Concerning Judas

The passage before us today is the first chapter, if you will, in the book of Acts. The introduction found in the first 14 verses, which reminded us of much of what Luke had already said in his Gospel, is over. What will happen next?

We are a bit surprised to find the answer. The first item on the agenda is “concerning Judas” (v. 16), that infamous disciple of Jesus who turned against him. As Luke tells us about this matter, we come to see how Judas Iscariot serves as a warning to Christians to not lose faith in Jesus but to remain confident that Jesus and his kingdom will endure forever.

Luke gives us three things to consider concerning Judas: his sin, his death, and his replacement.

Judas’s Sin

First, Judas’s sin. What did Judas do wrong, and why did he do it in the first place?

Betraying Jesus

In Luke’s Gospel, we are told:

Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was of the number of the twelve. He went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers how he might betray him to them. And they were glad, and agreed to give him money. So he consented and sought an opportunity to betray him to them in the absence of a crowd.” (Lk 22:3-6)

Judas “betrayed” Jesus. The Greek word that is used here is often a technical term for turning someone in to the police.[1]

Peter describes it a bit differently here in verse 16 when he says that Judas “became a guide to those who arrested Jesus.” By being the informant to those who were able to take Jesus into custody on that fateful night in Gethsemane, Judas became to Christian history what Benedict Arnold is to American history. Judas was a traitor.

Judas’s Motive

But why? Why did Judas do it? What was his motive?

We get an indication in the Gospel accounts that Judas was tempted by financial gain. He seems to have been something like the treasurer for Jesus and his followers. And John says that he used his access to money to benefit himself. Judas was a thief (Jn 12:4-6).

So, was Judas’s motive for betraying Jesus financial gain? That would seem to have been part of it. We know that there was an arrest warrant for Jesus of Nazareth, and Judas was promised a monetary reward for his collaboration with the Jewish authorities. How much money? Thirty pieces of silver (Matt 26:15). That’s about one month’s wages. Not an insignificant amount, but not exactly a life-changing sum either.[2] We suspect that there must have been other motives at work.

The Gospels do not explicitly say why Judas did what he did. But remember, as one of Jesus’s disciples, one who, as verse 17 says, “was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry,” Judas was no fringe follower of Jesus. He was one of the Twelve, one chosen by Jesus to be an important part of this messianic movement and revolution. It was a highly privileged position. Just listen to what Jesus had promised:

Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. (Matt 19:28, NIV)

Judas had been promised a cabinet position in the messianic kingdom. And he had not misunderstood, either. Jesus had spoken repeatedly of this movement as the arrival of the kingdom of God. Judas must have believed that Jesus was the Messiah who was bringing it all about, and of course, he was not wrong about that.

But it seems Judas had become disillusioned. Some have suggested that Judas had a pure motive, that he simply had grown impatient and was hoping to put Jesus in a position where he would win, overthrow Judean authority, and set up his messianic kingdom. But it seems more likely that after being this close to Jesus he had concluded that this was not what he had thought it was going to be. Things were not moving forward at the pace or in the way that Judas had expected.

And this is a warning to all of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus. We, too, can become disillusioned with him, can’t we? Judas is, at least potentially, all of us. You say you are a Christian, a disciple of Jesus? So was Judas. You say you believe in Jesus, that you think he is the savior of the world. So did Judas.

But Judas gave up on Jesus. So could we.

Satanic Influence

And when Judas gave up on Jesus, he didn’t just come to the conclusion that this whole Jesus-thing was not for him. He came to the conclusion that Jesus was not for anyone. Because, the claim of Jesus is either true and must be embraced whole-heartedly, or the claim of Jesus is false and must be resisted. There can be no middle ground.

We need to think about this carefully, because Judas certainly did. He had anchored his hopes to the belief that Jesus was the Messiah, the one who would, quite literally, save the world. And as we’ve said, in this, we Christians today say he was right. That is who Jesus is. That is what Jesus was promising. But no doubt Judas had become disillusioned because of Jesus’s “paradoxical values” that Judas just couldn’t conceive would ever be able to deliver on that promise.[3]

You can go on calling yourself a Christian, a disciple of Jesus, but if you stop going his way, you have turned to another way. That temptation is strong, brothers and sisters, because it is also satanic. To abandon the way of Jesus is to collude with evil.

Our world today is, everyone feels it, in a very dangerous place. Who can deliver us? Jesus, and only Jesus, we say. Right? You believe this? Then you must live it. You must let this truth play out Jesus’s way.

Judas’s Death

The reason we are concerned with Judas is because he remains a warning to all would-be disciples of Jesus. If you give up on Jesus and the way of his kingdom, then you will be on a different path, the path like what Judas decided to go down. And all those paths are hopeless. They all end in death, not life, not salvation.

