The Kiss of Judas; German, 16th century (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

[Reposted]

GOD in his Sacred Passion drew our attention to human betrayal. He helped us understand what it is and what to do about it. He commiserated with the betrayed. He recognized betrayal, one of the most painful of human experiences. His Passion is a microcosm of all the greatest sufferings and this world of suffering was filled with more acute pain than ours because of the incomparable sensitivity and guiltlessness of the Victim.

No harder experience in life exists. Friends, spouses, relatives are betrayed in acts of hidden treachery every day and their suffering is often hidden. Judas was one of Jesus’s chosen, elected as a friend. And yet he betrayed Jesus not in an impetuous moment, but in a calculated plot.

Why do people betray each other?

Betrayal results from desire. The traitor wants something. He wants money, fame, popularity, pleasure, romantic love — and someone stands in the way of getting it. The traitor is often secretive because he wants to have everything at once — the thing desired and the continued loyalty of the person he betrays.

We are all traitors at some point in life, at least in trivial ways. Sometimes it is simply the result of thoughtlessness.

Betrayal results from the essential fickleness and avarice of human nature. People change. They change in shocking ways. They may stop loving even those who have given them all. This change is often mysterious. Those who are betrayed struggle to make sense of it, to find the logic in it, and this effort is a great part of their pain because there is no sense in it and the effort to find sense is futile. Betrayal is irrational. Betrayal results from atavistic desire. Or revenge and envy. Betrayal stems from passion and it enters lives like a terrible storm, wrecking and overturning everything in its path. The damage may last a lifetime.

All of these were factors in the betrayal of Jesus as Luis de la Palma, S.J. wrote in his book The History of the Sacred Passion, as revised and translated by Henry James Coleridge:

Judas was full of indignation and evil temptation against our Saviour and against the doctrine which He taught. The perdition of this unhappy and miserable apostate began from his covetousness, because having charge of the alms which were given to our Saviour, he used to steal this money for his own purposes . And then, being overcome and mastered by this passion, he began to care less, and by little and little to conceive hatred and abhorrence, for the doctrine and person of our Redeemer, Who taught so uncompromisingly the love of poverty and condemned the coveting of temporal riches.

Going on further and further thus, Judas at last so hardened his heart, that in his unwillingness to look into his own conscience or lay to his own charge his own state of misery, he laid it all upon our Saviour, censuring and murmuring at all He did or said. At last he came no longer to believe in Him, but looked upon His doctrine as imposture and on His miracles as fictitious, and he did harm by his words and example to all those who listened to and who followed our Saviour. For, on the occasion of that most sublime discourse which He delivered to His disciples, wherein He promised them that He would give them His flesh to eat and His blood to drink, Judas must have been the chief among those who murmured, exclaiming, ‘This saying is hard and who can bear it ?’ Most probably, he was at the head of that movement of revolt which was the reason why so many of the disciples ‘ went back and walked no more with our Saviour. [emphasis added]

Jesus tells us beautifully what to do about betrayal. It is not for us to pretend it has not happened and yet it is not for us to seek revenge. Jesus acknowledges Judas’s treachery and gives him a chance to reconsider.

Then St. Peter, imagining that all the rest had the same good heart as himself, answered in the name of them all, ‘ Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have known that Thou art the Christ, the Son of God.’ But our Saviour, Who knew well whom He had in His company of disciples, answered, with an allusion to Judas, and to give him an occasion to move himself to compunction if he had not been so hardened, replied, ‘ Have I not chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?’

At the Last Supper, he speaks openly of the coming treachery. He is exquisitely perceptive and compassionate:

Judas was amongst them, his countenance hiding from them all the wickedness and treachery of his heart. And our Saviour, with ineffable gentleness, ate at the same table and at the same dish with a man of whom He knew that he had gone to the Chief Priests and was treating with them to betray Him, that he had already concluded the bargain and fixed the price, nay, that he was then thinking of nothing else but how to find a good opportunity for delivering Him into their hands. And then to show that He well knew and understood all this, and that He suffered of His own freewill, and also in order to touch the heart of Judas, and give him an opportunity of entering into himself, seeing that his secret was known, our Lord, among the other words which He spake at that Supper, lovingly complained of this, saying, ‘Amen, Amen, I say unto you that one of you is about to betray Me, and has conspired with My enemies against Me.’ On hearing these words, they all of them began to be very sorrowful and to cast troubled glances at one another, but much more did each one look into his own conscience, to see whether in himself or in the others he could discern any traces of such treachery.

Jesus shows that He is disturbed, that he knows He has been betrayed. 

Then our Saviour, seeing that he was so blinded and so deluded, said to him with His accustomed calmness and gentleness—‘That which thou hast to do, do quickly.’

In the garden, His full anguish is felt:

But, as the sorrow that is kept in does all the more violence to the heart, and naturally seeks some vent by which to obtain a little relief and comfort, so when our Lord found Himself in the solitude of the Garden, and no longer obliged to keep up appearances before the eight disciples whom He had left at the entrance, He allowed His sorrow to declare itself, and let His Heart seek relief and pleasure in the love and loyalty of the Apostles who were more especially dear to Him.

Finally, when Judas comes with the soldiers and guards, Jesus walks out to meet him. He does not flee. He embraces him.

What has Jesus taught us about betrayal?

The Christian is not a Stoic. He does not think he can so master pain as not to feel it. He does not believe that existence is a blind, merciless competition. There is meaning in our emotions. Jesus has taught us to embrace this suffering by contemplating the infinitely worse betrayal of that awful week. Surely, we are not too good to be betrayed.

And as we see, the traitor often suffers much more through remorse. There is no sin too great for God to forgive. Judas’s end is sad because God loves both the traitor and the betrayed and Judas lost confidence in that divine love.

— Comments —

Michael writes:

I thought that was very well written especially how the betrayed tries to make sense of it all.  We are made in God’s image in the intellect so it is natural for us to love one another. The closer someone is to us the more natural it is to love. Betrayal is never suspected at first and when things appear to reveal themselves in that direction we try to dismiss it and then rationalize it. Before the confrontation we try to bend the sentiments of the betrayer back in the proper direction. If unable we must treat them the way Jesus treated Judas. Pray for them and not refuse them kindness. The confrontation should be mild, as was Jesus’s toward Judas.  ‘God loves both the traitor and the betrayed’. But only to a point. God’s love is conditional. ‘if you love Me keep My commandments and I will take up My abode with you.’ As you alluded, He knew each of us would fall, so He made provisions for that. We receive the graces not to fall into grievous sin from the sacraments primarily and to a lesser degree from prayer, but even if we should fall, He allowed for it and offered His hand in friendship to help us recover our position. The point that God no longer loves the betrayer is when they refuse His grace to be restored to a place of honor. But the man who is betrayed by a fellow man does not know when this point of final impenitence/reconciliation will be reached or If it may come for those that betray him, so as long as his betrayer breathes there is hope for restoration of friendship and he is to treat them as Jesus treated Judas even to the last. It was not Jesus who refused Judas friendship it was Judas who obstinately refused to be reconciled. Jesus did not let the actions of Judas disturb His peace and though He still showed him kindness there came a point that He stopped giving him the graces needed to repent.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

That’s well said.

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