Today commemorates the day Judas Iscariot went to the Sanhedrin and asked for money to betray Jesus.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Judas did his dirty work on the sly and none of the friends of Jesus knew he was plotting to betray Jesus.\u00a0 Nor did he wish them to know.<\/p>\n
So when the evangelist relays to his readers Judas\u2019 deal with the Sanhedrin, he is giving a summary, not the words of Judas.\u00a0 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 \u201cGive me some money and I will hand Jesus over to you.\u201d\u00a0 It was doubtless dressed up in piety and perhaps even \u201cconcern for Jesus\u2019 soul\u201d.\u00a0 The fact that Judas would betray Jesus, not by screaming \u201cHere he is!\u00a0 Get him!\u201d but with a kiss, suggests the Judas managed to convince himself he was acting out of gooey \u201cconcern\u201d for Jesus\u2019 best interests.<\/p>\n
But the evangelist strips away all that and reports only what Judas actually did<\/em>:\u00a0 he asked for money in exchange for betrayal.<\/p>\n Real traitors never use such barren, revealing language.\u00a0 The traitor shrouds himself in euphemism and lies.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He does not chew her out for robbing him of the riches he might have had.\u00a0 Too crude.\u00a0 Too blunt.<\/p>\n No, he wraps it all up in gooey piety and complains that she is robbing the poor.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That is how real traitors talk, especially to themselves.<\/p>\n And, of course, it was simply coincidence that Judas, for Jesus\u2019 own good, goes to the Sanhedrin immediately after Jesus sharply rebukes him for his denunciation of Mary of Bethany.\u00a0 That was not spite or vindictive vengeance.\u00a0 Of course not!\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> for Jesus\u2019 welfare.\u00a0 Yeah!\u00a0 That was it!\u00a0 That was the ticket!\u00a0 Judas just felt it was time for him to move on and away from a rabbi who just wasn\u2019t right for him, and he understood<\/em> the concerns of the Authorities about Jesus grandiose ideas about himself.\u00a0 He felt it only his duty, really, to get him the help he needed.\u00a0 And given Judas\u2019 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.<\/p>\n If Hebrew has long words, you can bet Judas used a lot of them to avoid saying what he really meant: \u201cWhat will you give me to betray him?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1017],"class_list":["post-102951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-spy-wednesday"],"yoast_head":"\n