Scribes gathered about Him to lay traps for Him and take down His words.
The uneasy and embittered crowd set on His track spies, destined to
become false witnesses in a few days. If we are to believe John, the
order was given to certain guards to capture Him, but they were afraid
to lay their hands upon Him. The attack with the whips on the
animal-sellers and money-changers, the loud invectives against the
Scribes and Pharisees, the allusion to the ruin of the Temple, made the
cup run over. Time pressed; Jerusalem was full of foreigners and many
were listening to Him. Some disorder, some confusion might easily spring
up, perhaps an uprising of the provincial crowds who were less attached
to the privileges and interests of the metropolis. The contagion must be
stopped at the beginning and there seemed to be no better way than to
make away with the blasphemer. The wolves of the Altar and of business
arranged a meeting of the Sanhedrin to reconcile law with assassination.
THE HIGH PRIEST CAIAPHAS
The Sanhedrin was the assembly of the chiefs, the supreme council of the
aristocracy which ruled the capital. It was composed of the priests
jealous of the clientele of the Temple which gave them their power and
their stipends: of the Scribes responsible for preserving the purity of
the law and of tradition: of the Elders who represented the interests of
the moderate, moneyed middle-class.
They were all in accord that it was essential to take Jesus on false
pretenses and to have Him killed as a blasphemer against the Sabbath and
the Lord. Only Nicodemus attempted a defense, but they were able quickly
to silence him. “What do we? for this man doeth many miracles. If we let
him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come
and take away both our place and nation.” It is the Reason of State, the
Salvation of the Fatherland which political cliques always bring out to
screen with legality and ideality the defense of their particular
profit.
Caiaphas, who that year was High Priest, settled their doubts with the
maxim which has always justified in the eyes of the world the immolation
of the innocent. “Ye know nothing at all nor consider that it is
expedient that one man should die for the people and that the whole
nation perish not.” This maxim in Caiaphas’ mouth, and on this occasion,
and for what it meant, was infamous, and hypocritical like all the
speeches made by the Sanhedrin. But transposed into a higher meaning and
transferred into the Absolute, changing nation into humanity, the
President of the circumcised patriciate was expounding a principle which
Jesus Himself had accepted and which has become under another form the
crucial mystery of Christianity. Caiaphas did not know—he who had to
enter alone into the Holy of Holies to offer up to Jehovah the sins of
the people—how much his words, coarse in expression and cynical in
sentiment as they were, were in accord with his victim’s thought.
The thought that only the righteous can pay for injustice, that only the
perfect can discount the crimes of the brute, that only the pure can
cancel the debts of the ignoble, that only God in His infinite
magnificence can expiate the sins which man has committed against Him;
this thought, which seems to man the height of madness exactly because
it is the height of divine wisdom, certainly did not flash out in the
corrupt soul of the Sadducee when he threw to his sixty accomplices the
sophism destined to silence their last remorse. Caiaphas, who together
with the crown of thorns and the sponge of vinegar was to be one of the
instruments of the Passion, did not imagine in that moment that he was
bearing witness solemnly, though involuntarily, to the divine tragedy
about to begin.
And yet the principle that the innocent can pay for the guilty, that the
death of one man can be salvation for all, was not foreign to the
consciousness of ancient peoples. The heroic myths of the pagans
recognize and celebrate voluntary sacrifices of the innocent. They
record the example of Pilades, who offered himself to be punished in
place of the guilty Orestes; Macaria of the blood of Heracles, who saved
her brother’s life with her own; Alcestis, who died that she might avert
from her Admetus the vengeance of Artemis; the daughters of Erechtheus,
who sacrificed themselves that their father might escape Neptune’s
blows. The old King Codrus, who threw himself into the Ilissus, in order
that his Athenians might be victorious; and Decius Mus and his sons, who
consecrated themselves to the Manes that the Romans might triumph over
the Samnites; and Curtius, who, fully armed, cast himself into the gulf
for the salvation of his country; and Iphigenia, who offered her throat
to the knife that Agamemnon’s fleet might sail safely towards Troy. At
Athens during the Thargelian feast two men were killed to save the city
from divine wrath; Epimenides the Wise, to purify Athens, profaned by
the assassination of the followers of Cylon, had recourse to human
sacrifice over the tombs; at Curium, in Cyprus, at Terracina, at
Marseilles, every year a man threw himself into the sea as payment for
the crimes of the community, a man regarded as the Saviour of the
people.
