Episode Transcript
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Josh.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: And I'm Gabriel.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: And today on reading the gospel, we are studying the betrayal plot. This is found again in the four gospels.
We will be reading from Matthew 26, verses one through five and 14 through 16. But you can also find it in mark 14, 1210 and eleven. And in Luke, chapter 22, one through six. And John, chapter twelve, verses ten through eleven. Follow along with us as we read in Matthew, beginning in verse 26, verse one.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: When Jesus had finished all these sayings, he said to his disciples, you know that after two days, the Passover is coming and the son of man will be delivered up to be crucified.
Then the chief priests and the elders of the people gathered in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas. And plotted together in order to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him.
But they said, not during the feast, lest there be an uproar among the people.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Then one of the twelve, whose name was Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, what will you give me if I deliver him over to you? And they paid him 30 pieces of silver. And from that moment, he sought an opportunity to betray him.
This is a sad event that we're reading here, the betrayal of Jesus.
But it bookends our previous event.
What happened at Bethany that brought Judas.
Did something happen at Bethany that brought Judas to this place?
[00:02:20] Speaker B: That Saturday night, before the triumphal entrance in Jerusalem on Sunday, Jesus is invited to one of the community leaders house for a special banquet. Who wanted to honor Jesus Christ because he was healed.
And Maryland, who was known by anyone as a sinner, even if she repented and turned around. And Jesus Christ went many times to her place. And Mary, Martha and Lazarus, this man invited Jesus Christ. And Mary did something surprising for everyone.
She took a vessel with a very expensive ointment and broke it and anointed the body of Jesus Christ.
And that night, Judas, he's kind of unhappy with this, maybe upset. And he said, Lord, that is not right. This woman should have donated the ointment to us. We should have sold it and used that money for the poor.
The gospel explains that there is a thought process behind these words of Judas. Because he was putting some money aside into his own pockets.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: And that's found in Mark 14, by the way, if anyone's wondering. Verse four, five.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, sorry. So that is when Judas expresses his disagreement or unhappiness out loud.
Right after this event, he went to the high priest. And of his own initiative, he said, look, I can help you achieve your plans. It seems that Judas might have kept some connections. With the high society in Jerusalem. We don't know exactly from the gospel. I just deduct this from the sequence of the conversation. He knew what was the, you know, being discussed in that palace. So he offered his help.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Well, and we know that there were times where Jesus fled Jerusalem. Because the Pharisees were out to get him. So Judas was not ignorant to the fact that the Pharisees wanted Jesus dead. Wanted Jesus out of the picture.
And so he's coming to them to find out how much they would give. He's wanting to make money. And again, going back to the anointing. He says this oil could be sold for 300 denarii. This brings us to the other point. It's. The leaders have come to a place where they're ready to kill Jesus by stealth. This is not going through the proper channels. They're wanting to assassinate Jesus.
And, in fact, John goes further and says that they're wanting to assassinate Lazarus too. That Lazarus is causing problems. Because he's in Jerusalem. He's talking to people. They're seeing him. And they believe in Jesus. Because this guy, who was dead, is now alive.
And so we have the Pharisees. Willing to commit a crime.
Willing to break the commandments of God for the what they would see the good of the nation.
And I think this brings us to one of the big problems.
And this is one of my problems with situational ethics. The idea of the lesser of two evils. The thought that sometimes it's okay to do a little wrong. To avoid a bigger wrong.
But that's not the case. And I think here the. The Pharisees were thinking. We're doing a little wrong to avoid a bigger wrong. Or not even that, avoid headaches. They didn't want the Romans to come down on them. They wanted control. They didn't want people following Jesus. And so they're pushing back against this.
[00:06:41] Speaker B: It's very interesting. Sometimes the crowds, and maybe some of the leaders.
Wanted a national leader as Jesus.
Who has the power to heal their wounds. To provide food.
To help them in the battle with the Romans. And to reestablish the golden kingdom of David and Solomon on the other side. They swing to the other extreme. And if Jesus would not follow. Exactly their view of a political messiah.
They are ready to eliminate him. Not just to cancel him, but really to assassinate him.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think that brings us to the question.
Why are we following Jesus? Because it would appear that Judas was following Jesus. For more motives. Than just to be in Jesus. Presence, that he's come to a point where he no longer wants to be around Jesus.
And so why are we following Jesus?
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Let's analyze Judas situation first, because that will bring more light to our life today.
So it seems that Judas, for a while, had some questions about identity and the mission of Jesus Christ.
