“If anyone returns evil for good, evil will not depart from his house.”
The most disgusting characters in fiction, I find, are the traitors. Adulterers, turncoats, false friends, they induce a concentrated hatred and revulsion; they have in them something which mere murder, mere villainy, cannot match. Whether they are parents who betray their children and refuse them love, friends who submit to the enemy, or manipulators who abandon at the arrival of the danger they have brought, they deserve, my every bone declares, damnation. Treachery, the breaking of given trust and deep relationship, is a revolting sin.
How do we respond to treachery? I don’t mean the petty things, the jokes we might make in merriment. I mean this: when a relationship we thought secure, a love (familial, friendly, romantic, or Christian) we thought genuine, a history we thought trustworthy, when all this is broken and violated, what do we do? Reconciliation is at once longed for- we cannot simply cease to care about the other- and seemingly impossible- for how can we trust again, when trust has been given and destroyed already?
Dante placed treachery at the bottom of Hell, the last and deepest sin, and among the four traitors he names, alongside a Roman and an Italian more contemporary to Dante, we find Judas and Satan, the two great betrayers of God. Consider the good which God gave to each of these, to the angel and to the man. Of a specific angel, we are given little information (Scripture does not focus on demons), but we know that he was cast down from heaven (Luke 10:18), from the purity of holiness which the angels of Isaiah 6:1-6 rhapsodize in the midst of.
As for Judas, Christ put it most well: “But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it” (Matt. 13:16-17). Judas was given the boon of standing before the Christ of God, the Messiah, the Holy One of Israel, of being taught by Him in word and action, in the flesh and face-to-face. What greater blessing is there? Yet for the price of a slave, for thirty shekels of silver, Judas betrayed Christ, and that with a kiss.
In Judas, though, we can see a characteristic of traitors: they generally don’t start with the big blow-up. Some, more cold-hearted, more deliberate, more cunning, enter relationship in the first place with an intent to betray, but they’re the exception. When treachery develops, it comes usually from sin planted long before, and therefore smaller treacheries will precede the greater, hidden by deception. So Judas did not start his ingratitude towards Christ with that 30-shekel transaction, if we attend to the text.
Judas, as John 13:29 informs us, was in charge of the disciples’ funds. He had the money bag. However, as John 12:6 makes clear, Judas was a thief. It is this perhaps which explains some of the outrage expressed by unnamed disciples in Matthew 26:8-9 at the waste of the anointing oil upon Christ; while Judas is not explicitly one of those complaining, it certainly fits his crime. Judas, as this makes clear, did not launch straight into his great treachery. The lesser treachery preceded it, and if we read into the order of events, that Judas’s solicitation of a bounty to betray Christ to the Jewish rulers immediately follows the ‘waste’ of the oil in Matthew 26 and Mark 14 both, we wonder if Judas’s great treachery was not prompted in part by an apprehension that his lesser treachery was going to run low, that the funds he could steal were being strangled by Christ. It is standard, after all, for the thief to resent the one he steals from, to feel entitled to that which is not his, to grow angry when the rightful owner defends against theft.
Today’s proverb, however, shows us the final end of treachery, both in human relationships and in our relationship to God. Matthew 27:5 gives an instance of the judgement this proverb promises: “And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, [Judas] departed, and he went and hanged himself.” Not only did the profit of his treachery turn sour in his mouth, Judas found it so repulsive that he renounced it, found himself so unbearable that he renounced himself, endeavoring, likely, to escape the judgement of God. Suffering does not depart from the one who repays evil for good- save, by His grace, that Christ bore that suffering on the traitor’s behalf (1 Pet. 2:24).
God bless.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
