Judas the Betrayer
by Bill Dols

In the shadows Judas approaches Jesus. We gasp. In the garden darkness Judas steps toward Jesus with the kiss that will initiate violence, passion, death, and that will also birth new and remarkable possibilities.

There are 2000 years worth of speculation about why Judas betrays Jesus. For some it is thirty pieces of silver. For others Judas is a devoted disciple seeking to force upon Jesus a militant messiahship that would finally engage the Romans and replace Caesar’s kingdom with the kingdom of God. No one knows the heart of the betrayer. All we can be sure of is that his kiss kills Jesus and scatters the frightened disciples. We also know the very same violence and grief created a new community at the center of which a Jesus spirit dwelt in men and women who became passionate and empowered in ways impossible as long as Jesus lived. What Jesus was unable to accomplish while alive happens only after he is dead and nevertheless present with them, but in a much different way.

Judas is the betrayer inside each of us. He is the inclination and urge to lie, cheat, steal, compromise, sell out for power, lust, control, or success by betraying the best and purest and most noble in us. It is Judas in us who knows we, too, have a price and can be bought. In a thousand and one ways our Judas has betrayed those closest, most vulnerable and beloved. We have had to answer for some of our betrayals in public. Most, however, are private affairs for which we reckon in our haunted conscience, dreams, body pains, and nameless fears.

What do you know of such a Judas within you? What has your Judas wrought? What betrayals of the others and even of yourself? What kiss? What violence, passion and dying have your betrayals precipitated? How might your life be different had you resisted your Judas? What have you killed, punished, or even sacrificed as Judas did in his reported suicide in hopes of atoning or making it right, easing your burdens of guilt? Without approving, applauding or condoning betrayal, wonder what the betrayal invited into your life that could have come in no other way. What do you know now that you could never have known had you never been a betrayer? Or been betrayed? What healing and hope filled things have occurred in your life that might never have been had the betrayal not happened?

In this season of death and resurrection, rather than treat Judas in the gospel and Judas in you and your world as simply villain and culprit, source of remorse and regret, ask what was created, reborn, kindled, understood, known and experienced for the first time only on the other side of betrayal. How might it be possible for you to say THANKS FOR ALL THAT HAS BEEN including Judas, as Dag Hammarskjold writes, on the way to finally being able to say "Yes" to all that shall be?

Copyright © 2005 William Dols