“Judas could have left as many disciples did,” the pontiff explained.
“Indeed, he should have left had he been honest. Instead, he stayed with
Jesus, not out faith, nor out of love, but with the secret desire of
taking revenge against the Master. Why? Because Judas felt betrayed by
Jesus, and decided in turn to betray him. Judas was a Zealot; he wanted a
winning Messiah, one who would lead a revolt against the Romans.
However, Jesus did not live up these expectations. The problem is that
Judas did not leave, and his fault is that of falsehood, which is the
mark of the devil. For this reason, Jesus told the Twelve: “Yet is not
one of you a devil?” (John, 6:70).
...the biblical account (and Benedict’s) suggests that Judas is damned
because he is damnable: a vindictive, bitter man whose will to stay and
punish Jesus for disappointing him is a kind of hellish parody of
Peter’s faith.
Do such people exist? You know they do. The feminist
scholar Mary Daly promoting goddess worship and hatred of the faith at a
Catholic college out of pure spite instead of leaving. John Dominic
Crossan using his Catholic credentials to teach that Jesus’ corpse was
eaten by wild dogs. There are people who leave the Church because they
hate it. There are also people who stay in the Church because they hate
it more deeply still and wish to do whatever they can, from within, to
hurt it in its vital organs. Judas “looked for an opportunity to hand
him over”.
Unlike the movie Judas, that’s not because he was a clueless
git who had no idea what would happen to Jesus once his enemies got
ahold of him. It’s because he knew perfectly well.
Of course, as
is often the case, the vengeance tasted like ashes in his mouth and he
felt remorse about betraying innocent blood...
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