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When morning came, all the chief priests and elders of the people plotted against Jesus to put Him to death. And when they had bound Him, they led Him away and delivered Him to Pontius Pilate the governor.
Then Judas, His betrayer, seeing that He had been condemned, was remorseful and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, "I have sinned by betraying innocent blood." And they said, "What is that to us? You see to it!" Then he threw down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed, and went and hanged himself. But the chief priests took the silver pieces and said, "It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, because they are the price of blood." And they consulted together and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in. Therefore that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, "And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the value of Him who was priced, whom they of the children of Israel priced, and gave them for the potter's field, as the LORD directed me."
- Matthew 27:1-10
Yesterday, we read that Peter sat outside in the courtyard of the high priest, while Jesus was being tried inside. And a servant girl came to him, saying, "You also were with Jesus of Galilee." But he denied it before them all, saying, "I do not know what you are saying." And when he had gone out to the gateway, another girl saw him and said to those who were there, "This fellow also was with Jesus of Nazareth." But again he denied with an oath, "I do not know the Man!" And a little later those who stood by came up and said to Peter, "Surely you are also one of them, for your speech betrays you." Then he began to curse and swear, saying, "I do not know the Man!" Immediately a rooster crowed. And Peter remembered the word of Jesus who had said to him, "Before the rooster crows, you will deny Me three times." So he went out and wept bitterly.
When morning came, all the chief priests and elders of the people plotted against Jesus to put Him to death. And when they had bound Him, they led Him away and delivered Him to Pontius Pilate the governor. My study bible says, "While the religious Law dictated the death penalty for blasphemers (Leviticus 24:16), under Roman occupation, the Jews were prohibited from carrying out an execution. Thus, they had to get permission from the governor."
Then Judas, His betrayer, seeing that He had been condemned, was remorseful and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, "I have sinned by betraying innocent blood." And they said, "What is that to us? You see to it!" Then he threw down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed, and went and hanged himself. But the chief priests took the silver pieces and said, "It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, because they are the price of blood." And they consulted together and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in. Therefore that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, "And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the value of Him who was priced, whom they of the children of Israel priced, and gave them for the potter's field, as the LORD directed me." In contrast to Peter, my study bible points out, Judas doesn't repent although he is remorseful. Suicide isn't a sign of repentance -- rather that of being self-absorbed. My study bible also notes that there are two versions given of Judas' suicide in the New Testament: here and in Acts 1:16-19.
Here's another sign of failure, as we noted in yesterday's reading and commentary. This time, it's the failure in Judas' suicide -- a disciple hand-chosen by Christ, who fails to repent: to turn to God's love, ask forgiveness, confess the sin not to those who encouraged him, but to the disciples who were his brothers in Christ. He tries instead to undo the sin, to return the money, but this isn't really the point. In some way, it's still a focus on the money, something in common with all the stories we've read about Judas: that he was the treasurer, that he criticized the woman who anointed Jesus with the expensive ointment for the wasting of something valuable. He's the one whom John names a thief. His sin is extraordinary, true -- but these men he turns to don't represent Christ or the things that Christ taught. Instead, they remain those who would strain out a gnat and swallow a camel: they don't care about Judas, and they don't help him, it's just his problem in their sight. Instead they worry about the lawfulness of blood money going into the treasury, and buy a potter's field, in which foreigners are buried. What's the difference between remorse and repentance? The question is important, because remorse may be one thing: we think possibly we can fix that problem somehow, like by returning the silver pieces to those who plotted an innocent man's death in the first place. But this doesn't "fix" things. And often we might feel remorse for something that happened long ago, that we can't just "fix." The answer to both things we can fix and things we can't is repentance, going to God. Asking for a kind of transformation, with a willingness to change ourselves (or our "minds" as the word for repentance in Greek literally says). The Greek for repentance is a word that implies a deep change of the self. That kind of change comes with God's help, and comes from a return to God. Peter will rejoin the disciples, and we know he will be forgiven explicitly and included by Christ (see Mark 16:7). Where does Judas go? Perhaps he felt he could not return to the disciples, but where is his prayer? Does he attempt to see Christ? He only gives back the money in an attempt to relieve himself of guilt, but there is no prayer here: he takes his life by his own hands, as a kind of self-punishment. Where is the God of love in this scenario? I think it's a crucial distinction. The emphasis here on guilt and punishment, the absence of the concept of repentance, renewal, Resurrection -- it is not here. And love is not here, and mercy is not here. There are all kinds of things in this world we may have remorse for. But remorse in and of itself isn't an end -- taken to its end alone, it becomes a kind of self-centered morbid guilt that can lead away from God. Instead, repentance is turning to God, to the power of Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit, and confessing and asking, "What do I do?" There are those others also who can help us do so if they too trust the love of God. We need Christ's power to repent, to truly change in the direction God will ask of us, to find the way forward out of this nihilistic ending of pure remorse. Any way we go, our own self-centeredness can work to deceive: we no more do what is right through self-destruction than we do through pure self-exaltation. It's two sides of the same coin. What we need instead is the rehabilitation from the love that teaches and leads us forward, beyond the sin -- and this comes through repentance. At the early part of the reading, we read that Jesus is bound in order to be led to Pilate. It symbolically teaches what the reality is for Judas, and perhaps all of us, without Christ -- in a kind of merciless world that doesn't teach us otherwise.
