At Saratoga, on a battlefield that once was covered with British and American blood, there stands a monument, 155 feet high.  The monument is there to commemorate that decisive struggle in which the British made their last stand over two centuries ago.  Around the base of this monument are four deep niches, and in each niche appears the name of one of the American generals who commanded there.  Above the names stand giant bronze figures on horseback.  In the first stands Horatio Gates; in the second, Philip John Schuyler; and in the third, Daniel Morgan.  But the niche on the fourth side is vacant.  The name appears, but the soldier is absent.  History buffs might remember that the soldier whose name is listed there was a Brigadier General in the American Army who once commanded West point.  His was a distinguished military career up until one decisive moment in his life—the moment in which he decided to betray his country.  His name?  Benedict Arnold.  In the mind of every American the name of Benedict Arnold stands for betrayal. 

There is a more famous traitor in history than Benedict Arnold, however.  There is the apostle whose very name has become synonymous with treachery.  His name is Judas.  I have listened with great interest as the present leaders of Eastern European countries denounce the former Communist leaders, and in at least one case, I recall them saying of a previous premier: “He is a Judas!” So, they do know their Bibles!  We all know what “Judas” means.  It means traitor, betrayer, untrustworthy.  Judas was the one bad apple in the barrel of the twelve disciples.  I have performed hundreds of baptisms in the last forty years.  I have never once been asked to baptize a child with the name Judas. 

I.  BUT IT IS A GOOD NAME.  OR AT LEAST, IT WAS.  It was a proud name before this Judas of the New Testament story besmirched it.  Judas Maccabeus was a great warrior, a hero of his people, who overthrew the heathen idolatry forced upon the Jews by the Greeks in the second century before Jesus.  His victory over Antiochus Epiphanes around 165 B.C.  is celebrated in the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights.  Jewish parents everywhere took pride in naming their sons after that Judas.  No less than five men named Judas can be found in the New Testament, including one of Jesus’ own brothers!  (See Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3) In Jesus’ day, the name Judas was synonymous with greatness.  One can imagine that when he was born his parents thought they were doing him a favor by naming him after a great hero. 

In the first three Gospels Judas does not appear on the scene at all until the drama of the last days, but in the fourth Gospel he makes two earlier significant appearances.  After the feeding of the five thousand, there was a movement to make Jesus king by force.  (John 26:15) When it became clear that Jesus would have nothing to do with that, many of His supporters ceased to follow Him any longer.  Jesus asked the Twelve whether they, too, would leave Him.  Peter protested his loyalty.  It was then that Jesus said, “Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?” John explains that Jesus was referring to Judas Iscariot who would one day betray Him.  (John 6:66-71)

Remember the story of the woman who anointed Jesus with precious oil?  In the Fourth Gospel the woman is named as Mary of Bethany (John 12:1-4) and it says that the reaction of Judas was that it was a shocking waste, for the ointment might have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor.  The writer goes on to comment that Judas said this not because he really cared anything for the poor, but he was the keeper of the money box, in other words, the treasurer.  Those words were written many years after the event, and that may be a slander, based on the fact that the author knew Judas’ ultimate betrayal, but it stands there, nevertheless. 

In the closing days of Jesus’ ministry Judas plays a much more significant role.  The authorities wanted to get rid of Jesus as a troublemaker, but they needed an insider to help them do the dirty deed, and they found that insider in Judas.  In the Garden, Judas betrayed His Master.  He knew he would be there, for Jerusalem was crowded and just across the Kidron valley there was a small garden where Jesus would go to rest with His friends, the key given by a friend.  And Judas led the authorities there. 

II.  WHY DID JUDAS DO WHAT HE DID?  Judas is the supreme enigma of the New Testament.  He is, perhaps, the most universally despised man in human history.  Some see him as the Devil incarnate.  Others see him only as a poor, misguided man.  I would like to suggest this morning that Judas was not a monster, but a man.  He was just as human as we ourselves.  We who are decent and respectable have a tendency to look upon people who go woefully wrong as being vastly different from us.  “Such a thing couldn’t happen to any of us,” we say.  “We are made of much finer stuff.” It is hard for us to realize our kinship with such a man as Judas Iscariot.  The great British preacher G.  Campbell Morgan (1863-1945) said that he did not believe that Judas was a man in the ordinary sense of the word.  He believed that Judas was the Devil incarnate, created in history for hell’s work.  But I am afraid that such a view raises more questions than it settles.  If Judas was created for the express purpose of betraying Christ, then he was not to blame for what he did.  God was.  And that makes God responsible for sin and evil.  That, I cannot accept.  I believe that Judas had as many possibilities for greatness as did Peter, James or John.  He could have chosen the high road instead of the low one.  He chose the low.  Why?  I don’t know why.  Why do we? 

