For 2,000 years the quintessential example of betrayal has been Judas Iscariot.
Since the moment God created Adam, Eve, and everything else including the number 42 while withholding the knowledge of good and evil and then punishing the couple because they acted on that lack of that knowledge which they only received after the fact. Like the evil Queen telling Snow White there was poison in the apple but only after she bit it, He had to devise a plan to forgive mankind for falling for the set up. God is omniscient and sees time in one fell swoop, instantaneous and all encompassing, and should have had a contingency plan but, instead, settled on a vague promise that He would send a Messiah without actually explaining what that would entail, and assuming it would thrill everyone when they were forgiven for a sin they had no idea was on them as they had not been around.
It’s in the book.
The whole Old Testament seems to be an account of all that was happening before the plan was put into effect without actually mentioning how all the parts fit.
But it took a few thousand years, judging by the ages of some of the characters in the stories, and one would assume that having learned His lesson for planning in greater detail and not including booby traps along the way, it would be a tightly woven one. The plan came down to having Jesus crucified, very ostentatious and hard to miss, and this meant a way was needed to get Jesus into the hands of religious and secular authority which would be harder to accomplish if it relied on mere chance. There had to be a way to get this done and it was divinely decided that someone would have to betray Jesus, perhaps a close friend.
In the New Testament Jesus walks around choosing his apostles. There was no application to be filled out or interview to be held, and there is no record of anyone shouting, “Pick me” as He did so.
He chose them.
He chose Judas.
“ One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles: Simon (whom he named Peter), his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called the Zealot, Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot”
He knew all about all of them. None had secrets.
During the last supper Jesus let it be known that someone was going to betray him. He knew it because it was part of His plan, yet He let it happen. He went through that whole bread dipped in gravy thing just to keep the other eleven Apostles curious. Without his knowledge, Judas became part of a preordained divine plan in which he had no say and which could have been called off completely or, at least, modified at any time to spare Judas the task of betrayal and two millennia of hate.
Jesus knew about the silver, if there really had been any. He could have chosen not to go to the garden where He was to be betrayed. He could also have pulled Judas aside at any time and told him how it was all going down as part of the plan so he should just go along with things.
Judas did not choose to betray Jesus, he was chosen by Jesus to do it.
Jesus brings up the betrayal long before it happens in a somewhat casual conversation with the guys, and then, again, at the Last Supper which meant it could have been prevented if that was what was wanted.
However, the betrayal was what was wanted.
God created Adam and Eve who had not existed until that moment with everything new and being encountered for the first time, and within a short time, He throws a fit, banishes them out of the garden with no knowledge of what’s out there and what might happen now, with no advice other than to increase and multiply to which He then adds labor pains.
Why, just for shits and giggles?
Judas was minding his own business, hoping to get a job, when Jesus picked him, and his life ended, depending on whether you read Matthew 27:3–10 where, feeling remorse, he returned the silver and hanged himself, or Acts 1:18, where he buys a field with the silver and then trips over something as he was walking across it, hitting the ground with enough ferocity that all his bowels gushed out.
Either way, it is clear that by the time Jesus died on the cross and went to Hell to get everyone out, Judas would have been there. Was anything explained to him so he could forgive himself? Did Jesus take him along or leave him there?
Was He decent enough to relieve Judas of his burden of guilt?
Judas had played the role he was assigned and helped bring about mankind’s salvation and the forgiveness for a sin we had not committed and he should get some recognition for that, especially as nowhere in the New Testament are we really told anything negative about him that would show betrayal was part of his makeup, except Luke’s adding the words, “who became a traitor”, at the end of the verses on choosing the Apostles years after the events He wrote about had transpired and there could have been some bias since Jesus didn’t say anything but had time from the Resurrection to the ascension to fill the other Apostles in on the facts.
Judas had been one of them, an Apostle and a friend.
Jesus did have the time and took it to speak to the remaining eleven a time or two.
Besides the betrayal, we have this assessment of his character from
John 13:27–30:
“Then said Jesus unto him, that thou doest, do quickly. Now no man at the table knew for what intent He spake this unto him. For some of them thought, because Judas had the bag, that Jesus had said unto him, buy those things that we have need of against the feast; or, that he should give something to the poor. He then, having received the sop, went immediately out: and it was night.”
Obviously Judas’s previous actions bore witness to the other Apostles that he was a nice guy and the fact that Jeuss told him to get busy with the betrayal, Judas might have just been innocently obedient assuming the plan would have everything worked out.
Was it malicious betrayal or obedience to the will of God?
By all accounts, according to his contemporaries he was a rather nice guy, obviously obedient to Jesus, and his holding the money bag with which necessary items could be bought, and with our only having that one unfortunate interchange between Jesus and a fig tree as the sole instance where the Twelve Apostles and Jesus went hungry, we have to assume he was an acceptable steward. . His being greedy and selling Jesus out for thirty pieces of silver actually began many years after the events in the New Testament, at least those involving Judas.
Judas’s life and reputation suffered dearly because God chose him as the instrument to set the final phase of the plan for salvation, the fulfillment of all the prophecies, miracles, wars, and rapes of the Old Testament in motion so the Eucharist and the lynch pin of Christianity, the Resurrection, could be forged.
And we hate him for it.
After telling Christians that they would be granted “power at a level that you’ve never used before”, promising to crack down on acceptance of transgender people, and supporting the creation of a task force to investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America, Trump, the thrice married man who cheated on his wives in succession before marrying them while continuing to have sex with other women and some possible minors, who was found liable for sexual abuse, and facing sentencing for existing convictions and trials dealing with other cases, who regularly speaks about human genitals using foul language in front of children, and violates the Beatitudes and other core Christian tenets in favor of the money changers in the temple was championed by evangelicals as having been chosen by God to save America from the demonic influence of their enemies.
Trump has declared, “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason. And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.”
On election day about 80% of white evangelicals, 67% of Latino evangelicals, and 14% of Black evangelicals went for the one chosen by God to see his divine plan brought to fruition.
During the campaign, Trump spoke of retribution against political opponents, threatened to jail officials who criticized him or tried to stop his efforts to overturn his loss in 2020, waffled a bit on his support of a national abortion ban, and his accepted the election results by mentioning his disdain of Transgender people and his wanting to roll back the rights of GLBTQ people.
Comparing what we know of Trump to what we do of Judas, and if both were divinely chosen to bring about the realization of the plan to save humanity from that which God created and to punish us for His original poorly thought out plan, Judas must be reconsidered and, like a felon becoming president of the United States who has the capacity to claim not only a democratic mandate, but a divine one as well, be accepted as a tool chosen by God Himself whether he liked it or not and given his rightful place as the most obedient and devoted Apostle.
Perhaps, the actual rock upon which it was all built is Judas.
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