Lie To MeDo you really want to be like Jesus? Then you need a Judas.

Betrayal is hard to swallow. Having the very people you love and trust and need turn their back on you will eat at your very soul. The ones you thought were friends and that you treated better than family turn out to be worse than the highwayman with the knife waiting to slit your throat for the two or three pennies in your pocket. You stop believing that there’s really anything “good” in the world, that everything is a falsehood and a lie that is only going to be true until the truth about it is discovered.  You await deception – suspicion your constant companion.

It was like that with Jesus and Judas. Of the millions of humans on the earth, the man who was God in a human body chose one dozen, just 12, individuals to share his divine life with. Not even his own parents, nor his brothers and sisters, were so lucky as to come to see with their own eyes, and know as a friend, the one who was appointed before the start of the Creation to be the sacrifice to pay for every messed up, stupid, wrong, evil, and mean thing we are capable of. But, even this huge opportunity was not enough for Judas, his greed and self-interest led him to petty theft from the very sack of money that the 12 needed to live off of. He went so far as to scold Jesus himself for accepting a gift of oil on his forehead and saying that the oil should have been sold and the money “spent on the poor,” all the while actually being angry that the expensive gift went on Jesus’ forehead instead of his own pocket. In the end, Judas gave Jesus up to the authorities of the church for a miserable 30 pieces of gold; the life of the man who was God and man at once sold for a bag of coins. Maybe they really were a lot of money, but no amount of money could ever be enough to trade for the wonderful person that was Jesus of Nazareth.

Certainly Jesus could have picked a better guy than this rat and thief and bottom-feeder to join him. There were probably other guys, men with character and a hunger to know the one true God of all that is, who would have jumped at the opportunity to live with the Master, the Anointed One, the Christ. There were 500 men and 1000 men in attendance on two separate occasions that Jesus fed. There had to be some pretty stand-up guys there. There was at least one guy who was freed of a 1000 evil spirits, he might have been ecstatic over the chance to go with the one who brought him out of all that agony. There had to be no shortage of candidates for the position of #12. And Jesus had to have known this. Jesus knew that the woman at the well was living in adultery. We even know that he knew all about Judas’ thievery all along. Judas’ poor character was despicable but in the greater plan for all of humanity he was indispensable, and irreplaceable, wholly necessary piece in the puzzle without which there would never be any hope for even one miserable soul on this earth.

Jesus declared to the 12, during the feast of Passover in his 33rd year, that one of the group was about to stab him in the back. One of these special, precious, lucky men, he said, was going to double-cross him. The whole room erupted in arguments about how none of them could even think about being a traitor, and it was probably true that the other 11 just would never have thought to harm so much as a hair on their teacher’s head. Judas, on the other hand, knew that Jesus was talking about him. He’d already been talking to the church leaders and weighing out the risk of giving Jesus up versus what he might be able to do with all of that money. And, if there had been any hesitance at any time in the mind and heart of Judas, there was none now. Full of evil intent, focused only on the gold and whatever he had planned to do with it, ignoring the love that Jesus had to have shown him, denying the power of God that coursed through Jesus’ being and that healed the sick and brought dead people back to life, Judas went to the church and took the leaders’ money and led them to Jesus. Within 6 hours, Jesus hung dead, nailed to a pair of heavy beams.

The death of Jesus was a horrible ordeal for him. He suffered not only the pain of torture, humiliation, and the actual horror show that was the act of crucifixion. Jesus suffered the pain due to all of humanity for it’s failings in the eyes of the Creator and Father. So deeply did the punishment and pain of sin go into Jesus’ being that the Father actually turned his back on Jesus. This was God turning his back on a part of himself, as if we could turn our back entirely on ourselves. 39 strikes with a whip of ropes with bits of bone and glass embedded in them, hard from blood dried on them. A crown made of slim branches with long thorns pressed onto, and into, his head. Beaten by sadistic guards, his beard ripped from it’s roots on his face. The prophet Isaiah, seeing the crucifixion in a prophetic vision, described the face of Jesus and unrecognizable as human. Then, nailed to a pair of beams in a cross shape, once in each wrist and once through both of his feet, he hung for three hours in the hot desert sun. Over and over again, already beaten and weak from the abuse on his way to the cross, he was forced to raise the entire weight of his body on the nails to gasp for air. Each time he relaxed, the nails tore deeper into his flesh and bones and his position and weight distribution caused his lungs to fill with liquid until he either raised himself up again or gave up and died of asphyxiation. When he finally surrendered the life in him, a soldier stabbed his hanging corpse in it’s side to make sure he was truly dead. Water and blood came poured out of the body, the result of his heart having exploded within his chest as a result of the deep stress of the ordeal. All of this to make us even with God for the sin, the failure to live up to God’s standard of conduct in our lives, by taking our punishment on him. And, all of this horror caused directly by one man – Judas.

