BETRAYAL John M. Buchanan
Matthew 26, 27 selected Broad Street Presbyterian Church
March 23, 1980 Columbus, Ohio

"Ts it E, Lord?" What a curious way to respond to the announcement that someone in
the group is a traitor. The normal reaction in that situation is reflexive and de-

fensive - "It's not me!" It's amazing how many things go awry in an average household,
how many tools misplaced, lights left burning, doors uniocked without anyone apparently
being at fault. "Who knocked down the walls of Jericho?" the Sunday School teacher

asked and a young student answered immediately, "ZI don't know, but it wasn't me."

Ordinarily, you and I do not react to the announcement that there is foul play among us
by asking whether or not we might be the perpetrator, Our first instinct is to declare
our innecence. Qur second instinct is to look around and try to figure out who did it.

"Is it I, Lord?" A curious thing to say + unless betrayal is complex; unless some-
times betrayal can happen unintentionally; unless, in fact, you can betray a person
without really knowing that you're doing it. Then, “Is it I?" becomes a legitimate and
appropriate question,

Jean Paul Sartre, French existentialist, philosopher and author, seems sometimes to
want to believe in God, but can't because of the absurdity and meaninglessness he sees in
the human situation. In a short story, The Wall, Sartre argues that life is absurd,
without meaning, precisely because the worst betrayals sometimes are not intentional. The
story goes something like this. A palitical prisoner has been tried and condemned to die.
After the anguish of trying to make a kind of peace with his fate, he summons the
courage from somewhere deep inside himself to defy his captors one last time. He will
do it, he decides, by making them look foolish - the worst thing one can do to pompous,
strutting militerists. He recalls that his captors have offered to reprieve him if he
will reveal the whereabouts of the leader of the underground movement of which he is a
member, His Life - in exchange for information. Under torture and endless interrogation
he had not given an inch. But now, in defiance, in order to strike a blow for freedom
and decency and his own integrity, he reports to the office of the commandant and
announces that he has changed his mind. He knows where the man they really want is hiding
in a very obscure location, in a tool shed in a cemetery. The tale he has created and
woven is so unlikely that his captors accept it very reluctantly. A squad of soldiers
is dispatched finally and the prisoner is sent back to his cell, thoroughly enjoying
now the thought of the soldiers searching frantically for the leader of the underground
in a cemetery tool shed, It is a very pleasant vision. How foolish they must feel!

Later, guards come to his cell, he assumes to escort him to the firing squad.
Instead, however, he is allowed to walk in the prison yard, to enjoy the sun. Wow, very
wary, he asks another prisoner if anything unusual has happened. "Nothing much," the
man replies, “except I heard that they finally caught up with the leader of the under-
ground, found him in a tool shed in a cemetery of all places. Executed him on the spot."

Sometimes, Sartre seems to be suggesting, betrayals happen for what appear to be
good reasons. Sometimes people do very bad things out of what appear to be noble
motives. Sometimes great evil happens even though no one ever intended it that way.
Has anything like that ever happened to you? It's one of the worst feelings imaginable.

At the very least we can understand that betrayal is an altogether relative word.
Depending on which side is doing the defining some traitors look rather like heroes. In
His Majesty's Colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, there were a number of notorious
traitors, who blatantly betrayed their country. Their names were Sam Adams, Tom Paine,
Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson. From the point of view of the British Parliament,
they were betrayers.

-2-

Often, if not always, the people who end up with the title "Traitor" are people of
deep commitment, strong loyalty, often selfless devotion. They are often people of
passion and great courage. They may be wrong. They may, in fact, be responsible for
great evil, but often they are people of admirable character.

Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Jesus, is generally consigned to hell by everybody in
history who ever thought about him. Dante did it with great flare in his Divine
inferno. In that work Satan himself, a three~headed monster, lives in the pit of hell,
‘in an icy lake of human tears. Im’ each of three mouths he is forever consuming Brutus,
Cassius, and in the middle, Judas Iscariot, the worst traitor in all of history. That
is where history has consigned him. But before we do that, before we resolve the issue
ef Judas as an instance of total treachery, let's be open to the possibility of
further truth,

Who was he anyhow? The Gospel writers are obviously reluctant to tell us. Every
time his name comes up théy add automatically - ‘who betrayed him"; or,"Judas, one of
the twelve" - as if they themselves can't believe what happened, After the fact, the
writers are ashamed of Judas. They are not objective about him at all. And so he
remains the most enigmatic person in the Gospel narratives. He was, at the very least,
aman of great potential. Jesus saw something important in him, something that could
become vital in the process of the Kingdom. What was it? Was it the same characteristic
which led him to betrayal? His passion perhaps? His commitment? His decisiveness?

