It was going to be a day where extremes met. Light and darkness were meeting in the closest quarters. The Divine and the Satanic were racing toward one another to a still collision. And while most of the players in this drama of dramas were locked fast into their roles, all things hung on the free choice of one man. It was certain that before the day was out life and death, hope and despair, faith and sin, love and hate would circle about each other, changing places, revolving round and round in a dance that would make the future, that much was certain, but whether the dance was an embrace or a grappling to the bitter end was hidden in the freedom and good pleasure of Our Lord on Good Friday morning. This wasn't the first time that this Man had stood face to face with Evil. When the Tempter had been thwarted he had departed to wait for, "an opportune time" and now that time had come. This time the tempter was armed with more than hunger, and doubt, and plausibility. He would bring to bear against The Lord God, Betrayal, and Death, and Desolation, and he would come with the face of a friend and with a kiss.
Our theories of the Atonement, of How Our Lord took away our sin, focus on satisfying divine justice, of substitution of the Innocent for guilty Sinners, and there is much truth in all of that. But for a long time I have felt our hope is, or at least should be, centered not in the actions of Christ but in His mind. Our hope is in the righteous Personality that swallows the sin of the world as the ocean swallows a single drop of poison. Anyone familiar with my writing has probably noticed attempts to look into His psychology, and while I don't feel bound to call such attempts failures, I certainly can't call them successes. The Son of Man is like us except for sin but I find His mind a million miles away from anything I can understand. So, for this Good Friday, I am going to try and approach Him indirectly, that is I am going to try and look into the hearts and minds of two of the supporting characters in His drama to see, if we can, the Heart and the Mind of the Saviour.
Part 1 Judas
When we read the Gospels one thing that we can never keep in mind enough is the absolutely furious storm of Messianic expectation that had enveloped Israel. Since the birth of our Lord the signs had been coming thick and fast. A pretty good group of Shepherds had heard the heavenly choir sing his birth, Simeon's recognition of the one he had been waiting for must have made quite a bit of news in the priests, and no one had forgotten Herod's bloody attempt to forestall the divine Hope. Everyone had lost track of the little boy in His Egyptian diaspora, but no one had forgotten Him. Sometime around the date of the Lord's birth what Josephus calls the Fourth Philosophy of the Jews appeared in Galilee. There were three recognized schools of Judaism, the Pharisees with whom we are fairly familiar, the Sadducees who were a group that took a less literal and material view of Judaism and denied the physical nature of the Resurrection, and the Essenes who lived a sort of monastic and ascetic Judaism. The Fourth Philosophy could only have arisen in the context of all of these fulfilled signs of the Coming Messiah and the resentment of a conquered people against their oppressors. It was grounded in the rejection of all government that did not find its source in the God of Israel and the certain expectation of the imminent appearance of God's Christ as the King of the Jews. This Philosophy kept the Jews, especially the Galileans in a constant state of rebellion against Rome, usually held in check by the presence of the Legions like a lid on a boiling pot.
Many, maybe even most, of Jesus' followers, including many of the Twelve, were a part of this. Before their association with Jesus quite a few of them certainly had credentials with the "Expectation of the Messiah", and were strongly influenced by the vision of a Theocratic King. And I think that without seeing this it is hard to understand Judas. Judas, I think, came to Jesus by way of the Messianic Expectation, by way of the Jewish Independence movement. Judas, it seems to me, had a big part in the social aspect of Jesus' ministry, in the charitable activities of Christ. Despite the Son of Man having no place to lay His head, it seems that Jesus Christ Ministries Inc. probably had considerable financial weight. Why did people give Jesus their money? Well for a lot of the same reasons that they do now, but even more so. It must have seemed very clear to the people who encountered Him that if they wanted their money to do good, then giving it to Jesus, the tender hearted, yet surprisingly shrewd, miracle worker and multiplier of resources was a no brainer. Some gave because they knew that money given to Jesus would wind up going to the truly poor and needy and meeting their needs, some gave because they had received so much from Him that gratitude and love drove them to give back, and some gave for "The Kingdom" that is to the warchest of the King of Israel, but everyone who wanted to give to Christ put their money in the hands of the trusted Judas. The Gospel writers don't record it, but it seems likely to me, that often after Jesus miracles the next part of the story is that Judas sits down with the family and disperses funds. The sick that Jesus healed undoubtedly had a lot of bills that they couldn't pay, whether medical expenses or lost wages or what have you, and I am confident that Jesus didn't neglect this very practical followup, that the people who "sold all that they had and gave it to the poor" when they followed Him, gave it to the poor by giving it to Jesus, that is His trusted steward Judas to be distributed.