Luke stresses this point by editorializing the reported speech of Peter—see the parentheses bracketing off verses 18-19? These two verses are Luke’s comments, reminding us of what became of Judas. They report to us his tragic end. Luke wants us to be warned “concerning Judas” by telling us how he died. And Luke’s way of putting it certainly gets our attention.

The Reward of His Wickedness

First, Luke says that Judas “acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness.” Now, according to Matthew, the money Judas had been given to betray Jesus was later used by the chief priests to purchase a field to serve “as a burial place for strangers” (Matt 27:7). That the same field is being referred to by Luke is clear from the fact that both Matthew and Luke tell us that the field became known as “the Field of Blood.” The two accounts are easily harmonized: it was Judas’s money that was used to purchase the field, so Judas did acquire a field in this “causative” sense.[4]

But the money that was used to purchase the field Luke calls “the reward of his wickedness,” an interesting way of putting it. What was Judas “rewarded” for his wickedness? A cemetery. How appropriate, for “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23).

To turn away from Jesus in any form is no benign act. It can only lead in one direction: death.

Cause of Death

Next, notice Judas’s cause of death. How did Judas die? According to Matthew, Judas committed suicide by hanging himself (Matt 27:5). But Luke describes Judas’s cause of death this way: “and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out” (v. 18). I told you Luke gets our attention.

Are these contradictory accounts? That’s one option, of course, there for the taking for those who are eager to find reasons to disbelieve the Bible. There are also possibilities for harmonization, including a very long church tradition which explains that Judas hung himself from a tree branch that protruded over a valley. When the tree branch broke, well, so then did his body.[5]

Focusing on trying to make these details match up to our satisfaction runs the risk of missing the greater point Luke wants to make. However exactly it happened, Judas was now dead, and Luke thinks that that in itself is instructive to his audience. Luke sees in Judas’s death, as he will see in the death of a couple of others in the community of Jesus later on, “an example of divine judgment.”[6]

And that’s why Luke described Judas’s death like this. He uses gory language to report the death of Herod in Acts 12:23 evidently to make the same point. This was common convention in Luke’s day. Josephus in the first century also writes about the death of someone whose “entrails were so corroded, that they fell out of his body. . . . [And] thus he became as great an instance of divine providence as ever was, and demonstrated that God punishes wicked men.”[7]

And so our concern with Judas is not in the precise facts of how he died but by the fact that his death itself stands as a warning to all who follow Jesus. Don’t go the way Judas went.

Memorialized Place

The general tale of Judas and his death “became known to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem,” verse 19 says. So that the field that was tragically associated with Judas and his treachery became as infamous as Judas himself, known everywhere as Akeldama, “Field of Blood.”

Now while Luke has digressed to make this point, we do find in Peter’s speech itself, a bit later in verse 25, that this sobering point was on his mind, too. Peter is helping this young group of believers select a replacement for Judas, the one who “turned aside to go to his own place.”

To what place did Judas go? Many Christians have read this as an indication that Judas went to hell, and no doubt the phrase “to his own place” is a euphemism, but we should note the reticence of language here. While the circumstances of [Judas’s] death did not leave much room for optimism, Peter would not speak definitively about what “his own place” was.[8]

When it comes to Jesus, then, we are dealing with high stakes stuff. If, like Judas, we decide that Jesus is not to be trusted to be the one who really is the Savior of the world, then we will go our own way, and we will end up in our own place.

Call it “hell” if you like, but know that any attempt to describe such a fate is likely borrowed from the imaginations of medieval theology rather than from solid biblical evidence. That’s not to say that hell—whatever it is—ain’t so bad after all. Luke’s concern with how Judas died is meant to stir up a healthy fear that warns us not to give up on Jesus and the way of his kingdom. All other paths are dead-end paths, with the dark and mysterious cemetery as the testimony to where everyone is headed, with no hope of ever getting out.

Judas’s Replacement

But there is another way. A way of hope. A way of life. Ironically, Luke’s concern with Judas in this passage points us this way, too. The passage is about Judas’s replacement, and there’s more to this story than many Christians today understand.

The Scripture Must Be Fulfilled: Sovereignty and Scripture

First of all, it’s difficult for many of us to understand the shock and horror of Judas’s betrayal. In the light of Jesus’s ascension, we might have thought the disciples would have more or less forgotten about Judas and his heinous act. And yet, here we are, as the book of Acts gets going, and the first order of business for this fledgling group of Jesus-believers is “concerning Judas.” There was an empty seat at this community meeting, and the loss was palpable to them. This was a problem.

