"Peter/Judas"
- FirstPres Abq
- Mar 15
- 6 min read
Rev. Matthew Miller
A good while ago, in another state, I was attending a presbytery meeting. For those who don’t know, in the same way that catholic parishes are gathered into what is known as a diocese, Presbyterian churches are grouped into regional bodies known as Presbyteries. In connectional traditions, that is Christian traditions in which individual congregations are connected to each other in the larger witness of their tradition, this is how we take collective action for mission, ministry preparation, and discipline, among other things. It is how we support one another and hold one another accountable. Anyway, depending on the presbytery, they meet to discuss and do the business of the church anywhere from two or three to several times a year. This particular meeting I attended had some rather unpleasant business to do. A pastor in the presbytery had gone rogue and was trying to lead his congregation out of the denomination. As the various actions of individuals were discussed a member from the church in question got up and said something to the effect that they didn’t need us poking into their business and the whole thing would have been taken care of if, and this is the part I vividly remember, “some Judases” hadn’t tipped off the rest of the presbytery. There was an audible gasp from the gathering and he was cautioned to refrain from further name calling.
Between the gospels and history, there is no mistaking that to be branded a Judas is one of the most severe thing a person of faith can be called. As Presbyterians we regard everyone who is baptized as a saint of the church, but in the traditions where saints are formally canonized, Judas Iscariot is the only one of Jesus’ original twelve who is excluded from sainthood. No, historically he has been forever dammed to the fires of hell for his betrayal. In Dante’s epic poem, The Inferno, Judas is condemned to the ninth circle, the deepest part of hell as punishment for his crime. In addition to his betrayal of Jesus by conspiring with the religious establishment to have him arrested, Judas is also characterized as a thief by John’s gospel. And historic Christianity has made use of Judas’ death as a way of doubling down on its condemnation. That has led to the pervasive and harmful practice of condemning any person who dies by suicide. It has been suggested to me that earlier pastors of this church would not participate in the funeral of someone they suspected may have died by suicide. As recently as ten years ago, we learned of the tragic death by suicide of someone whose family had found a home in this church. When San Williams shared this news in worship, we were told that it was the first time in anyone’s memory that a death by suicide was publicly acknowledged by the church. Even so, questions circulated about whether it was appropriate to host a reception for that funeral, given the manner in which the person died.
That’s a lot of blame to put at the feet of one person in the story. Especially when we set Judas and his actions against someone like Peter. Three times, while in the courtyard of the high priest, Peter denies knowing Jesus. Two of those include swearing an oath, which is something that Jesus explicitly taught his disciples not to do in the Sermon on the Mount. The last time he is so emphatic in his denial that he begins to curse. When the cock crows, he remembers Jesus predicting this very outcome and weeps bitterly as his guilt. Now when Judas saw the consequence of his actions, saw that turning his teacher over wouldn’t just mean prison but likely death, Matthew tells us that he repented. Did you know that? That part of the story doesn’t always get retold. Judas repented and tried to give the money he’d been paid back to the chief priest. He even confesses his sin of betraying innocent blood. Peter weeps, while Judas repents, so what went wrong. How did Judas end up in Dante’s ninth circle of hell, but Peter with an ornate basilica named after him in Rome?
Some have pointed to the non-canonical gnostic gospel of Judas as a corrective to the narrative that paints Judas as an irredeemable villain. In that work Jesus enlists Judas to betray him in order to set the whole thing in motion. Judas becomes a kind of reluctant hero, acting on his teacher’s behalf for the sake of something much bigger. I confess that sounds like too large a swing in the opposite direction. The truth is more likely to reside in between, not really a villain, but not a hero either. Just human and prone to all the reasons humans tend to hurt and betray one another. While other parts of the work are theologically problematic, this is something that I think Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber got right with their rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar. The tone is set at the outset with the song “Heaven on Their Minds.” In it Judas lays out the growing tension between the way of Jesus, his words and work, with the person of Jesus. In a brilliant stroke of lyric irony his first words are, “my mind is clearer now.” But what he thinks is clear scares him. “You have set them all on fire,” he sings, “they think they’ve found a new Messiah. And they’ll hurt you when they find they’re wrong.” In the next line he worries that they’ll hurt him if they think he’s lied. “I am frightened by the crowd/ for we are getting much too loud/ and they’ll crush us if we go too far.” Weber and Rice don’t see Judas as a Villain or a hero, but a man who is afraid. Afraid of being wrong, afraid of being called a fraud, afraid of the power of those in power to crush them all for going too far. In John’s Gospel, it’s said that Satan enters Judas and that is why he does what he does. It’s the old Flip Wilson bit, the devil made him do it. I don’t much go in for that sort of thing, but if Satan is just a way of naming the lies that get whispered in our ear, the half-truths about ourselves and others that makes us fear them, then maybe. Or maybe it would just be easier to say that fear made him do it. Heros and villains don’t often feel the need to repent, but those who act out of fear often regret it after the fact.
That’s why Peter did what he did. In fact, there’s nothing about Judas’ crime that is any worse than what Peter did. Or what the rest of the twelve did for that matter, abandoning him one by one, leaving him forsaken and alone. Instead of turning Judas into the scapegoat, the one who conveniently takes the blame for this betrayal, we might do well to regard what happens to him as tragic. Tragic as he listens to his own fear in the face of growing criticism from the religious establishment. Tragic when he realizes the consequence of his action and tries to repent, and tragic when he runs up against the obstacle that stops all of us at one point or another. Ashamed and unable to forgive himself for what he’s done, he cannot believe that God can or will either.
Judas is any one of us who lets our guilt drive us to shame, who sees the harm created by our action or inaction and becomes convinced that the problem isn’t just with what we’ve done, but who we are. The problem with sending Judas to hell for dying at his own hand is that it misunderstands just what hell is. It isn’t some afterlife punishment for all the bad things we’ve done in this life. It is the punishment we give ourselves because we believe the tempter’s lie that our sin is unforgivable, that we are unforgivable. Judas doesn’t go to hell for taking his own life. No one does. He takes his own life because he’s already in hell, the hell of self-condemnation, the hell of believing a religious system that met his pain with judgment instead of compassion, the hell of something he cannot undo and fears he will never escape. Rather than turning away from those who have died like Judas, the church would be far more faithful in continuing to proclaim the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ that saves us from precisely this kind of hell, the hell of believing that we, or anyone else for that matter, is beyond redemption.
Professor Tom Long writes about a congregation that years ago built a small, secluded chapel for prayer and meditation. In it they placed twelve chairs, each inscribed with the name of one of Jesus’ original twelve disciples. The one that became worn with the heaviest use was the one inscribed with the name of Judas Iscariot. As Long goes on to write, “the deepest tragedy about Judas is not that he is guiltier than others… The saddest truth is that he took his remorse to the place of death and not to the place of life.” He could not save himself. None of us can. But that does not mean we are beyond saving. No one is.
