Saturday
Saturday
The Motivation of Judas
Then Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, went to the chief priests to betray Jesus to them.
Mark 14:10
It is true that the betrayal of Jesus by Judas was seen by the early church as a fulfillment of Scripture (see Ps. 41:9; John 17:12), and that it took place after Satan had first “prompted” and then “entered into” Judas (John 13:2, 27). Yet these facts do not exonerate Judas. Neither biblical prophecy nor Satanic influence robbed him of personal responsibility for his action. At the last minute in the upper room Jesus made a final appeal to him (John 13:25–30), and when Judas rejected it, Jesus said: “Woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man!” (Matt. 26:24).
What then can have been Judas’s motivation? The evangelists focus on his love of money. John tells us that he was treasurer of the apostolic band and that he was a thief, helping himself to the contents of their common purse. No wonder he was horrified by Mary’s lavish extravagance. He seems to have gone straight to the priests in order to recoup some of the loss. He bargained with them and settled on thirty silver coins, the ransom price of a common slave.
Another motive for Judas’s betrayal may have been political rather than commercial. There has been much speculation about the meaning of Judas’s surname, Iscariot. Some believe it was a place name and that he was “a man from Kerioth,” a village south of Hebron. Others think that Iscariot was a corruption of sikarios, an assassin (from sica, a dagger), and that Judas was a member of the sikarii, a fanatical terrorist group mentioned by Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian. Was Judas a militant nationalist, then, longing for the liberation of Israel from Roman domination and disillusioned with Jesus as a messianic failure? It is possible, but the evidence is not strong enough for us to be sure.
The evangelists, as we have seen, set Mary and Judas in stark contrast—Mary’s uncalculating generosity and Judas’s coldly calculated bargain. Incensed by Mary’s waste of a year’s wages, Judas sold Jesus for barely a third that amount. Truly “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim. 6:10).
For further reading: John 13:1–2, 18–30