But these sacrifices, when they were spontaneous, were for the salvation
of one being alone, or of a restricted group of men; when they were
enforced they added a new crime to those they were intended to expiate;
they were examples of individual affection or of superstitious crimes.
No man had yet appeared who would take upon his head all the sins of
men, a God who would imprison Himself in the abject wretchedness of
flesh to save all the human race and to give it the power to ascend from
bestiality to sanctity, from earthly humiliation to the Kingdom of
Heaven. The perfect man, who takes upon himself all imperfections, the
pure man who burdens himself with all infamies, the righteous man who
shoulders the unrighteousness of all men, had appeared under the aspect
of a poor fugitive from justice in the day of Caiaphas. He who was to
die for all, the Galilean working-man who was disquieting the rich and
the priests of Jerusalem, was there on the Mount of Olives only a short
distance from the Sanhedrin. The Seventy, who knew not what they did,
who did not know that they were obeying the will of the very man they
were persecuting, decided to have Him captured before the Passover; but
because they were cowardly, like all men of possessions, one thing
restrained them, the fear of the people who loved Jesus. They consulted
that they might take Jesus by subtlety and kill Him. But they said, “Not
on the feast day lest there be an uproar among the people.” To solve
their difficulty, by good fortune, there came to them the day after one
of the Twelve, he who held the purse, Judas Iscariot.
THE MYSTERY OF JUDAS
Only two creatures in the world knew the secret of Judas: Christ and the
traitor.
Sixty generations of Christians have racked their brains over it, but
the man of Iscariot, although he has drawn after him crowds of
disciples, remains stubbornly incomprehensible. His is the only human
mystery that we encounter in the Gospels. We can understand without
difficulty the depravity of Herod, the rancor of the Pharisees, the
revengeful anger of Annas and Caiaphas, the cowardly laxity of Pilate.
But we have no evidence to enable us to understand the abomination of
Judas. The Four Gospels tell us too little of him and of the reasons
which induced him to sell his King.
“Then entered Satan into Judas.” But these words are only the definition
of his crime. Evil took possession of his heart, therefore it came
suddenly. Before that day, perhaps during the dinner at Bethany, Judas
was not in the power of the Adversary. But why suddenly did he throw
himself into that power? Why did Satan enter into him and not into one
of the others?
Thirty pieces of silver are a very small sum, especially for an
avaricious man. In modern coinage it would amount to about twenty
dollars, and, granting that its effective value or as the economists say
its buying power were in those days ten times greater, two hundred
dollars seem hardly a sufficient price to induce a man whom his
companions describe as grasping to commit the basest perfidy recorded by
history. It has been said the thirty pieces of silver was the price of a
slave. But the text of Exodus states on the contrary that thirty shekels
was the compensation to be paid by the owner of an ox which had injured
a slave. The cases are too far apart for the doctors of the Sanhedrin to
have had this early precedent in mind.
The most significant indication is the office which Judas held among the
Twelve. Among them was Matthew, a former tax-collector, and it would
have seemed almost his right to handle the small amount of money
necessary for the expenses of the brotherhood. In place of Matthew, we
see the man of Iscariot as the depository of the offerings. Money is
insidious and saturated with danger. The mere handling of money, even if
it belongs to others, is poisonous. It is not surprising that John said
of Judas the thief, that he, “having the bag, took away what was put
therein.” And yet it is not probable that a man greedy for money would
have stayed a long time with a group of such poor men. If he had wished
to steal, he would have sought out a more promising position. And if he
had needed those miserable thirty pieces of silver, could he not have
procured them in another way, by running away with the purse, without
needing to propose the betrayal of Jesus to the High Priests?
