what are your thoughts on judas? why do you love him so much?
The myth of Judas is like every story in the Bible: it depends on how you read it.
There’s the first story, the one everyone knows, in which Jesus is divine and Judas is the betrayer and he is condemned for it. But what isn’t said is that there needs to be a betrayal; that the story hinges on it; the passion can’t play without it. And so the question becomes: if it’s all destined, if it’s fate, is Judas culpable? Was he lead to the betrayal - did he ever even have a choice? The question of Judas is the question of free will. This is why Jesus loves him most, keeps him close, never hates him - he’s part of the godhead. He knows that he’s not the only one who is sacrificed for salvation. And doesn’t Judas get the worst of it - reviled for all eternity, hated by all, written down in the book as The Betrayer? He doesn’t even get a legacy. He doesn’t get worshipped; he doesn’t even get to be forgotten. For someone to rise up, to ascend, someone else has to take the fall, and that’s exactly what Judas did.
The second story is the historical one, the one that says Jesus was just a man, and that he and Judas knew exactly what the fuck they were doing. In this story Jesus is the leader and Judas is his right hand, his zealot, the one who believes that the cause, the salvation of his people, is more important than anything else, more than anything Jesus might want, more important than any human bonds, any love or dedication. They’ve read the book. They know the stories. They know that the only way to make their revolution last is for Jesus to become a martyr. They make the myth because they are just men and the story, the story will last far beyond them. The story lasts forever.
And so we come to the Gethsemane, only it’s under different lighting. There’s this idea, somehow, that Jesus is the innocent, that the betrayal is a blow - but he knows what’s coming. In every version, he always knows. And that changes things, it complicates things. It changes the two of them from good and evil, profane and divine, into what they were and what it was - two men giving up their lives in the hope that they could bring hope to all the people who came after them. The hero and the villain because they created themselves that way.
I’m partial to the second story - because it’s messier, it’s more devastating, it’s more real to me. It’s a story about loving something so hard you can’t live without it and giving it up only for something even greater, a higher cause - and becoming unable to look at yourself in the mirror afterwards. That’s the thing about Judas - he wants too much, feels too much. And what’s more human than that? He is, all at once, the purest disciple, and the hardest; the most faithful, and the least; the one who loved Jesus and the cause enough to betray them, and sacrifice his own soul in the doing. He is the best of us and the worst of us, all at once, and what that makes him above all is human, in a way Christ specifically is not, in the messy and fallible way that we all are. The church wasn’t built on a rock; it was built on a kiss.
