Thy Will Be Done?

Psalm 37:1-18 • Psalm 37:19-42
Isa. 7:1-9 • 2 Thess. 2:1-12 • Luke 22:1-13

Judas Iscariot is an interesting character on at least a couple of counts. He is remembered mainly of course for betraying Jesus, the act set up in today’s gospel when he goes to the chief priests, who are “delighted” to pay him off for help in Jesus’s arrest. That will happen in the garden when Judas identifies Jesus with the infamous kiss. It is surely one of the most familiar stories in scripture, with details that have entered our vernacular: any betrayer as a Judas, thirty pieces of silver as metaphor for any dirty payoff, the redbud as a Judas tree.

And yet without the betrayal there could be no crucifixion and thus no resurrection and thus, for us, no salvation. From that angle, Judas is performing a deed absolutely essential for all the good that follows. Why, then, do we condemn him? It is likely a question scholars have picked apart, and I would like to hear some answers, but on its face it seems a logical—and theo-logical—snarl.

Then there is the question of motive. Why did Judas do it? Luke says that “Satan entered into him,” which begs the question. Satan presumably planted a reason in Judas’s head, but we’re not told what it was. Some would say he did it for the money, but that seems awfully thin. Considering all his experiences as one of the twelve disciples, it strikes me as pretty unlikely that Judas would sell out the man he had followed through so much for some cash. And besides, the story is that once he saw the results of what he did, he gave the money back before killing himself.

A more satisfying answer is that Judas was trying to force Jesus into action. The argument here is that, like John the Baptist and other disciples and many others, he expected Jesus to be the sort of messiah long hoped for, one who would lead a successful revolt against Roman rule and re-establish a powerful kingdom. But Jesus seemed frozen, Hamlet-like, and unable to pull the trigger to set things in motion. A choreographed confrontation with authorities would get him moving toward the final victory.

But that of course was not the victory or the kingdom that Jesus and His father had in mind. Instead Judas’s misunderstanding precipitated action toward what we consider the ultimate turning point in the human story, which I suppose takes us back to the first question about Judas as pariah or essential player in our salvation.

In the season of advent, perhaps the lesson here is a strong caution against the temptation of second-guessing God. We are all called to act as best we can in accordance to divine purpose, but in the end we cannot know what that purpose is, so I guess we all begin with an honest questioning of our motives and a submission to “thy will be done.” I plan to think about that tension during the next few weeks.

Written by Elliott West

Elliott teaches history at the University of Arkansas. He has been a member of St. Paul’s for more than twenty-five years.