Sunday February 7, 2010 | Greg Boyd
Now the Festival of Unleavened Bread, called the Passover, was approaching, and the chief priests and the teachers of the law were looking for some way to get rid of Jesus, for they were afraid of the people. Then Satan entered Judas, called Iscariot, one of the Twelve. And Judas went to the chief priests and the officers of the temple guard and discussed with them how he might betray Jesus. They were delighted and agreed to give him money. He consented, and watched for an opportunity to hand Jesus over to them when no crowd was present.
When reviewing Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, Greg had two questions in mind for us to consider: “Was Judas fated to betray Jesus?” And “Why did Judas betray Jesus?”
When reviewing Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, Greg had two questions in mind for us to consider: “Was Judas fated to betray Jesus?” And “Why did Judas betray Jesus?”
Greg’s response to the first question in an emphatic, “No!”. After explaining various texts that support the idea that Judas was predestined to betray Jesus Greg reminded us of the central message of Scripture which is that God loves everyone and wants all to be saved (1 Tim. 2:3-4; Titus 2:11; 2 Peter 3:9; I Tim. 2:6; 1 John 2:2; etc.). This alone is enough to cause us to pause at the idea of Judas being treated differently than every other human being.
The second question has been answered in various ways. Some suggest that it was simply greed that caused Judas to betray Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. This seems unlikely though when we consider how devoted Judas had been to Jesus and that 30 pieces is not a huge sum of money.
A more likely reason is that Judas’ political convictions made him vulnerable to being misguided about Jesus’ plans. Judas’ background was deeply patriotic and zealous for the cause of freeing the Jews from Roman oppression. It might have been easy for Judas to assume that Jesus was here to cause the literal release of the Jews from the Romans happen. After all, why wouldn’t God want to free the Jews from their captors?
As it happened, Judas may have been trying to force Jesus to move ahead with his agenda to free the Jews more quickly by causing things to come to conflict more directly with the Roman officials. In a sense, he may have been trying to “help things along”. But apparently, Judas didn’t expect that Jesus’ true mission was to come, suffer, and die for the sake of the whole world. Judas had the Jews in mind, but Jesus had all of humanity in mind. The devil seized this as an opportunity to mislead Judas and essentially make him a pawn in the playing out of the death of Jesus.