These common-sense reflections about a crime so extraordinary have
induced many to seek other motives for the infamous transaction. A sect
of heretics, the Cainites, had a legend that Judas sorrowfully accepted
eternal infamy, knowing that Jesus through His will and the will of the
Father was to be betrayed to His death, that no suffering might be
lacking in the great expiation. A necessary and voluntary instrument of
the Redemption, Judas was according to them a hero and a martyr to be
revered and not reviled.
According to others, Iscariot, loving his people and hoping for their
deliverance, perhaps sharing the sentiments of the Zealots, had joined
with Jesus, hoping that he was the Messiah such as the common people
then imagined Him: the King of the revenge and restoration of Israel.
When little by little, in spite of his slowness of comprehension, it
dawned on him from the words of Jesus that he had fallen in with a
Messiah of quite another kind, he delivered Him over to His enemies to
make up for the bitterness of his disappointment. But this fancy to
which no text either canonical or apocryphal gives any support is not
enough to explain Christ’s betrayer: he could have deserted the Twelve
and gone in search of other company more to his taste, which certainly,
as we have seen, was not lacking at that time.
Others have said that the reason is to be sought in his loss of faith.
Judas had believed firmly in Jesus, and then could believe no longer.
What Jesus said about His end close at hand, the threatening hostility
of the metropolis, the delay of his victorious manifestation, had ended
by causing Judas to lose all faith in Him whom he had followed up till
then. He did not see the Kingdom approaching and he did see death
approaching. Mingling with the people to find out the temper of the day,
he had perhaps heard a rumor as to the decisions of the meeting of the
Elders and feared that the Sanhedrin would not be satisfied with one
victim alone, but would condemn all those who had long followed Jesus.
Overcome by fear—the form which Satan took to enter into him—he thought
he could ward off the danger and save his life by treachery; unbelief
and cowardice being thus the ignominious motives of his ignominy.
An Englishman celebrated as an opium-eater, has thought out a new
apology for the traitor which is the opposite of this theory. His idea
is that Judas believed: he even believed too absolutely. He was so
persuaded that Jesus was really the Christ that he wished by giving Him
up to the Tribunal to force Him finally to show Himself as the
legitimate Messiah. So strong was his hope that he could not believe
that Jesus would be killed. Or if He really were to die, he knew with
entire certainty that He would rise again at once to sit on the right
hand of the Father as King of Israel and of the world. To hasten the
great day, in which the Disciples were at last to have the reward for
their faithfulness, Judas, secure in the intangibility of his Divine
Friend, wished to force His hand and, putting Him face to face with
those whom He was to cast out, to compel Him to show Himself as the true
Son of God. According to this theory the action of Judas was not a
betrayal but a mistake due to his misunderstanding of the real meaning
of his Master’s teaching. He did not betray therefore through avarice or
revengefulness or cowardice, but through stupidity.
On the other hand others give revenge as the reason. No man betrays
another without hating him. Why did Judas hate Jesus? They remember the
dinner in the house of Simon and the nard of the weeping woman. The
reproof for his stinginess and hypocrisy must have exasperated the
disciple who perhaps had been reproved for these faults on other
occasions. To the rancor of this rebuff was added envy which always
flourishes in vulgar souls. And as soon as he could revenge himself
without danger, he went to the palace of Caiaphas.
But did he really think that his denunciation would bring Jesus to His
death or did he rather suppose that they would content themselves with
flogging Him and forbidding Him to speak to the people? The rest of the
story seems to show that the condemnation of Jesus unnerved him as a
terrible and unexpected result of his kiss. Matthew describes his
despair in a way to show that he was sincerely horrified by what had
happened through his fault. The money which he had pocketed became like
fire to him: and when the priests refused to take it back he threw it
down in the Temple. Even after this restitution he had no peace and
hastened to kill himself. He died on the same day as his victim. Luke in
the Acts sets down in another way the evil end of Judas, but the
Christian tradition prefers the story of his remorse and suicide.
In spite of all the unraveling of unsatisfied minds, mysteries are still
tangled about the mystery of Judas. But we have not yet invoked the
testimony of Him who knew better than all men, even better than Judas,
the true secret of the betrayal. Jesus alone could give us the key to
the mystery; Jesus who saw into the heart of Judas as into the hearts of
all men, and who knew what Judas was to do before he had done it.
