Judas, The Man Who Never Knew

I read this today from Max Lucado. I love his writing and his ponderings. This is an excerpt from one of his books and it fits in the context of our journey with these impoverished people in the bateys of Altagracia, Los Robles, Don Bosco and Algodon. When we visit these bateys and build relationships with these children and adults, we discover they are just like us, hard wired by God with the same needs and desires. The Bible speaks over and over again about caring for people who are poor and destitute, who are living in environments and circumstances that are beyond their control.

This Max Lucado piece speaks of how he (we) may have stereotyped Judas Iscariot, intriguing. Hmmm...I wonder if we don't do that with the poor. Lucado also talks about Judas as a man who practiced religion and never knew Jesus intimately. I wonder if those who practice religion (in the church) are looking and not seeing the needs of the poor.

I’ve wondered at times what kind of man this Judas was. What he looked like, how he acted, who his friends were.

I guess I’ve stereotyped him. I’ve always pictured him as a wiry, beady-eyed, sly, wormy fellow, pointed beard and all. I’ve pictured him as estranged from the other apostles.

Friendless. Distant. Undoubtedly he was a traitor and a quisling. Probably the result of a broken home. A juvenile delinquent in his youth.

Yet I wonder if that is so true. We have no evidence (save Judas’s silence) that would suggest that he was isolated. At the Last Supper, when Jesus said that his betrayer sat at the table, we don’t find the apostles immediately turning to Judas as the logical traitor.

No, I think we’ve got Judas pegged wrong. Perhaps he was just the opposite. Instead of sly and wiry, maybe he was robust and jovial. Rather than quiet and introverted, he could have been outgoing and well-meaning. I don’t know.

But for all the things we don’t know about Judas, there is one thing we know for sure: He had no relationship with the Master. He had seen Jesus, but he did not know him. He had heard Jesus, but he did not understand him. He had a religion but no relationship.

As Satan worked his way around the table in the upper room, he needed a special kind of man to betray our Lord. He needed a man who had seen Jesus but who did not know him. He needed a man who knew the actions of Jesus but had missed out on the mission of Jesus. Judas was this man. He knew the empire but had never known the Man.

Judas bore the cloak of religion, but he never knew the heart of Christ.

We learn this timeless lesson from the betrayer. Satan’s best tools of destruction are not from outside the church; they are within the church. A church will never die from the immorality in Hollywood or the corruption in Washington. But it will die from corrosion within—from those who bear the name of Jesus but have never met him and from those who have religion but no relationship.

Judas bore the cloak of religion, but he never knew the heart of Christ. Let’s make it our goal to know … deeply.

From Shaped by God (original title: On the Anvil)
Copyright (Tyndale House, 1985, 2002) Max Lucado