Judas’ Profile…

Judas’ Profile in the Psalms: Meditation on the Holy Wednesday

Rev. Eugen J. Pentiuc, Th.D., Ph.D.

Excerpt taken from Jesus the Messiah in the Hebrew Bible. New York, NY: Paulist Press, 2006.

The most evocative component of the episodes of Christ’s suffering is perhaps the ambivalence of the incident of betrayal. At once we witness the valleys and the peaks of the human condition and we are drawn into a polemic that challenges us to glimpse the light amidst a deep darkness. Within the ambivalence, then, there exists this antagonism, which only exacerbates the humanness of the story, and ought to give us greater pause. There is breadth of emotional dimension present in the various gospel accounts of the betrayal: friendship and trust, juxtaposed against greed, deceit, and fear. Not only does Christ have the onus of Judas’ perfidy to bear, but he is also beset by abandonment by others of his chosen twelve. Perhaps the most poignant of the recallings is the fleeing by the others in Mark’s narrative (Mark 14:50–52). Not only did they forsake their Master, but they left everything behind in doing so; this is in stark contrast to the original call of Christ to leave everything and join him (Matt 8:22; Mark 10:29). The fear of condemnation and death was greater even for the disciples than was the discarding of the one in whom they sought their salvation. Against this backdrop of disturbance and melee, we see the tremendous potential for humanity as Christ is led to and endures his sacrifice. These various dimensions should beget in us a keen perception of the vagaries of our humanness; that our individual, small efforts are insufficient to the task of our own improvement; and that our hope lies in turning over our lives to the one who took on our flesh and redeemed us from the darkness. By reference to the events and person of the Messiah, the Old Testament made available for the faithful of the early common era the apparatus of belief and understanding by which the perception of Christ as the Messiah could be conceived. It continues to make this apparatus available for contemporary readers of faith.