There was no time for looking back and theologizing about how God had sovereignly used Judas’s betrayal to bring about the salvation of the world, but they found hope in God’s sovereignty, nonetheless. How so? Notice what Peter says, in verse 16, “Brothers, the Scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David concerning Judas . . .” One commentator has observed, “Insofar as they could make any sense of this, it was a scriptural sense. Insofar as they could see what to do as a result, it was a scripturally rooted sense of direction.”[9]

In other words, they looked back to the scriptures for comfort and guidance, and they found it in passages like Psalms 69 and 109, from which Peter cites in verse 20. It may surprise us to consider that such passages were meant as prophecies about Judas, but Peter makes that case. And that is how the first Christians consistently re-interpreted the Old Testament: “they read it in light of the things which had taken place in connection with the life and ministry of Jesus.”[10]

So, then, should we. If indeed Jesus is the savior and lord of the world, then we look to him for answers for every way forward from the troubling realities that confront us. We find ourselves right now in troubling times, and many Christians understand that this is not unexpected from a scriptural standpoint. But what is not always so easily grasped is how Jesus, resurrected and ascended, offers us real hope in our day when we are all tempted to become impatient with the expected impact of his kingdom on our present circumstances. We need to let the scriptures give us direction, but the direction the scriptures give us must always be viewed through the lens of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.

Why There Must Be Twelve: Saving of Israel and Testifying to Jesus

Let me try to be more specific. Why did these early Christians find a need for replacing Judas? When another of the original Twelve, James the brother of John, is killed in Acts 12, there doesn’t seem to be a need for replacing him, so it isn’t a matter of early church polity, as if there needed to always be twelve living apostles, perhaps to keep the one-out-of-ten ratio of apostles to congregational size (see v. 15).[11]

The reason why replacing Judas mattered was because he was no longer considered to be counted as one of the twelve due to his apostasy. But there had to be twelve, someone else had to take his place to get to that number, because what Jesus had started was not a new religion but the fulfillment of Israel’s election. The Christian claim here at the very beginning is that what we see in Jesus is the success of Israel, now completely redefined around him. And nothing, not Jesus’s crucifixion, not Judas’s apostasy, would be able to stop the spread of this good news.[12]

But, alas, many Christians today don’t seem to believe that anymore. Part of the problem is that we’ve forgotten what the scriptural story has been about all along, and we’ve turned the Jesus story as good news for what happens to you after you die rather than the good news of what happens in the world right now while you are alive. We are good with Jesus for the hope of going to heaven, but we aren’t so sure his way offers hope for life in the real world. Have we become more like Judas, disillusioned with Jesus’s summons to mercy and grace and forgiveness? This isn’t exactly the way to win elections. Love your enemies? Yeah, right. You have to suppress your enemy or they will ruin our country. Be compassionate to the stranger and the immigrant? You have to be suspicious of them because they are probably criminals intent on murdering you.

And if that has your riled up, thinking that everything I’ve just said is meant to persuade you that the Jesus way is on the opposite side of the political aisle than the one you are on, then you have not yet understood how the way of Jesus and his kingdom stands over all sides, always speaking truth to power, and never, ever being co-opted by the political strategies of human beings.

Whom God Has Chosen: The Character of the Disciples

That’s why I find this passage so helpful for the political moment we are in right now. As the eleven look to complete their number, they put forward two candidates and then prayed, “You, Lord, who know the hearts of all, show which one of these two you have chosen” (v. 24). They were not looking for the right candidate for their new religion. They were looking for the right candidate for this revolutionary kingdom movement that Jesus himself had launched.

They certainly did not want another Judas, so they asked God to give them someone who, unlike Judas, had his heart in the right place, someone whose character would not diminish their collective witness to Jesus and his resurrection. That of course would be their vocation, as verse 22 says, and as we will see them doing throughout the book of Acts. It is as the church of Jesus Christ bears witness to his resurrection and is itself a credible gospel community possessing the kind of character expected of those who believe in that gospel message, that the Jesus movement will live on and begin to change the world.

And it remains so today. So let us be warned concerning Judas, and not turn aside from the ministry of Jesus to yet another dead-end street that offers nothing new to a broken and confused world.

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[1] Walter Bauer et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 762.

[2] R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, The New International Commentary on the New Testament, ed. Gordon D. Fee (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publication Co., 2007), 979.

[3] France, Matthew, 977–78.

[4] Darrell L. Bock, Acts, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, ed. Robert Yarbrough and Robert H. Stein (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 83.

[5] D. A. Carson, “Matthew,” The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Matthew, Mark, Luke, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein, et al. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984), 562.

[6] C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, 2 vols, International Critical Commentary, ed. J. A. Emerton and C. E. B. Cranfield (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 1:93.

[7]Josephus, Wars of the Jews, 7.453.

[8] F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts, The New International Commentary on the New Testament, ed. F. F. Bruce (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1988), 47.

[9] Tom Wright, Acts for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1–12 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 18.

[10] Barclay M. Newman and Eugene A. Nida, A Translator's Handbook on the Acts of the Apostles, UBS Handbook Series (New York: United Bible Societies, 1972), 25.

[11] Ben Witherington, III, The Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), 120.

[12] Barrett, Acts of the Apostles, 1:94.