http://www.inhabitatiodei.com/2007/04/07/judas-jeremiah-a-holy-saturday-homily/
For some reason I never bothered to note that Halden Doerge of Inhabitatio Dei blogging is in Portland, Oregon. I, er, happen to be Oregonian by birth and upbringing and came to the Emerald City to study. This homily I read recently is something I find encouraging and so I am linking to it, in classic WenatcheeTheHatchet fashion, literally years after it was posted.
What sticks with me is the observation that Judas, upon realizing his guilt in betraying Christ to death, goes to the very religious authorities to whom he betrayed Jesus. Their response is to refuse him any possibility of absolution. We may surmise that Jesus' enemies who arranged for the crucifixion did not, in fact, even remotely care that Jesus was innocent. They were taking matters into their own hands because they had cause to believe Jesus was a blasphemer and very probably a bastard who claimed to be able to do what God alone could do. And, on top of all these things, Jesus was being welcomed as a king; had spoken against the Temple predicting its total destruction; and was becoming popular enough that Rome was in danger of beginning to take some action. All these, for the Temple authorities, would have made Jesus anything but an innocent man.
Yet Judas, we are told, knew the magnitude of his sin. He may have known it incompletely in as much as he merely knew he was guilty of shedding innocent blood. He may have known that he consigned to death a man whom he may even at one point have considered the Christ, God's appointed man to defeat the power of evil in that age. When he realized his guilt he went to the very authorities to whom he had betrayed the Lord. Their answer was "See to it yourself." Judas was trapped in a double bind of his own making.
We generally see Judas as the betrayer, as the bad seed from the start. Yet Jesus was abandoned by all of His disciples at the hour of death. Judas betrayed his master and quickly came to regret it. We are told that he repented. He felt remorse. He turned, however, to religious authorities who neither absolved him of the death he was complicit in nor approved of his being party to the death. The religious leaders and his pangs of conscience put him in an inescapable double bind. He was needed so that the enemies of Christ could obtain what they wanted by finding a pretext to have Jesus put to death, and yet he would not be considered any kind of hero or ally, merely a tool. He became a tool to his own sin and to those who found his sins useful for obtaining their ends.
Yet in the end it seems to be Judas' despair of any hope in the face of his own regret and rejection by those whose money he sought that impels him to end his life. The other disciples were, theologically speaking, no less guilty of nailing Christ to the cross through their own sins. What was it, then, that made Judas so particularly doomed? Was it because Judas did not recognize that Jesus was the Christ? No, this does not seem to be the case or he would have abandoned Jesus with the others and would not have remained when Peter said "To whom shall we go? You alone have the words of life?" We are told that Satan entered Judas. We are not told that Satan entered Judas at the START of Jesus' ministry but near its end.
Was Judas' particular flaw unbelief? Even the other disciples did not believe until after the resurrection and even Thomas doubted. Did Judas lack hope? So did the other disciples. What did Judas do or think in the wake of the death of Christ that made him different? In his lack of hope he forcefully accomplished for himself what he realized he was guilty of according to the law--he took his own life. I don't have more to blog about at the time so I'm just going to unceremoniously end.
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