The story is told of a preacher whose method for selecting his Sunday scripture was, shall we say, unusual.  Some pastors use what’s called a lectionary--a three-year cycle of readings that retells the story of Jesus every year using either Matthew, Mark, or Luke.  Other pastors select a topic—maybe “grace” or “sacrifice”--and then biblical texts that address it.  Still others preach through entire books.  One church I know will spend almost all of 2017 going through 1 Peter verse by verse.

But the preacher in this story didn’t use any of those methods.  No, he would simply close his eyes, open his Bible, and put his finger on the open page.  He figured the verse on which his finger landed was the one God had chosen for him to expound. 

One day, as Sunday approached, it was time for him to select the reading, and so he closed his eyes, opened his Bible, and put his finger on the page, only to find that it had landed on Matthew 27:5:  “And throwing down the pieces of silver, Judas departed, and he went and hanged himself.”

The preacher was perplexed.  Why, he wondered, would God want him to preach on that verse?  So he decided to ask God for a supplemental text, a second verse to illuminate the first.  Once again he closed his eyes, opened his Bible, and placed his finger on the page.  And when he opened his eyes, the first words he saw were the last half of Luke 10:37:  “And Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’”

As you might imagine, the preacher chose another means for selecting his Sunday scripture. 

This story rightly points to the insanity of the preacher’s method of text selection, but it also hints at the challenge of preaching on Judas Iscariot. 

While we don’t hesitate to preach on Mary or Peter or Thomas or Paul, Judas is different.  Yes, he’s one of Jesus’s chosen companions, someone who heard Jesus’s words and saw his deeds, and yet he betrays him.  What can one say about a man who is the face of failed discipleship?  What can we possibly learn from one whose name has become synonymous with betrayal? 

To answer those questions I think we have to dig deeper into why Judas betrayed Jesus. 

Through the years, biblical scholars, preachers, and theologians have suggested at least three possible motives for why Judas did what he did.[i]

Some have suggested it was divine necessity. 

By the time we get to our reading in Matthew, Jesus has told his disciples three times that he “must go to Jerusalem,” where he will be “delivered”—which is the same word translated elsewhere as “betrayed”—“into the hands of men and killed.”  Some say that for Christ to accomplish his work someone had to betray him and God chose Judas as that someone.  They say he had no choice.  He was predestined or ordained to betray Jesus.

As strange as it may sound, there’s something appealing about that possibility.  If it is true it would absolve Judas of responsibility.   He simply did what God destined him to do.   It might also suggest that God has so ordered all lives—including our own—that people can’t help but do what they do.  One could argue that God made the baker to bake, the giver to give, even the liar to lie.  One could hardly be held accountable for doing what he or she was destined to do.

But our reading suggests Judas had more freewill than this approach suggests.  Notice, for example, that Judas initiates his betrayal.  He is the one who goes to the chief priests and elders and offers to deliver Jesus into their hands, for a price.  The fact that he asked for payment suggests he could have decided against doing it.  Notice also that Jesus warns Judas against betraying him.  As they were sharing the Passover meal, Jesus says that “the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed.”  In doing so, he imputes responsibility to Judas.  He is not a pawn or puppet of God.  He has chosen the path he will take.

Others suggest it was not divine necessity that led Judas to betray Jesus but good, old-fashioned greed. 

That is, of course, what our text suggests.  When Judas went to the chief priests and elders, he asked, “What will you give me if I deliver him over to you?”  It was clearly a solicitation for money, and they obliged, giving him “30 pieces of silver.” 

While we don’t know much about Judas, John’s Gospel suggests such greed might be in keeping with his character.  In John’s account of the woman anointing Jesus with expensive perfume, it is Judas--not the disciples, as in Matthew, but Judas--who objects, suggesting the perfume should have been sold to help the poor.   But, John’s says, Judas did so “not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it.”

While none of us would condone selling out Jesus, it’s not hard to understand how it could happen. 

The movie “Silence” is based on Shusaku Endo’s historical novel about two Jesuits’ attempt to find their mentor after he disappears amid persecution of Christians in Japan.  According to one reviewer, the most powerful weapon the Inquisitor uses to persuade Christians there to betray their Lord is not torture but comfort.  Father Rodrigues, the imprisoned teacher, is provided with food, clean clothes, and honor, not simply to woo him but to show the starving, near-naked peasants that rejecting their Christian faith would be profitable for them.  It is hard to blame them when they choose life’s comfort over Christ for whom they are suffering.  In fact, the reviewer suggests it happens all the time.

Yet greed may not have been the main issue for Judas.  “Thirty pieces of silver” is a pretty meager sum.  While it had symbolic significance--in Exodus it was the value of a slave and in Ezekiel the wages of a shepherd—Judas certainly could have gotten more.  And if it was all about money, it’s hard to explain why Judas wanted to return it after Jesus was condemned.  If money was the point, what happened to Jesus wouldn’t matter.

Still others say it was not divine necessity or greed that drove Judas but rather frustration.

