By DONAL FOLEY
One of the most puzzling things in the New Testament concerns the question as to why Christ chose Judas Iscariot to be one of His apostles knowing that he would ultimately betray Him.
It almost seems as if Christ was being unfair to him in doing this, that it would have been better if He had allowed Judas to leave Him — or even sent him away — rather than put him in a position where he would ultimately commit the terrible sin of betraying Christ to the Jewish authorities, and thus, according to Scripture, end up in Hell. We can see this from the passage in the Acts of the Apostles, which describes him as going to his own place (Acts 1:23-26), which is usually understood to mean Hell.
And yet, in the beginning, Judas must have had some good qualities, otherwise Jesus would not have chosen him for such an exalted role.
We read in St. Luke’s Gospel, that before He definitively chose the twelve apostles from the company of His followers, He spent the whole night in prayer; and then the apostles are listed, including Judas. But even here, it is significant that St. Luke goes on to tell us that Judas became a traitor (Luke 6:12-16).
The point is, though, that Christ did not choose Judas lightly, but only after intense prayer; at the same time, Jesus was God incarnate and must surely have known right from the beginning that Judas would in fact betray Him.
And then, to make matters even more mysterious, further on in his Gospel, St. Luke tells us that after the apostles had been with Jesus for some time as He journeyed around the countryside, teaching and healing, He called them together and sent them out on their own to “preach the kingdom of God, and to heal,” giving them authority “over all demons and to cure diseases” (Luke 9:1-6).
Judas was certainly amongst the apostles and so must have had the power to cast out demons and cure diseases and presumably exercised these powers. In other words, before his downfall, Judas performed miracles.
What, then, happened to make him turn away from Christ? The Gospels don’t give us much detail about him but we can surmise that as time went on, Judas began to tire of the hard life required of an apostle, the constant traveling, and also became alarmed at the growing opposition Jesus faced from the Jewish authorities.
Avarice, too, seems to have been part of the reason for his downfall. He controlled the common purse of the community and, according to St. John, stole from it (John 12:1-8). Another probable reason for his defection was the incident likewise related by St. John, when after Jesus had miraculously fed the 5,000, He revealed the doctrine of the Eucharist to the crowds.
We are told that at this point, “many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him,” although St. Peter, in the name of the twelve, proclaimed his faith in Christ. But significantly, right after this, St. John reports that Jesus then said, “Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?” The evangelist comments: “He spoke of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was to betray him” (John 6).
So it probable that Judas’ lack of belief in Jesus’ words about the Eucharist were also a factor in his decision to betray him.
But none of this solves the problem as to why Jesus continued to have Judas as part of His privileged inner circle, and the recipient of the most intimate teachings, despite knowing in advance how it would all end.
In trying to solve this problem, we have to acknowledge that this is a very difficult area, theologically, since it concerns questions about the relationship between grace and free will which have been debated down through the centuries and never categorically resolved by the Magisterium of the Church.
A possible answer is that Jesus took on Judas as an apostle, knowing full well that he would betray Him, but also knowing that this was giving Judas the best possible chance of salvation, in that he would be in the company of Jesus and see firsthand His wonderful miracles, His humility, His purity, and the example of a life lived totally for others.
We can only very dimly and feebly attempt to understand the mind of God in these matters, but perhaps we can say that He foresaw that of all the positions that Judas could have been placed in, from the dawn of time, right to the end of the world, this was the best possible one for Judas, the one that gave him the best chance of salvation.
It may be that an analogy with the knowledge which a priest has under the seal of Confession is appropriate here. This knowledge cannot be used by him in his ordinary life, and possibly he might act differently if he could use such knowledge. So perhaps Christ’s infused knowledge of Judas’s future condition was like this — and He was aware that it was the will of the Father that how He related to others should not be influenced by what He prophetically knew of their future state.
And perhaps, too, if Judas had been in another time or place, he would have been even more notorious. Or perhaps if Christ had sent him away, he would have joined the Pharisees and Jewish authorities and thus made his ultimate punishment even worse?
The same is true of Pontius Pilate. Perhaps being the man, out of all the human beings who will ever exist, who was given the role of actually judging and condemning Christ, perhaps his encounter with the Man-God on that bleak Good Friday nearly 2,000 years ago, was, in the mind of God, Pilate’s best chance of responding to grace and thus of being saved.
Obviously, we are struggling to understand God’s mind and motives here, but one thing is certain. Judas did not go from being a favored apostle of Christ to His betrayer in one go — it was a series of gradual falls culminating in his complete rejection of Jesus and his despair and suicide at betraying Him.
The lesson for us, surely, is that we have to be on our guard against such small falls, in the knowledge that they can, if we are not careful, lead to bigger ones, and ultimately to spiritual disaster. Perhaps the best way of doing this is regular Confession, so as to avoid a situation where we become accustomed to our sins and our hearts are gradually hardened.
Lent generally, and Holy Week in particular, are good times to ponder these things, and also to be grateful to God that we weren’t put into the position of either Judas or Pilate, and confronted with the choices they had to make.
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(Donal Anthony Foley is the author of a number of books on Marian Apparitions, and maintains a related website at www.theotokos.org.uk. He has also written two time-travel/adventure books for young people — details can be found at: http://glaston-chronicles.co.uk/.)
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