The 12 all saw what happened, Judas included. Like the rest, Judas watched the beatings, the phony trials, the hate-filled crowds driven to a frenzy with bloodlust and the eventual horrific destruction of the man Jesus of Nazareth. The weight of the guilt on his heart at realizing just what he had done drove him mad and he ran back to the church and threw the coins back at the leaders and then he went out to a field with a tree and he hung himself in desperate shame for betraying God himself.

It’s easy to mentally cast Judas aside, to judge him for being the thief, opportunist, traitor, and even coward that he was, and rightly so. But it’s not so easy to dismiss the truth that had Judas not been the kind of man that he was, he would not have acted the way he did. And, had he not acted as he did, the death of Jesus Christ that paid for the sin of all of humanity would not have been possible. While there were probably hundreds and thousands of candidates that you or I would have said were more deserving of becoming one of the 12, no one but Judas could have accomplished the disgusting task.

We need betrayal sometimes. We need traitors to our cause. We need backstabbers. We need finks. We need the rotten bastards who take our worlds and turn them upside down, force failure down our throats, and leave us for dead.

Up until Judas made his move, the story of Jesus is like a fairy tale, we even tell it to children as a bedtime story. Up until Judas’ intentions become known, the whole ministry of Jesus is a thriving, growing, joyful, hopeful, ideal dream. Of course the other 11 reacted like they did when Jesus told them of the one that was going to betray him, things were good and when things are good we are lulled into a horrifyingly false sense of security. The 11 could not possibly have imagined the horrors the next few hours would show them.

When Judas made his move, the whole world literally came apart. At the very moment of Jesus’ death, the earth shook so hard that the curtains in the temple that separated the most holy objects of God were ripped in two and the skies went dark. At the moment of betrayal, many a good person has preferred death than to suffer the evil pain and face the coming suffering. The destruction of Jesus was as monumental for it’s brutality as for it’s importance to the eternity of humanity.

We despise betrayal. We despise having our loyalty dismissed. We despise having our love discarded. We despise having our hope and security ripped from our grasp. We despise the Judas’s for their cold and calculating manner, their heartless deeds, and their unrepentant ways. We look at the men and women who have stripped us of our very dignity with eyes filled with fire and hearts filled with hate. We despise hurt and the ones who do the hurting to us. And that is as it should be, for no one who makes another suffer should ever be let to do it. But, while the anger of betrayal may remain, the pain of it will not last forever.

The end of the pain of betrayal for Jesus was death. But that was not the end of Jesus, because he came back from death after three days and nights in the grave. And when he came back, he had actually defeated death and made it possible for all of humanity to live forever. When he died, the Father accepted his death as the full payment for all of our sin so that we could spend that eternity of life with him. When the curtains ripped apart in the temple, the Spirit of God was set free to enter into any human being who asked him to come into them, enabling humanity to have God’s perspective and guidance through life so that we could live the kind of life that God always wanted us to live. Even if the betrayal in our life kills us, we cannot truly be destroyed by it, because Jesus enabled us to live forever. And whatever life we have left is going to be lived guided by him within us, with our failures forgiven, and with the promise of a life forever with him.

Judas was, from the very start, the key to taking Jesus from the path of teacher, preacher, mentor, healer, and friend to the path of being the living sacrifice to pay for the freedom of all of humanity’s souls. Judas delivered Jesus directly into his life’s ultimate purpose and destiny. In the end, the traitor in your life is handing you into your ultimate purpose and destiny. Your traitor has shaken up your world and made you suffer and hurt, but you are headed directly into something greater than you can imagine. You are being freed from the limits of the life you have lived up until this point, like Jesus being freed from the body, and you are being enabled to accomplish what you have not yet imagined. Your traitor has cast you aside, but you will not be left to lay there dead and useless, you will be raised up from the death of your dreams, your goals, your hopes, and your security and you will have a new life and will be the promise of new life to others. Where your traitor is now left with his world and his treasures and whatever earthly rewards he can glean from those he continues to cause to suffer, you are free from his treachery and you are only suffering for a time before God’s greatest work is accomplished in your life.

All the while on the cross, Jesus made no sound. As he was whipped he made no cry. As he died, he asked once for something to drink, told John to take care of Mary, asked God why he’d left him, and then declared that his life and his work were done, nothing more. What you need to do now is do what Jesus did, bear the pain of betrayal and the suffering it has brought quietly, strengthened and enabled by the hope in the knowledge that even when God seems to have completely turned his back on you, he has not left you, at least not forever, and there is an end coming that is greater than where you were and what you were doing before your Judas came to light in your life.