A Meditation for Good Friday
Judas has traditionally been portrayed as the evil one, the one who betrayed Jesus. The other eleven disciples—-they were good, but Judas was wicked.
This notion seems to cast all the events of the Passion—-the events leading up to Jesus’s death on the Cross—-as the sole result of Judas’s treachery. As if nothing would have happened had Judas not accomplished his evil deed.
But this turned all speculation toward Judas’s motive: why did he do this?
Had the love of money become so overpowering for him? Resentment that he had been excluded from the inner circle of the favored disciples—-Peter, James, and John? Anger and disillusionment with Jesus that he did not take the obvious opportunities set before him to win greater power and influence among the people?
But this leaves the larger question unanswered. Would things have turned out any differently, had Judas not done what he did?
Did his deed have any actual effect on the course of events? And if so, how?
Like Peter, whose shame in denying his bond to Jesus gave him cause to weep, bitterly, afterward, Judas committed an act that was a cause of great shame, and, like Peter, he repented bitterly of it afterward. But did it matter, in the end?
W. H. Vanstone, in a fascinating book called The Stature of Waiting, thinks not.
He says, “For it seemed to me then, as it still seems to me now, that if Judas had done nothing at all, events would still have taken much the same course. The deed of Judas was by no means necessary to bring about the arrest of Jesus and to set in train the sequence of events which ended in His crucifixion.”
Jesus did not go into hiding—he moved around freely. Presumably the authorities could have located him quite easily if they had wanted to arrest him.
So Judas’s part in this story was a convenience, but hardly a necessity. What about this crucial verb, most often translated, to betray?
It is a translation of the Greek verb, paradidomi. It means, not, to betray, but to be handed over.
It is used in such other places as John’s description of Jesus’s death on the Cross: he bowed his head and handed over His spirit. When Paul refers to his preaching of the
Gospel to the Corinthians, he says that he handed over to them that which he had himself received. It is quite clear that in such passages as these paradidomi cannot be translated as betrayed. In thirty-one other instances in the New Testament when the deed of Judas is described it is in cases always using this verb.
The verb itself is neutral, ambivalent, colourless. The incorrect translation probably came about from the influence of the Latin of the Vulgate, but that’s a longer discussion.
So it is remarkable that all four Evangelists should use this word to describe what Judas did, because in other passages they show no tendency to play down the gravity of his offence. But it is this verb that is used, consistently.
John uses this verb a second time when he writes that Jesus was handed over to Pilate by the authorities. And for the third time, at the end of the trial, when Pilate hands Jesus over to them, to be crucified.
This phrase came to be central to the understanding of what happened to Jesus in these three days. He ceases to be the subject, the one who preaches and teaches and heals, and allows himself to become an object of the action of others—-to be handed over.
It made a difference for the early Christians in their developing understanding of the meaning of the crucifixion. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans and elsewhere: “He that spared not His own Son but handed him over for us all, how shall He not also with Him freely give us all things?”
The importance of this different understanding of the verb, to hand over, cannot be overestimated. What it means is that at that moment of handing over, Jesus freely allowed himself to be acted upon by others. He accepted whatever the will of God was for him, embraced it, and followed it to its end.
The Gospel of John uses different language than the other evangelists—John talks about Jesus’s statement that the night is coming, when no one can work. He is saying that in due course the night will come, when he will be constrained, but up to that point, he freely does the work of the Father.
When Jesus is handed over, the night has come, and the period of working has given way to a period of waiting. Jesus has completed the Father’s work, and now awaits what others will do to him. He has entered into his Passio.
But this is another word that must be examined for its precise meaning. It simply means that which happens to one. The Greek word pascho simply means to be done to.
So Jesus passed from action to passion, from subject to object, from working in freedom to waiting upon what others decided and receiving what others did.
Waiting can be the hardest of all human modes of being. We have all been a medical patient at some time or other. And in that place of the clinic or the hospital, we willingly hand ourselves over to be the object of the decisions of physicians and others who care for us. We are content to wait, trusting in a greater good that will come out of our waiting. We can do nothing more.
It does not mean that intense and poignant waiting, like Jesus’s in the Garden of Gethsemane, is without doubt, praying even that suffering might pass from one. But it does mean that like Jesus, we also hand ourselves over, in trust, to the God whose purposes for us are for great good.
Jesus, for a great good, exposed himself to the extremity of risk, at the end. For the sake of a great good He created a situation of which the outcome did not lie in His own hands and would be infinitely costly and painful and destructive to Himself.
Jesus’s purpose was to spare nothing, not even His own life, in the cause of winning the nation to discipleship of the Kingdom. He handed himself over without limit or reserve—even unto death.
Vanstone says: “The God Who is disclosed in Jesus is the One Who hands Himself over to be affected by the world, to receive the impact and the meaning of the world, to wait upon the world. It is this God whose image we bear. Within our human experience there is one kind of waiting where we can clearly discern the image of the God Who waits; and that is the waiting to which we destine ourselves by loving.
When we love, we allow ourselves to become exposed and vulnerable to what may be done to us; we wait upon what may be done to us; in us, then, the image of the God Who is disclosed in Jesus is not unrecognizable. There is a holiness of waiting, in love.”
God is love; God is the one who has created the world in love and who will bring to fruition all that He intends, in goodness, for us.
May we be able to hand ourselves over to that God, in our own imitation of the Passio of Christ.
Amen.
The Revd Dana English
St. George’s Campden Hill, London
April 2, 2021