I think it was the most dangerous thing God ever did when God gave us free will, freedom of choice, freedom to say either “Yes” or No” to God.  With that freedom came the power to break God’s heart.  But God chose to create us as persons, not as puppets.  Puppets cannot love their creator.  Persons can. 

“You always hurt the one you love” was a popular love song during my younger years.  It seems to be true of most Christians.  We proclaim that we love Christ, but much that we say and do hurts Him.  When Christians squabble and fight with one another, when they forget His teachings of love toward God and one another, when we give our blessings to those things which Jesus would never support, when we fail to live up to our high calling to be Christians—Christ’s men and women—then we “hurt the one we love,” and betray Christ all over again.  Judas was not a monster.  He was a person very much like us.  As the Irish poet Oscar Wilde said in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol:” “...all men kill the thing they love,/By all let this be heard,/Some do it with a bitter look,/Some do it with a flattering word,/The coward does it with a kiss,/The brave man with a sword!”

But Judas was not always a traitor.  Jesus chose him for something better than that.  Luke says that he became a traitor.  John says that at the Last Supper “the devil entered into him.” “The Devil made me do it” may be one of the greatest cop-outs of human history.  It began in the Garden of Eden—the effort to place the blame on somebody or something else.  The very fact that he was the treasurer of the twelve indicates that he was deemed trustworthy.  I know, a popular view for years has held that Jesus knowingly chose a villain for the specific purpose of betrayal, but that does not seem consistent with the kind of God we meet in Jesus Christ.  What kind of God would play with human life as pawns on the chessboard of life?  Not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Judas had a choice regarding what to do with his life, even as you and I.  Yes, I know that Jesus said to the Twelve: “Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?” That sounds like Judas was a devil from the beginning.  But I take it to mean that Judas had the capacity for devilishness.  I don’t take it to mean that Judas’ lot in life was predetermined.  Later on, Jesus said even stronger words to Peter.  “Get behind me, Satan!” He said.  (Matthew 16:23) It can be argued that Peter’s sin of denying his Lord not once, but three times was just as bad as Judas’ sin of betraying Him.  Jesus’ words do not mean that either Judas or Peter were entirely bad.  He meant that evil had a hold on their lives.  They were facing in the wrong direction.  But Peter turned around; Judas did not. 

Why did Judas do what he did?  Certainly not for the money.  Thirty pieces of silver wasn’t all that much: the price of a slave, according to the Book of Exodus.  One clue may be found in the name Iscariot itself.  Some scholars suggest that it comes from the word sikarios, the Greek form of the Latin sicarius, a dagger-bearer.  In Acts 21:38 the word is used in the plural to describe the followers of a certain Egyptian terrorist.  From this we get the word assassin.  If this is so, then Judas was a member of the Zealots, those who wished to overthrow the yoke of Rome by violence.  It may be that he attached himself to Jesus in hopes that Jesus might take the way of the sword, but when Jesus specifically rejected the way of violence, he became disillusioned.  “Who can follow a Messiah like that?  Someone who asks us to love even our enemies?” Who, indeed?  We all have a problem with that. 

Another line of thought suggests that the name Iscariot comes from “ish,” the Hebrew word for “man;” thus, he was the man from Kerioth, a small village in Judea.  So Judas came from Judea, and there was fierce regional loyalty.  He may have felt like an outsider, for all the rest were Galileans—except Jesus, who was born in Bethlehem of Judea.  It may be that Judas felt like an outsider all of his life, never felt really accepted by the other disciples, and that may have contributed to his betrayal.  At the Last Supper, Jesus tried His best to include Judas in by giving him the place of honor, but Judas would have none of it. 

