Spy Wednesday

Today commemorates the day Judas Iscariot went to the Sanhedrin and asked for money to betray Jesus.

This is one of those passages in Scripture where the sacred author is obliged, of necessity, to reconstruct, rather than report what Judas said to the Sanhedrin for the very good reason that he was not there, nor were any of the eyewitnesses to the Passion.  Judas did his dirty work on the sly and none of the friends of Jesus knew he was plotting to betray Jesus.  Nor did he wish them to know.

So when the evangelist relays to his readers Judas’ deal with the Sanhedrin, he is giving a summary, not the words of Judas.  He is telling us what Judas, in the core of his being, actually meant to do, not what Judas literally said to the Sanhedrin. The core transaction was “Give me some money and I will hand Jesus over to you.”  It was doubtless dressed up in piety and perhaps even “concern for Jesus’ soul”.  The fact that Judas would betray Jesus, not by screaming “Here he is!  Get him!” but with a kiss, suggests the Judas managed to convince himself he was acting out of gooey “concern” for Jesus’ best interests.

But the evangelist strips away all that and reports only what Judas actually did:  he asked for money in exchange for betrayal.

Real traitors never use such barren, revealing language.  The traitor shrouds himself in euphemism and lies.  So Judas does not, of course, denounce Mary of Bethany for wasting money on a false prophet in whom Judas no longer believes and whom he has come to despise.  He does not chew her out for robbing him of the riches he might have had.  Too crude.  Too blunt.

No, he wraps it all up in gooey piety and complains that she is robbing the poor.  John notes that Judas kept the purse and helped himself to it, no doubt rationalizing that charity begins at home and anyway the followers of Jesus are poor and besides, Jesus blessed the poor.  That is how real traitors talk, especially to themselves.

And, of course, it was simply coincidence that Judas, for Jesus’ own good, goes to the Sanhedrin immediately after Jesus sharply rebukes him for his denunciation of Mary of Bethany.  That was not spite or vindictive vengeance.  Of course not!  Nor was it wounded pride at being put in his place on behalf of a stupid cow who does not even know how to handle money and who is not even one of the Special Twelve as he was.

On the contrary, Judas went to the Authorities and asked for money because he was, once he thought about it, the one who cared most for Jesus’ welfare.  Yeah!  That was it!  That was the ticket!  Judas just felt it was time for him to move on and away from a rabbi who just wasn’t right for him, and he understood the concerns of the Authorities about Jesus grandiose ideas about himself.  He felt it only his duty, really, to get him the help he needed.  And given Judas’ own precarious finances (exacerbated by that idiot woman), he decided he really would like to come to some mutually beneficial arrangement in which he could get some seed money for his New Life Direction. In return (and this was hardly to much to ask) Jesus could finally get the help he needed to deal with his strange and extreme delusion that Judas, for one, could no longer just sit back and enable.

If Hebrew has long words, you can bet Judas used a lot of them to avoid saying what he really meant: “What will you give me to betray him?”