Judas Iscariot - Page 3

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Much of Our Lord’s teaching was about the Kingdom of God, and although he himself stressed its spiritual character, the disciples thought of it as a material Kingdom, soon to be set up in Palestine with Our Lord at its head.  Indeed, James and John went so far as to put in for the chief posts in the government.

While, however, the rest sweetened their present hardships with dreams of future greatness for Our Lord and for themselves, with Judas it dominated all his waking hours.  Perhaps he pictured himself as governor of his native Judea, in place of Pontius Pilate, living in a palace in Jerusalem with all the wealth and power and luxury he wanted.  It did not seem an impossible dream but its realisation hinged on whether Our Lord staged a coup and took over the country as its King.  All depended on that.

And so when after the Feeding of the 5000, Our Lord deliberately evaded the efforts of the Galilean patriots to make him King, Judas, seeing the ambitions on which he had set his heart tottering, felt that he had been duped.  The next day, when Jesus gave his discourse on the Blessed Sacrament in the synagogue of Capernaum, it became clear to his audience that Jesus’ concern was with spiritual nourishment and not with political power and rewards: and we read, “Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him” (NRSV, John 6:66).

Judas did not follow them, but he had already joined them in his heart.  And Our Lord, sensing unerringly the newborn hatred in the traitor, solemnly said, “Did I not choose you, the twelve?  Yet one of you is a devil” (NRSV, John 6:70).