I want to talk about the psychology of Jesus and there is nowhere that His psychology is more different from mine than in the matter of Judas. Jesus knew from the beginning how it would end with Judas, yet they were sincerely friends. This wasn't some "Jesus loves and is nice to everybody" thing. He chose this man to be a close friend and they must have been close. Somehow Jesus didn't let His knowledge of the darkness that would come between them poison this friendship and He trusted a man that, like me, He knew would prove untrustworthy. I don't see how I could be friends with someone knowing that they will use that very friendship to betray me. But how did it all end? If I can't understand the mind of Jesus, I think I can at least understand the mind of Judas and it must have become dominated with the pain of the paradoxical distance between the Messiah, the Glorious King of the Jews and the Suffering Servant that it became increasingly obvious was how Jesus saw Himself. Judas remains in the background throughout most of the Gospels, when he comes to the front I think that it is predominantly as one who is offended by the Cross.
When Jesus began to talk about His upcoming death, the crowds started to thin. When He talked about Himself as a sacrifice and His broken body as a meal so many were offended and turned back. I can't help but think that Judas, and maybe others even of the Twelve, would have liked to have turned back but found themselves too deep in it to back out. For Judas there is not only the very legitimate problems of backing out of something that you have given your all to follow and have built your whole life and career and reputation around, but another probably insurmountable obstacle to turning back. And it is simply this, Judas knew in a way that almost nobody else did that Jesus was the real deal. Why? Because if there was anything fake about Jesus then Judas would have been in on the trick. If Jesus had been using any of the tricks that charlatans use then Judas would have been the guy doing the leg work for the scam. He wasn't and he knew that no one else was either. So how do you get psychologically to betraying a guy that you know is legitimately working miracles, how do you turn against someone that you know for a fact is the real deal? I think that that requires a tremendously strong psychological driver, and I can only find it in the Scandal of Grace. The more clear it became to Judas what Jesus was really all about, that His Kingdom was not of this world and only ever would be by the paradoxical conquest of the Rider of the White Horse, who wasn't interested in kicking the Romans out of His kingdom but was going to all lengths to get them IN to His kingdom, the more repelled He was by it. And to be fair, each and every one of us, the more clearly we see Jesus the more clearly we feel our Self, our Soul revolt against what we see. We are all spiritual bookkeepers by trade and when Judas saw that Jesus really wasn't interested in making the books balance, but instead offered him, the embezzler, the example of the Unjust Steward who can win even in defeat, he found himself in the pickle of all pickles. Everything in him hated the idea of going forward, and he couldn't see any way to go back. Being offended by the Gospel fundamentally means that we accuse the way of Jesus, the way of Free Grace and Grace Alone of being wrong and bad and unworthy of God. We become the Accuser of Christ and the spirit of Satan enters us as Luke says it entered Judas. So, what did Judas, the Satanic Accuser of Christ do? He tried to put the Lord into a position where He would back down. He tried, as he had in the wilderness, to find the limit of how far Jesus would be stubborn about this issue.
One of the strangest parts of the Crucifixion, that appears in all four evangelists, is this constant theme of Jesus being offered "outs".
Likewise the chief priests also, mocking with the scribes and elders, said, “He saved others; Himself He cannot save. If He is the King of Israel, let Him now come down from the cross, and we will believe Him. He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now if He will have Him; for He said, ‘I am the Son of God.’ ” from Matthew 27The priests tempted Christ to give up His incomprehensible commitment to Salvation by Failure and do some straightforward Messiahing, they promised to believe in Him if He would just do some things that were a bit less unbelievable.
So then Pilate took Jesus and scourged Him. And the soldiers twisted a crown of thorns and put it on His head, and they put on Him a purple robe. Then they said, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they struck Him with their hands.
Pilate then went out again, and said to them, “Behold, I am bringing Him out to you, that you may know that I find no fault in Him.”
Then Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate said to them, “Behold the Man!”
Therefore, when the chief priests and officers saw Him, they cried out, saying, “Crucify Him, crucify Him!”
Pilate said to them, “You take Him and crucify Him, for I find no fault in Him.”
The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to our law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God.”