This is why he started to save some money. When I say save is in quotation, that means to steal some money.
Because he was the treasurer of that group of twelve disciples.
He wanted to kind of save some money just in case this movement fails.
So with that money, maybe he would buy a property somewhere and live well by going to the disciples. And I really like what you said just before recording this podcast, that probably in Judah's mind, he wanted to do something good somehow for himself and for the nation.
He said, if I'm going to betray him, he will have to do either two things. Number one, to save himself and to establish himself as the political leader of the nation.
And that means this movement was right and I am in the right place, close to him. I am going to be one of the ministers of this new government, or everything was a farce, was a fake movement. And in that situation, I'm going to switch to plan b. I'm going to use the money that I set aside for myself and live a different life.
He tried to betray Jesus Christ, to force him to make a decision, a public decision, to push him to embrace this expectation of the nation, of a political messiah.
[00:09:51] Speaker A: Judas has his agenda.
[00:09:53] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: And it seems like God did not create Judas to betray Jesus. Right?
[00:10:00] Speaker B: No.
[00:10:01] Speaker A: So this was not some plant that God put in.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: God knew in advance that this is going to happen. Yeah, but God didn't need a Judah for Jesus Christ to save us, or for Jesus Christ to die for our sins.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: Yeah, because if Judas had never gone to the Pharisees, Jesus could have still laid down his life. It seems that when the twelve go out, Jesus sends out the twelve. Very early on, we read this event a long time ago.
When they come back, Jesus talks about their salvation.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: Their names are written in the books of heaven.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: Exactly. They're names written in the book of heaven.
There were times where Judas was saved. But he goes down this track, where, through doubt, through questioning, whatever it was, he gets to a place where he cannot see Jesus as the messiah. He's no longer willing to follow Jesus. He's no longer there, and he's ready to betray him. The danger is, any single one of us can go down this path. You can. I can. None of us are guaranteed to. To be followers of Christ. A year from now, little by little.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: The heart can be divided.
We can try to serve two different masters, both God and our earthly interests.
And if those two paths are, you know, growing apart from each other, we are ready for compromises, including for moral compromises.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: Like Judas was ready to help the jewish leaders to assassinate Jesus Christ.
We may not go that far, but we will compromise with different aspects of the will of God. And we might feel that some compromise is necessary to achieve a better outcome.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: Yeah, we at one point can love Jesus, but get to another point where we no longer want to be around him. So it doesn't necessarily mean we're overtly breaking the ten Commandments, but we just have no desire.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: If we behold one master more than the other, the other one grows dim, has less importance. We then feel the need to be around him. We then read the word of God. We then listen to the whisper of the Holy Spirit. We then go to gatherings with like minded Christian and so on.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: And then we get to a place where we start despising, we start hating the thing that we loved, and we start working against. And this is what we're seeing here with Judas, that he's got into a place where he's now working against, actively working against the very movement that he was supporting in the beginning.
And again, we need to be very careful.
This is getting back to it part of the reason why we do these podcasts, so that we daily can have these encounters, these interactions with God, that make him real, that bring him into our lives, that help us see him. So hopefully, when we come to these areas where we're asked to do a lesser evil for what we feel is a greater good, we will say no.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: And I like how the whole story ends in verse 16.
And from that moment, he that is Judas sought an opportunity to betray him.
Every day, the Lord places in front of us many opportunities. In fact, even every minute has a choice built in. Every choice. It's an opportunity. We have an opportunity to seek God. We have an opportunity to listen to his voice. We have an opportunity to serve him. And on the other side, if we get colder in this regard towards the Lord, we are going to seek an opportunity to not hear his voice, seek an opportunity to be around people who are very noisy, so we don't hear the whisper of the Holy Spirit. Seek an opportunity to do what is wrong. And for a while, you can justify that, but your conscience get numb. And after a while, sin is like a wall of separation between you and God between you and your conscience, between you and your spiritual mentors and your church family and so on.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: So the question is what opportunity are you seeking today?
[00:14:45] Speaker A: Let us pray.
Father God, if we are not intentional we can drift to places we do not need to be.
Our love can grow cold. Our desire to follow and serve you can slip away and we can find ourselves making decisions we would never make right now.
And so I pray that you will build within us a greater love for you each and every day.
That there will be a desire to follow you to do right, that we will stand for good and that we won't take our relationship with you for granted. That each and every day we will be thankful for the gift of eternal life. We'll ask forgiveness for our sins. We'll read our Bible. We'll pray and will tell others about Jesus. We ask these things in his name. Amen. Amen.
