Judas, Study for the Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci

After two centuries of mythopoeia (see a future post I have not written, or G.K. Chesterton, on myth) surrounding this sinister character we more or less throw everything at him and no one really objects.  Maybe we are in good company John 12:6 but I think he has gotten a bad wrap, and we may be more like him than we like to think.

I really think Judas is a lot like Inspector Javert from Les Miséserables.  He lived by a code of justice, which was for the most part honorable.  He upheld a duty to the law and fought for what was right.  But in the end he couldn’t understand the path of forgiveness and sacrifice layed out by our Lord.  Rather than repent and change his way of thinking, he committed suicide.  Similar to Judas.  Judas was ready to go to war to stop the tyrrany of Rome.  He wanted to see his people freed and the true King ascend to the throne.  These were all good things.  But he wanted to do it his way, Satan’s way, with no suffering.  We often seek this path as well.  Jesus cried out to his father in the garden asking if there was another way.  And there was, there was what Satan had offered him in the desert.  A kingdom with no death and suffering necessary, or so it seemed.  But our Lord prevailed and chose the path of suffering, that his Father might lift him up in victory.

There are many ways we can choose the easy way, which seems to get us what we want quickly with no humble sacrifice, with no suffering.  We try to get food we didn’t earn, maybe not direct theft but we steal it from our kids with pension plans or inflation or we steal from our neighbors by taking government handouts.  We want sex without the hard work of marriage and children.  We want a good job, for our family, so we lie a little on a resume.  We want to keep our job so we let others suffer unjustly so we don’t risk sticking our neck out.  “It’s all for the children.”  We want good goals but we want to get there our way, right now, instead of God’s way.  We want to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, now, instead of in God’s time.  This is the root of much Sin.  This brings to mind Peter in the garden cutting off the hight priests’ ear.  He was ready to bring in the kingdom, without Jesus dying, that was not The Plan.  So he acted as Satan, he acted as Judas.  I’m sure Judas was as surprised as anyone when Jesus was arrested.  He thought he could force Jesus’ hand into rising up and ushering in the an earthly kingdom.  But when faced with the fact that his paradigm was incorrect, he chose suicide rather than repentance.  Judas was a heretic in the sense mentioned previously, he had no direct followers, but we can be his followers when we try to find our own shortcuts to the blessings of this world.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” – John 12:24

Javert on the Precipice