If you betray your friend, you are a sinner, no matter how foreordained or collaterally beneficial your sin. He dies before Jesus does.ĭid Judas deserve this fate? If Jesus informs you that you will betray him, and tells you to hurry up and do it, are you really responsible for your act? Furthermore, if your act sets in motion the process-Christ’s Passion-whereby humankind is saved, shouldn’t somebody thank you? No, the Church says. Judas, stricken with remorse, returns to the priests and tries to give them back their money. That is the beginning of Jesus’ end, and of Judas’s. That night (or perhaps even before the Last Supper), he meets with the priests of the Temple, makes the arrangements for the arrest, and collects his reward, the famous thirty pieces of silver. And so Judas gets up from the table and leaves. “Do quickly what you are going to do,” he says. Is that a metaphor, meaning that Jesus’ prediction enables Judas to betray him? Maybe so, maybe not, but Jesus soon urges him directly. Once Judas takes the bread, Satan “entered into” him, John says.
And he answered, “It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” He then dipped a piece of bread into a dish and handed it to Judas Iscariot, a disciple whom the Gospels barely mention before the scene of the Last Supper but who now becomes very important. “Very truly,” he said to his men, “one of you will betray me.” Who? they asked. At a certain point, however, he lost heart. Each of the Evangelists tells the story differently, but, according to John, Jesus spent the time he had left re-stating to the disciples the lessons he had taught them and trying to prop up their courage. At the Last Supper, Jesus knew that it would be the last, and that he would be dead by the next day.
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