Jesus chose Judas to be one of the Twelve and to carry the gospel to the
world along with the others. Would He have chosen him, kept him with
Him, beside Him, at His table, for so long a time if He had believed him
to be an incurable criminal? Would He have confided to him what was
dearest in the world to Him, the most precious thing in the world—the
prophecy of the Kingdom of God?
Up to the last days, up to that last evening, Jesus treated Judas
exactly like the others. To him, as to all others, He gave His body,
symbolized by bread, His soul, symbolized by wine. He washed and wiped,
with His own hands, the feet of Judas, those feet which had carried him
to the house of Caiaphas—with those hands which, through Judas’ fault,
were to be nailed to the cross on the following day. And when, in the
red light of the flickering lanterns and the flashing of swords, Judas,
under the dark shadow of the olive trees, came and kissed that face
still wet with bloody sweat, Jesus did not repel him, but said, “Friend,
wherefore art thou come?”
_Friend!_ It was the last time that Jesus spoke to Judas, and even in
that moment He would use none other than that wonted word. Judas was not
for Him the man of darkness who came in the darkness to turn Him over to
the guards, but the friend, the same who a few hours before had been
sitting with Him before the dish of lamb and herbs, and had set his lips
to His cup: the same who, so many times in hours of rest in leafy shade,
or in the shadow of walls, had listened with the others like a disciple,
like a companion, like a friend, like a brother, to the great words of
the Promise. Jesus had said at the Last Supper, “Woe unto that man by
whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had
not been born.” But now that the traitor was before Him, that the
treachery was complete, now that Judas had added to that betrayal the
outrage of the kiss laid on the lips of Him who has commanded love for
our enemies, He answered him with the sweet and divine words of their
habitual intercourse, “Friend, wherefore art thou come?”
Thus the testimony of Him who was betrayed increases our bewilderment
instead of raising the veil of the dreadful secret. He knew that Judas
was a thief and He gave him the purse: He knew that Judas was evil and
He confided to him a treasure of truth infinitely more precious than all
the money in the universe: He knew that Judas was to betray Him and He
made him a participant of His divinity, offering him the mouthful of
bread and the sip of wine; He saw Judas leading His assailants upon Him
and He still addressed him as at first, as He always had, with the holy
name of friend.
“It had been good for that man if he had not been born.” These words
might have been, rather than a condemnation, an exclamation of pity at
the thought of a fate which could not be escaped. If Judas hated Jesus,
we see no signs that Jesus was ever repelled by Judas, because Jesus
knew that the base bargain was necessary, as the weakness of Pilate was
necessary, the rage of Caiaphas, the insults of the soldiery, the
timbers and nails of the cross. He knew that Judas must needs do what he
did and He did not curse him, as He did not curse the people who wished
His death, or the hammer which drove the nails into the cross. One
prayer alone broke from him, to beg Judas to shorten the dreadful agony,
“That thou doest, do quickly.”
The mystery of Judas is doubly tied to the mystery of the Redemption and
we lesser ones shall never solve it.
No analogy can give us light. Joseph also was sold by one of his
brothers, who, like Iscariot, was called Judas, and was sold to
Ishmaelite merchants for twenty pieces of silver, but Joseph, who
prefigured Christ, was not sold to his enemies, was not sold to be put
to death: and as a compensation for his betrayal, great good fortune was
his and he became so wealthy that he could enrich his father, and so
generous that he could pardon even his brothers.
Jesus was not only betrayed, but sold, sold for a price, sold for a
small price, bought with coins. He was the object of a bargain, a
bargain struck and paid. Judas, the man of the purse, the cashier, did
not present himself as an accuser, did not offer himself as a
cut-throat, but as a merchant doing business in blood. The Jews, who
understood bartering for blood, daily cutting the throats of victims,
and quartering them, butchers of the Most High, were the first and last
customers of Judas. The sale of Jesus was the first business done by the
merchant, just entering business; not very big business, it must be
admitted, but a real, true commercial transaction, a valid contract of
buying and selling, verbal, but honestly lived up to by the contracting
parties. If Jesus had not been sold, something would have been lacking
to the perfect ignominy of His expiation: if He had been sold for more
money, for three hundred shekels instead of thirty, for gold instead of
silver, the ignominy would have been diminished, slightly, but still
diminished. It had been destined to all eternity that He should be
bought, but bought with a small sum. In order that an infinite,
supernatural but communicable value should be made available to men, it
was needful to buy it with a small sum, and with a sum of metal, which
has no real value. Did Jesus bought by others not do the same, He who
wished to redeem with the blood of only one man all the blood shed on
the earth from the days of Cain to Caiaphas?