It may be that Judas really believed that Jesus was the Messiah, only a reluctant one.  Some have even suggested that Judas was the greatest believer of them all, for he had faith in Jesus when Jesus had lost faith in Himself.  He thought that by putting Jesus in the position of having to do something drastic, he would assert His messiahship and call upon those “legions of angels” to aid Him.  In this scenario, He did not expected Jesus to be crucified.  He expected Him to take the sword and assert His lordship.  And so, as in so many cases, “you pays your money and you takes your choice.” You decide which definition of Judas seems to fit the facts best.  But don’t make Judas out to be a monster.  He was a man who chose the wrong road.  Even as you and I. 

III.  WHATEVER BECAME OF JUDAS?  As Matthew tells the story, Judas went back to the priests and religious authorities and told them that he had sinned against innocent blood, and tried to give them their blood money back.  When they refused it, he threw it down and went out and hanged himself.  (Matthew 27:3-10) Thus his end was suicide.  But there is a different account in Acts 1:16-20.  In Matthew the money Judas returned was used to buy a field for the burial of strangers.  In Acts Judas buys the field with the money, and apparently while in the field met with a horrible accident in which his body almost literally blew up.  Possibly the Acts narrative implies suicide, for it says that Judas fell headlong.  (Acts 1:18) It could mean either that he hung himself or threw himself from a precipice. 

But what happened to Judas ultimately?  That’s what many have wished to know.  All sorts of lurid legends have cropped up around this man whom many centuries later the poet Dante was to locate in the lowest depth of the ninth circle of hell.  The New Testament itself brings down the curtain on his life in Acts 1:25 where it says that Matthias was chosen to take Judas’ place and that Judas “went to his own place.” What is Judas’ own place is not for us to say.  But it is a provocative phrase. 

Each of us does go “to his/her own place.” The pious nonsense that “everybody’s going to the same place” is just that: pious nonsense.  All of us wouldn’t be comfortable in the same place.  Some folks wouldn’t be comfortable in heaven.  They would be like a fish out of water.  They would be like a stranger in a strange land, unable to understand the customs or speak the language.  For love is the language of heaven, and earth is the school wherein we learn to speak it.  And death is the great graduation day.  Each goes to his/her own place.  Jesus said to His friends, “I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am, you may be also.” A lot of folks wouldn’t be comfortable in the presence of Christ.  They aren’t comfortable in His presence now.  One never sees them in worship or fellowship with others of Christ’s friends now.  Whatever makes them think they will be comfortable then?  For some folks, heaven would be hell. 

We know that Judas left the Last Supper early before the party was over, and went to Jesus’ enemies and led them to the Garden of Gethsemane to find Jesus and arrest Him.  After he had done the dirty deed, there would have been no reason for him to stick around, but he seems to have stayed around to see what would happen.  There are several versions of what he did in the New Testament, the most plausible of which is that he gave the money back, saying that he had shed innocent blood, and then went out and hanged himself.  Interestingly enough, there is a tradition in the early church that his suicide was not based on despair, but on hope.  Here is how it went: If God is love, then there would be hope even for a Judas who, for whatever misguided reason, turned Jesus over to the authorities.  The earliest form of the Apostles’ Creed says that Jesus “descended into hell,” and early traditions say that is precisely what Jesus did during the days between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  And Jesus went there for a specific purpose, hints a couple of New Testament books: to preach to the souls in captivity.  (Cf.  Ephesians 4:8 and I Peter 3:19-20) One such soul would undoubtedly have been Judas.  Reflecting on this ancient tradition, Frederick Buechner says in his inimitable fashion: “Once again they met in the shadows, the two old friends, both of them a little worse for wear after all that had happened, only this time it was Jesus who was the one to give the kiss, and this time it wasn’t the kiss of death which was given.” (PECULIAR TREASURES, New York: Harper & Row, Inc., 1979, p.  83) That sounds to me like just the sort of thing Jesus would do.  His is truly the love that will never let us go.  Any of us.  Ever. 

There is another ancient legend about Judgment Day.  In heaven on this final day, everyone is joyfully celebrating, singing, dancing, and embracing their loved ones.  Everyone is jubilant except Jesus, who is stranding sadly at the gates to heaven, looking down and beyond.  He is asked why He is not joining in the festivities all around Him.  Jesus answers simply, “I am waiting for Judas.” It is just a legend, but it contains a great truth.  Perhaps Jesus is still waiting for Judas.  Is He still waiting for you?