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I00 Yudas Iscariot. [Aug.,

JUDAS ISCARIOT.
By Professor WM. G. BALLANTINE,
D.D.,
Oberlin, Ohio.

Many ingenious suggestions have been made to mitigate

our condemnation of Judas. It accords with the temper of
our day to speak charitably of him. The theory that he was
" only a commonplace sinner" finds advocates.
At the outset, it is thought, he was as honest and earnest as
any of the apostles. Possibly even in the betrayal he only
intended to hasten on the Messianic kingdom, knowing the
miraculous powers of his master, and thinking that if a crisis
were precipitated it would lead to a speedier triumph. At
worst, he was playing a deep game, anticipating that Jesus
would, as on former occasions, slip from the grasp of his
would-be captors, and that then he (Judas) would enjoy the
sight of their chagrin and the thirty pieces of silver at the
same time.
But all such suggestions are purely unfounded guesses. All
that we know of Judas is in the New Testament, and every
word points one way. All that is said of him is very brief;
if printed together it would occupy hardly more than a single
page. Every one of those brief sentences reads like a knell
of doom. The sum of the testimony is that Judas was from
first to last a monster of cool and devilish wickedness.
The gentle Saviour, who in Gethsemane excused the sleep
of the disciples, saying, "The spirit indeed is willing, but the
flesh is weak "; who at Calvary said of his murderers, "Father,
forgive them; for they know not what they do,"-never spoke
of Judas but in words that chill the blood. " Did I not choose
you the twelve, and one of you is a devil?" "The Son of
man goeth even as it is written of him: but woe unto that
man through whom the Son of man is betrayed! good were
it for that man if he had not been born." "While 1 was with
them, I kept them in thy name which thou hast given me:
and I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the
son of perdition."
The evangelist John, the beloved disciple and the theolo-
I889] yudas Iscariot. IOI

gian of love, is unsparing in severity upon Judas. Judas,

according to John, was a liar and a thief. " Now this he said,
not because he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief,
and having the bag took away what was put therein." John
tells us that "after the sop, then entered Satan into him."
When the apostles, as narrated in the first chapter of the
book of Acts, came to fill up the vacancy in their number, they
prayed, " Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts of all men,
show whether of these two thou hast chosen, that he take the
place in this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas fell
away, that he might go to his own place." The Io9th Psalm is
the most terrible passage in all Scripture. In it " no less than
thirty anathemas have been counted." There is only one
individual in all history to whom we have scriptural warrant
to apply it-that person is Judas, to whom Peter found a ref-
erence in it on this occasion.
If inspiration tells us that Judas was a hypocrite, a thief, a
traitor, a devil, one into whom Satan entered, a suicide, a son
of perdition, for whom it would have been better not to have
been born, one who left the company of the redeemed to go
to his own place remote from God,-all thought of human
defense or extenuation is precluded. In silence and in horror
we contemplate the perdition of a guilty soul.
But does not the subsequent sorrow and suicide of Judas
show that there was some right feeling left in him? No; the
suicide was a crowning act of petulance, unbelief and selfish-
ness. Judas knew the gentleness of Jesus, yet he would not,
like Peter, seek his pardon. He possessed one-twelfth of the
trained preparation for telling the story of Jesus to a world
in darkness, but he carried that knowledge away with him out
of the world. The suicide of Judas was a gross insult to the
divine love, which none knew better than he, and a cruel
unfaithfulness to the interests of all mankind.
The first question that comes is why Jesus ever chose such
a man into the number of the apostles. It was not in igno-
rance of his true character; for we are expressly told that
" Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed
not, and who it was that should betray him." We come here
unexpectedly upon one of the most touching proofs of the
completeness of our Lord's humiliation. Jesus never used
his superhuman powers to shield himself from human trials.
102 yudas Iscariot. [Aug.,
He would not make stones bread when alone in the wilder-
ness; but afterwards he fed five thousand fainting men. He
touched the ear of the high-priest's servant and healed it; but
he let his own wounds bleed. We know that he never saved
himself a weary step, a pang, a blow which would have come
to any mere man in the same place. The cruelest injury that
any man can suffer is to be betrayed by a trusted friend; and
therefore it was necessary that Jesus should bear this too.
And so, in choosing his intimates, Jesus chose as men must-
by fairness of profession, by the outward appearance, by
natural endowments, and by general reputation.
Jesus never allowed his superhuman knowledge to save him
a pain, but how many it must have added. He knew Judas
from the first; he knew his hollowness, his secret profanity,
his unbelief, his petty thieving, his smooth-tongued hypocrisy,
his murderous treachery. The life of Jesus was spent in the
daily society of Judas. He walked with him, he ate with him,
he prayed with him. Judas was admitted into all the sacred
privacies of that life of loving labors and measureless sorrows.
Did any mere man ever suffer a trial so great as this ? Was
there ever a greater victory than this-to carry out to the
end a plan of gentleness and frankness, face to face with
treachery ? Jesus felt all the pain of Judas' presence; yet he
was not silenced by it, was not embittered by it, was not
defeated by it. He washed Judas' feet with the rest, he dipped
into the dish with him as with the rest. The serpent which
human vision could not detect he saw creeping closer, but
would not shield himself from the deadly sting.
Thus we see that a right estimate of the awful wickedness
of Judas is necessary that we may appreciate the love and
sufferings of our Saviour, and also that we may receive the
full benefit of his example when disheartened by the discovery
of gross wickedness within the church of to-day. Since the
Christian era probably the wickedest men of each generation
have been within the pale of the Christian church; yet their
presence is no argument against the truth of Jesus and no
more an excuse to us for unfaithfulness than the hypocrisy of
Judas was a reason why Mary should fail to break her alabas-
ter box of ointment.