Matthew 26:36-49 “Judas”
Today we find ourselves with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. As the Bible tells us he is greatly grieved. He asks his disciples, specifically James, John and Peter, to stay up with him to pray and to give glory to the Father in heaven. They fall asleep. Jesus comes back to them and remonstrates them saying: “You could not even stay awake one hour?”
You know, that is all that a good pastor should expect from his church—that they should at least stay awake for one hour! Make that from ten to eleven on Sunday mornings, please! I will try not to put you to sleep.
I have often wondered why the disciples could not stay awake with Jesus, and I will just put out my own idea that they had just had a huge meal, that is the Passover feast. In addition, they have just had their First Communion. They have just tasted the body and blood of Jesus for the first time in their own lives. They were in the process of in fact becoming the physical body of Christ. I am not sure what all God might have been doing with their own souls in that time. I invite you to consider this, however.
Also consider if you will, that there is in fact one disciple who is not sleeping while Christ is praying. That disciple is of course Judas! He is outside of the Garden of Gethsemane with a large crowd of elders and chief priests with swords and clubs. (As an aside, we should note that Matthew’s Gospel does not show us that there were Roman soldiers coming after Jesus. This group is more like a ‘brute squad’ or a gang of miscreants doing the bidding of the high priest Caiaphas. Often times in movies and all we see Roman soldiers in the group. In the Gospel of John, it says that there were soldiers and police from the Temple under Caiaphas; it does not say that these were Roman soldiers. They would have been the Temple Guard. So, the Romans were not involved up to the point at all. This was an internal matter of the Temple in Jerusalem.)
Imagine for a moment that you are watching this on a movie screen! The eleven disciples with Jesus are asleep, so the disciples are technically out of the picture. We can do a split screen right down the middle to show simultaneously that while Christ is in the Garden praying so hard that his sweat is like blood, that Judas has gone back to the Sanhedrin, to those same priests that had given him the thirty pieces of silver and is planning to give Jesus over to them.
Now, here is something else that I want you all to understand about Judas while he is there with the Sanhedrin. What Judas is doing is not painted as negatively in the original language as it tends to read in English. The word in the Greek for what Judas does to Jesus is paradidame, or simply “to give over.” We should read this as Judas “giving Jesus to the chief priests of the Temple.” It is not that Jesus is simply taken; he is technically given over.
Look, the chief priests and Pharisees knew who Jesus was. They had gone up to Galilee early on in his ministry in an attempt to co-opt Jesus to their political alliance. Look at Matthew 3:7 and on: “When he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath which is to come?’” Of course, they knew Jesus from the triumphal entry into Jerusalem when all the people were singing loud hosannas and calling him King. They knew Jesus from when he turned over the tables of the moneychangers in front of the Temple. In other words, they did not need Judas in order to “take” Christ. They needed Judas because they wanted one of Jesus’ own to “give” Him over.
I want to stretch this idea to us here today. I want you to consider that nobody, no matter how Satan has affected his heart, nobody can take Jesus from you. However, there is always somebody holding out there some kind of a deal that is in essence saying, “You will get this or that if you give up Jesus!” For Judas, it was thirty pieces of silver. Mind you, that is not chump change. I have heard that this might be as much as $15,000 today. Or, if we think about it this way, the Sadducees take the money and by a piece of real estate with it to create a cemetery for foreigners in the end after Judas gives it back. How much is three acres going to cost you today? It was a lot of money.
The chief priests in the temple did not and could not break Judas’ faith in Christ. Judas had to make the decision in his own heart to break the faith. That is what he did: he broke faith. Breaking faith is like breaking the law. If you are alone in your car and you are driving 70 mph in a 50 mph zone, then you have decided to disregard the law on your own volition—unless you are driving that “unnamed car brand” that has been having sudden acceleration issues! Same idea with Judas, however, he broke his faith with Christ on his own volition. Nobody had a sword to his head. He weighed the thirty pieces of silver against his own faith, and the silver weighed heavier on him. Don’t ever let that happen to you! Never let your faith become so light that it can weigh less than money or property—or anything else for that matter.
We know from our scripture reading from last week, that once he has broken faith with Christ that he is sorry that he has done this. It seems his that soul becomes just as tortured as Christ’s. Again, on the split screen in the movie theatre in your mind, see that both Jesus and Judas are awake, and being tortured in their very souls. Judas goes back to the Sanhedrin, the chief priests, and he tries to give the money back. He tries to confess and repent. They will not let him. He throws the silver back at them. They call it blood money and will not take it back unto themselves. Then, of course, they find a clever way to accept the money back without really accepting the money back. They buy the potters’ field with it.
On our split movie screen still, now looking back at Christ, we see that he is praying to God to take the cup away from Him? What cup is this? What is Jesus talking about. The theologian John Stott [Cross of Christ] brings up the idea that this image mirrors a custom in the Greek-speaking world of an accused man that has been sentenced to death being given a cup of hemlock that he must then self-administer. One famous person who was convicted and sentenced to commit suicide was the great philosopher Socrates. He was found guilty of sedition against the Athenian government and was given a cup of hemlock. He drank it, told one of his students to settle the debt of one chicken on his behalf, and passed away. Plato writes afterwards that in this manner the greatest philosopher of all time was taken.
Jesus does not have a cup of hemlock per se, as Socrates did. What is it that Jesus is drinking then? In that moment in the Garden, all of the sin of the world was rushing into Christ. This cannot even be compared in poisonous potency to hemlock! Every sin that was ever committed since the time of the eating of the apple in the Garden of Eden, every sin that I have ever committed, every sin that I will ever commit or my children will ever commit, or my children’s children will ever commit, is rushing into Jesus at that moment.
This idea of sin coming in through a cup that one drinks is also echoed in the Prophet Ezekiel, 23:31-34. In this reference is that Judah had started worshipping false gods like in the sister nation of Samaria: “You have gone the way of your sister; therefore I will give her cup into your hand. Thus says the Lord your God, You shall drink your sister’s cup deep and wide; you shall be scorned and derided, it holds so much. . . .”
On the other side of the split screen again, we see Judas trying desperately to repent, confessing his sin and remorse before the Sanhedrin. They want nothing to do with him. They tell him that he is on his own. However, he is not! Even in that moment, we have to see that Judas’ sin in handing over Christ was already taken into Christ and will be relieved on the Cross. As we know, Judas goes and hangs himself. Even that final sinful act is forgiven through Christ on the Cross.
I was amazed when I asked the Tuesday morning Bible Study group two weeks ago where they thought Judas was now. Was Judas in Heaven with God and Christ or in Hell with Satan? After a moment of reflective thought, the class all came up with the same conclusion that Judas must be today in Heaven. He was remorseful; he repented; his sins would have been forgiven just as ours are on the Cross; therefore, he must be in Heaven!
Even if we get very technical and say that one must have taken communion before one dies (which we never do in this church, by the way), we still have to see that Judas was there with Christ at the Last Supper and also took part in the body and blood of Christ in that original sacrament!
So, here is the absolute Truth of the matter for us today: Nobody can take Christ from you. However, if you were to choose to, you might give Christ over. Be very careful never to come to that. Satan will try to get you to hand Christ over. Conversely, you cannot give your sin over to anybody else—you cannot give back the thirty pieces of silver and think that you are forgiven. Only the blood of Christ can take your sin from you!
Amen.