Judas had spent three years in the presence of Jesus.  He had heard him talk about the coming kingdom of God.  He had witnessed the crowds hanging on Jesus’s every word.  He had glimpsed Jesus’s glory.  He had believed that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, the one who was to lead the revolution, the one to rally all of Israel against Rome and restore the nation to its former glory.

But, some suggest, Judas grew tired of waiting for Jesus to act.  So he sought to force Jesus’s hand by delivering him to the chief priests and elders.  He figured the great military messiah within Jesus would emerge and the people would follow.

Most of us can appreciate such impatience.  Two-thousand years later we still only get glimpses of the kingdom of God here and there, now and then.  We too become frustrated with Jesus when we’re holding a loved one losing the fight against cancer.  When some of us went to Kenya and few years ago and saw the plight of people there—the poverty and the corruption that facilitates it—we were more than frustrated that the kingdom to come had not yet come.  There are times in which we grow impatient and want to spur Jesus on.

Such impatience would make sense of Judas’s regret.  If he thought his betrayal would launch the revolution and lead to Israel’s freedom, then he would naturally be distressed when the chief priests and elders turn Jesus over to be executed.  But then again, if Judas expected Jesus to lead an armed insurrection against Rome, he probably wanted to be a part of it, a general in the Lord’s army, so to speak.  If that was his motive, why did he run to the chief priests and elders with his regret?  It would have made more sense to pick up the fallen flag and rally the disciples and crowd to rise in defense of Jesus.  But he didn’t do that.

Now there is something to be said for all these possible explanations for Judas’s betrayal, yet our text hints at a fourth.  One I believe is far deeper.  It suggests Judas betrayed Jesus because he no longer believed Jesus was the Savior of Israel.  It suggests Judas’s failure was not rooted in divine necessity, greed, or frustration, but in lost hope.

Our reading most clearly points to this lost hope in the dialogue Jesus and the disciples share during the Passover meal.  While they break bread, Jesus announces that one of them will betray him.  That news frightens all of the disciples.  And so, in Matthew’s Gospel, each one asks Jesus, “Is it I, Lord?”  The only exception is Judas.  While he asks the same question, he says instead:  “Is it I, Rabbi?”

That difference may seem small but it is significant.  While both “Lord” and “Rabbi” are terms of respect and honor, the fact that they are set in opposition to one another here suggests a difference in how the disciples and Judas view Jesus.  For Peter, James, John and the rest, “Lord” evokes the Old Testament, where the term is used as a synonym for the name of God.  It implies one with absolute power and authority and to which one owes absolute allegiance.  The earliest known confession of faith in Jesus is “Jesus is Lord,” because the church understood him to be God’s power and presence in the world.

The fact that Judas uses the term “rabbi” or “teacher” suggests he doesn’t share the disciples’ view of Jesus.  In fact, in Matthew’s Gospel “rabbi” is a negative term.  In chapter 23, Jesus says that the scribes and Pharisees “love being called rabbi by others” but are hypocrites who don’t practice what they preach.  He tells the disciples they should never use that title or allow themselves to be called by it.

And yet not only does Judas call Jesus “rabbi” at the Passover meal, he uses it again in the Garden of Gethsemane.  When he arrives with the authorities to arrest Jesus, he identifies him with the words, “Greetings, Rabbi,” hinting again that he has lost hope in Jesus as the one to redeem Israel.

That lost hope makes sense of Judas’ decision to go to the chief priests and elders and to ask them for money.  Why not, if Jesus is not what Judas had hoped he would be?  It makes sense of his failure to heed the warning Jesus offered about betraying him.  Why would he care what Jesus said if Jesus wasn’t anything more than another teacher of the faith?  It also makes sense of his change of mind—not repentance, but change of mind, they are two different Greek words.  While he didn’t believe in Jesus as Lord, he probably didn’t expect him to be killed and didn’t want his blood or anyone else’s on his hands.  And it even makes sense of his suicide.  Without hope, he simply gives up.

What our reading suggests is that Judas betrayed Jesus because he lost hope in Jesus as the one to redeem Israel.

That failure is, in and of itself, sad.  But do you know what makes Judas’s story truly tragic? 

If he had only held on a little longer, waited out the next few days, hung on until Sunday morning, he would have found the hope he’d lost.

“[He] didn’t need to take his own life,” writes King Duncan.  “He didn’t even need to spend the rest of his life punishing himself.  He could have made a new start.  His sin could have been washed away by the grace of the man he delivered into the hands of the authorities.”[ii]

If only he’d have hung on, he could have discovered that Jesus was the one for which he and all of Israel hoped.

There are times in life when all of us need to be reminded to persevere.  We need to be reminded of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.  But that is especially true of those of you who might be losing--or maybe have lost--hope.  When you’re wondering where God is when your children suffer or why evil so often seems to triumph over good or how it is that the kingdom has come but so much remains the same, remember Judas’s story and don’t give up.   Don’t turn away from Christ and the faith, for hope in him is never in vain.  It has been confirmed by his resurrection, by the transformation of his disciples, by the emergence of the church, and by the continuing power of the Spirit at work in his people today.   More importantly, it has been confirmed by a legion of Judases who failed their Lord but still hung on to find the grace to believe again.