And if He had been sold as a slave, as so many living souls were sold in
those days in the public places, if He had been sold as redeemable
property, as human capital, as a living tool for work, the ignominy
would have been almost nothing, and the Redemption put off. But He was
sold as the calf is sold to the butcher, as the innocent animals which
the butcher buys to kill, to sell again, to distribute in morsels to
flesh-eaters. The sacred butcher, Caiaphas, never in his most successful
days had a victim so prodigious. For more than two thousand years
Christians have been fed on that victim, and it is still intact, and
those who feed are not satiated.
Every one of us has contributed his quota, an infinitesimal quota, to
buy that victim from Judas. We have all contributed towards the sum for
which the blood of the Redeemer was bought: Caiaphas was only our agent.
The field of Aceldama, bought with the price of blood, is our
inheritance, our property. And this field has grown mysteriously larger,
has spread over half the face of the earth: whole populous cities,
paved, lighted, well-ordered cities, of shops and brothels, shine
resplendent on it from north to south. And that the mystery should be
even greater, Judas’ money, also multiplied by the betrayals of so many
centuries, by the accumulation of interest, has become incalculably
great. Nothing is so fruitful and fecund as blood. The statisticians,
those soothsayers of modern days, can bear witness to the fact that all
the courts of the Temple could not contain the money engendered from
that day to this by those thirty pieces of silver cast down there in a
delirium of remorse, by the man who sold his God.
THE MAN WITH THE PITCHER
The bargain was struck, the price paid, the buyers were impatient to
finish the transaction. They had said “before the Feast day.” The great
feast day of the Passover fell on a Saturday and this was Thursday.
Jesus had but one more day of freedom, the last day.
Before leaving His friends, those who were to abandon Him that night, He
wished once more to dip His bread in the same platter with them. Before
the Syrian soldiery should have spit upon Him, before He should be
defiled by the Jewish filth, He wished to kneel down and wash the feet
of those who until the day of their death were to travel all the roads
of the earth to tell the story of His death. Before the blood dropped
from His hands, His feet, His chest, He wished to give the first fruits
to those who were to be one soul with Him until the end. Before
suffering thirst, nailed upon the cross, He wished to drink a cup of
wine with His companions. This last evening before His death was to be
like an anticipation of the banquet of the Kingdom.
On the evening of Thursday, the first day of unleavened bread, the
Disciples asked Him, “Where wilt thou that we go and prepare that thou
mayest eat the passover?”
The Son of Man, poorer than the foxes, had no home of His own. He had
left His home in Nazareth forever. The home of Simon of Capernaum, which
had been in the early days like His own, was far away; and the home of
Mary and Martha in Bethany, where He was almost Master, was too far
outside the city.
He had only enemies in Jerusalem or shame-faced friends: Joseph of
Arimathea was to receive Him as his guest only the next evening, in the
dark cave, the banquet-hall of worms.
But a condemned man on his last day has a right to any favor he may ask.
All the houses of Jerusalem were rightfully His. The Father would give
Him the house best suited to shelter His last joy. And He sent two
Disciples with this mysterious command, “Go ye into the city, and there
shall meet you a man bearing a pitcher of water; follow him. And
wheresoever he shall go in, say ye to the good man of the house, the
Master saith, My time is at hand; where is the guest chamber, where I
shall eat the passover with my disciples? And he will show you a large
upper room furnished and prepared: there make ready for us.”
It has been believed that the master of that house was a friend of Jesus
and that they had arranged this beforehand. But that cannot be. Jesus
would have sent the two Disciples straight to him, giving his name, and
would not have had recourse to the following of the man with the
pitcher.