He was, apparently, a Judean, in the middle of eleven Galileans; geographically one
southerner and all the rest notherners. Was he an outsider in terms of frienship, too?
He became the treasurer of the small group. Jesus and His entourage of twelve friends
spent a portion of three years traveling. Someone had to arrange for funds and meais
and places to stay. Judas was the one, performing a valuable, if unromantic function.
When a woman emptied out a bottle of expensive perfume on Jesus, an act of lovely ex-
travagance, a kind of symbolic annointing for death which He accepted at face value, it
was Judas who remonstrated, with levelheaded common sense, that the perfume could have
been sold and the proceeds distributed to the poor.

He was, we begin to see, a deeply committed man: strong, effective, efficient, Loyal.
Most of the-scholars who work with the texts and the fragmentary data of history conclude
that Judas was, above all else, pasionately patriotic. Some believe that he was a member
of the Zealots, an underground, revolutionary, political party devoted to independence
and freedom for Israel. The Zealots effectively harassed the Romans, using classic
guerrilla tactics of surprise raids, murder and intrigue. Their purpose was to prepare
for the day when the whole nation might rise up and drive the hated Romans into the sea.

The Zealots based their revolutionary activity in scripture. The Zealots loved
passages of Scripture such as our Old Testament lesson this morning. In the book of
Isaiah and elsewhere they read about God doing a new thing for His people. They knew
what that meant...The Messiah ~ a leader who would be a new king, from the line of David.
He would carry the people with Him and reestablish the monarchy and the former glory of
the Kingdom. The Zealots were admirable, romantic, brave. We like the character. We
much prefer the French Underground to the collaborators. We admire the Resistance, not
Vichy. We would have liked Judas and his friends and what they were doing.

The Zealots were watching and waiting for the Messiah. When He came, they would be
ready Wo fight with Him and die for Him.

~3-

What Judas actually did is terribly familiar. He went to the officials of the
Temple in Jerusalem who intended to get rid of Jesus as quickly as they could anyway,
and offered to lead them to Him and to identify Him for the purposes of arrest. To
seal the bargain the Temple authorities gave him thirty pieces of silver. Judas played
it straight. He left the table in the Upper Room - in the middle of some opaque refer-
ences to betrayal, met the Temple guards and led them to the Garden of Gethsemane.
There, to prevent a quick substitute by one of Jesus’ friends, he identified Jesus by
greeting Him in the way customary for disciple and Rabbi, with a kiss.

It couldn't have been the money. The amount is not significant, I am told. Fifty
dollars, perhaps. It simply doesn't make sense for a disciple of three years to sell
cut his master for a few dollars:

Again, the scholars believe that Judas was a disappointed and disillusioned patriot.
Assume for a moment that he was a Zealot. When Jesus intentionally entered Jerusalem
in the way the Messiah was supposed to arrive, and when the common people wildly wel-
comed Him to a city filled with religious pilgrims celebrating their liberation from
oppression centuries before, and when Jesus went straight to the Temple and ejected
physically the very symbols of corrupt religion and politics, Judas thought that the
moment had come. The revolution was about to begin. All it needed now was for Jesus
to say the word. When He didn't, when instead of the speech which set off the revolt,
He withdrew to Bethany for the night, Judas knew that the moment, the moment for which
he had given three years of his life, had come and gone ~ slipped through his fingers as
quickly as water. And so in profound disappointment, perhaps rage, Judas betrayed his
master. Perhaps he did so, convinced that Jesus was an imposter, a fraud, a hoax wha
had deluded Judas and a lot of others with His delusions of grandeur about God's
Kingdom, and then betrayed them by His loss of nerve at the last moment.

That seems to me to be a distinct possibility. And it could have been even more
subtle. Perhaps Judas thought that Jesus was, himself, waiting for the right moment:
that Jesus was watching and waiting to see if any of His friends had the heart for real
confrontation and conflict. Perhaps He was intentionally waiting for someone to set up
a situation in which His hand would be forced and He would have reason to respond with
strength and to mobilize the popular following which He had gathered. Perhaps - and this
is the saddest and the most plausible possibility - Judas left the Upper Room, not
knowing that he was the betrayer, instead thinking that he was the only one who really
understood Jesus. How else to explain what must be the most forlorn sentence in the
Bible: "When Judas saw that He was condemned, he repented..." Does it mean what it says?
Judas didn't know? Judas didn't intend for Him to be condemned? Judas thought that he
was acting with decisiveness and courage, and suddenly saw that he was responsible for
Jesus! "death"? The most forlorn sequence in the Bible..."He brought back the thirty
pieces of silver - saying, 'I. have sinned in betraying innocent blood.’ They said,

‘What is that to us?',,,And throwing down the pieces of silver in the Temple, he
departed: and he went and hanged himself." (Matthew 27:3-5).