Therefore, when Pilate heard that saying, he was the more afraid, and went again into the Praetorium, and said to Jesus, “Where are You from?” But Jesus gave him no answer.
Then Pilate said to Him, “Are You not speaking to me? Do You not know that I have power to crucify You, and power to release You?”
Jesus answered, “You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above. Therefore the one who delivered Me to you has the greater sin.”
From then on Pilate sought to release Him, but the Jews cried out, saying, “If you let this Man go, you are not Caesar’s friend. Whoever makes himself a king speaks against Caesar.”
When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he brought Jesus out and sat down in the judgment seat in a place that is called The Pavement, but in Hebrew, Gabbatha. Now it was the Preparation Day of the Passover, and about the sixth hour. And he said to the Jews, “Behold your King!”
But they cried out, “Away with Him, away with Him! Crucify Him!”
Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?”
The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar!”
Then he delivered Him to them to be crucified. Then they took Jesus and led Him away. from John 19
Pilate would have let Jesus go if He would have said anything in His defense. Pilate nearly begs Jesus to turn back from the Cross, but He won't do it. The real driver of this whole drama is Christ's unwavering stubbornness, though He seems a mere man He moves the whole nation to a place that no one, not Satan, not Judas, thought they would ever be driven to with a Sovereign, Predestinating, Determinant, Obstinate Silence. I can't answer for Satan, though I suspect that he is much like his proxy Judas, who's end that we now come to, shows clearly that he didn't see how this would all turn out.
Then Judas, His betrayer, seeing that He had been condemned, was remorseful and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”Judas, when he saw that Jesus was condemned, was remorseful, and tried to take it all back. It kinda makes your mouth drop at what feels like simple naivety. You betray a man who has told you every way He can that He intends to die, into the hands of His enemies who run the government and want Him dead, and then you can't figure out how they come up with a guilty verdict. It seems obvious from our perspective, as if nothing else could ever have happened, but that's not the case at all. I hope to look at the trial itself a little more when we come to Peter, our next character in this drama, but we have already seen how the slightest defense or explanation offered by Jesus would have turned the tables, and this is even more the case in the Jewish court than it was with Pilate. The group among the Chief Priests who sought to kill Christ was I suspect small but influential. I suspect that in this court there were many, like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who sought a way to help this proceeding to not merely an exoneration but a coronation. It would have been so easy for that faction to have had its way. But there are two other factors in Judas' mind which must have made it impossible for him to foresee the outcome. Firstly, as I've pointed out above He knew that Jesus was the Messiah, and his understanding of the Messiah just couldn't stretch to include failure and death. And second, he knew that Jesus was innocent. How inconceivable it must have been for him to accept that the Supreme Representatives of God's Law on Earth would execute an obviously innocent man. Jesus' conviction was in the deepest sense the condemnation of the Law which condemned Him. But the Law's failure was about to get worse for Judas. He must have been stupified by the Law's shocking conviction of the innocent, but he was brought to despair by its refusal to bring him the justice that he needed. What justice did he find himself needing?
And they said, “What is that to us? You see to it!”
Then he threw down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed, and went and hanged himself. Matthew 27
“One witness shall not rise against a man concerning any iniquity or any sin that he commits; by the mouth of two or three witnesses the matter shall be established. If a false witness rises against any man to testify against him of wrongdoing, then both men in the controversy shall stand before the Lord, before the priests and the judges who serve in those days. And the judges shall make careful inquiry, and indeed, if the witness is a false witness, who has testified falsely against his brother, then you shall do to him as he thought to have done to his brother; so you shall put away the evil from among you. And those who remain shall hear and fear, and hereafter they shall not again commit such evil among you. Your eye shall not pity: life shall be for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. from Deuteronomy 19Judas stood before the priests and judges of the Lord and confessed to testifying falsely against an innocent man and causing His death. And the priests and judges told him that they didn't care. The failure of the law, which had been caught up in the much more powerful mechanism of Grace, in condemning the innocent and letting the guilty go free, when it ought to have exonerated Jesus and executed His false accuser, left Judas with a choice. The choice that we all find ourselves with ultimately. To demand the death that our sins deserve or to simply hush and let the inexorable wheels of Grace pull us along. The Law, being condemned by its conspiracy against the Lord and against His Christ can only look at our sins as it looked at Judas' and say "What does that have to do with me?" If we are going to be punished for our sins, it must be by our own hands in the most needless, most senseless of tragedies, the tragedy of being Offended by the Cross.
