doctrine of the harrowing of hell, the idea (expressed in the Apostles’ Creed) that Christ descended to the dead on Holy Saturday. A poet named Ruth Etchells imagined what that might be in a poem she wrote called "The Ballad of the Judas Tree." 

In Hell there grew a Judas Tree / Where Judas hanged and died / Because he could not bear to see / His master crucified / Our Lord descended into Hell / And found his Judas there / For ever hanging on the tree / Grown from his own despair / So Jesus cut his Judas down / And took him in his arms / "It was for this I came" he said / "And not to do you harm / My Father gave me twelve good men / And all of them I kept / Though one betrayed and one denied / Some fled and others slept / In three days' time I must return / To make the others glad / But first I had to come to Hell / And share the death you had / My tree will grow in place of yours / Its roots lie here as well / There is no final victory / Without this soul from Hell"/ So when we all condemned him / As of every traitor worst / Remember that of all his men / Our Lord forgave him first.

That last line is the theological punch: our Lord forgave him first.

The myth says Judas is the exception, the one person even God's love couldn't reach. The gospel says there are no exceptions. We profess in the creeds that Christ descended into hell. We believe that the love of God pursues us into the very darkest places we can go, including the darkness we make for ourselves.

Judas is a warning, yes, about the corrosive power of betrayal and despair, even more so about what happens when you so form Christ in your own image and expectations that you turn away from the real goodness God holds out to you. But if Etchells is right, Judas can also be a testimony to the relentless, pursuing love of Jesus Christ. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.