Perhaps we have made Judas into such a scoundrel because that disguises the fact
that the betrayal was appallingly human and terribly familiar. Perhaps if we consign
Judas to the pits of hell we will not have to confront the truth that betrayals are not
always treacherous and betrayers are sometimes doing the best they know how to do, and
that almost always betrayals happen when personal priorities begin to rule our behavior
and we discover, to our delight, that we can rationalize whatever we want to do.

I don't know many people who have broken the promise of fidelity and betrayed a
husband or wife, who intended to be treacherous. People don't often mean to hurt one
another. People don't plan to betray. It happens for what seems at the time to be very
Legitimate reasons. Traitors who give away vital military information believe that they
are doing it out of love for their own country. Always they regard their betrayal as an
act of high moral courage.

~ 4»

Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote one time: "The older I grow the more I ponder Judas
Iscariot. He came so near to not betraying Jesus. He was a loyal disciple. It took
courage to join that little band, and Judas had it. Then doubts began. What kind of
Messiah was this who refused violent revolution and talked about leving one's enemies?
Was not this idealistic Jesus letting them down? So the doubts grew until in an ex-~
plosive hour - oh, fifty-one votes against forty-nine - Judas sold his Lord - he came se
near not doing it, that when he saw what he had done he hanged himself in shame, Ah,
Judas, if you had only doubted your doubts to wait until Easter..." (See Lenten-Easter
Sourcebook, p.72).

The story of Judas is a description of what happens when we attempt to force Jesus
Christ into the mold of our own priorities. Jesus, very simply stated, was not the kind
of Christ Judas wanted. And instead of altering his own expectations, Judas destroyed
Jesus by trying to force Him to do something He could not do. It is a warning against
that dynamic in any age. Jesus can't be enlisted to support our church,priorities, our
nation, our way of doing things, our way of life. To force Him is to betray Him.

The story is a warning against fanaticism of any kind. Judas couldn't see the whole
picture because of his obsession with one small corner. He couldn't comprehend the
whole meaning of Messiahship because of his obsession with a particular aspect. So it is
with fanaticism: the whole picture always gets lost. And the small segment becomes badly
distorted when forced to stand by itself.

There is a lot to be learned from this forlern story. But most important of all
is that in his zeal for his own priorities, and his shame when he realized where it had
taken him, Judas missed the one thing that could have saved his life - the grace and
forgiveness of God in Jesus Christ. Judas had read the Scriptures but had not under-
stood. The "new thing" the prophet promised was not a revolution, but salvation; a new
dimension of love and grace acted out in history which would forever offer peace to the
Judases of the world. He missed that.

Fosdick was right. Too bad he couldn't have waited until the first day of the week.
Too bad he couldn't have known that crucifixion wasn't the last word. Too bad he didn't
see the church begin and grow in every city of the world. Too bad Judas couldn’t have
lifted up his remorse, guilt, shame and self-loathing to God, seeing the Cross, not so
much as a symbol of his own sin but of God's invitation to wholeness and Life and joy.
Too bad Judas couldn't have lived long enough to learn that nothing could keep God from
loving him - not even the Cross.

Theologians, philosophers have wrestled with the doctrines of the Cross for twenty
centuries. The wisest statement I ever heard was made to me, not by a scholar, but a
fellow student - from Australia, an ordained clergyman - in this country for a graduate
degree, [In a particularly skeptical stage of my own pilgrimage I could see nothing in
the Cross of Jesus Christ except a symbol of human sin.. I saw it in stark simplicity.
Jesus was a good man, Good men can't survive in this world. Corrupt politicians, dis-
honest religious bureaucrats and cowardly people killed the best man who ever lived. The
only thing the Cross stands for, therefore, is injustice, hopelessness, in a word - Sin.

IT still see that dimension. All the positive thinking in the world doesn't erase it. But i
friend helped me a great deal when after a long discussion he concluded, "John, the Cross
isn't so much what men did to Jesus, as it is what God did for men."

That's the dimension Judas never saw, That's a dimension we can miss too, if all we
perceive in his story is a bad man doing a very bad thing. Judas was loved, too - Jesus
never stopped loving him. "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" could
have applied to him as well. "Is it I?" Each of us could ask that. Each of us has
betrayed. But the point of the whole exercise is not to blame and assign guilt and exact
punishment. The point is good news of a love that reaches out to us in spite of all that.
A love big enough to forgive and accept and, in that, to give the gift of new life.