JUDAS

Would you ever go to a good friends home for dinner and after eating get up from the table and abruptly leave without thanking your host ? The overwhelming majority of people would answer absolutely not because it would be extremely rude. The question arises; why do people leave the House of God right after receiving the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ in Holy Communion? Is it that these people want to avoid the traffic after Mass or perhaps they have more important business to do than to thank God for His Holy Sacrifice? Both assumptions maybe true, but the real reason these people leave Mass early is they don’t believe Christ is present in the Eucharist.

Can you guess who was the infamous person that left the first Mass early because he did not believe and followed Satan? If you answered Judas Iscariot you are correct! "Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me... So when he had dipped the morsel, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. Then after the morsel, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, ‘What you are going to do, do quickly.’ ... So, after receiving the morsel, he immediately went out; and it was night.” (Jn 13:21-30) So the next time you see a person leaving Mass early just think about Judas shuffling off to betray Christ for thirty pieces of silver.

Dost Thou betray?[2]

There is a well known picture of Judas in the valley of Hinnon. The wretched man has just completed his act of terrible treachery and, in an agony of despair, he has rushed away to this lonely spot. The artist shows him to us kneeling there couched against the wall and covering his face with his hands. Presently a vision stands revealed before him. From out of the trees in front there emerges the crown-thorned, bleeding Christ Who looks down compassionately at the traitor. Judas looks for a second only, then once again claps his hands over his eyes, sinks low on his knees and refuses to read in that Face of Christ the divine eagerness to forgive him his sin.

Even at this eleventh hour Jesus would make everything right, but Judas wwill not allow Him. The unchanging love of the Master is lighting up even this dismal valley, and it would send its rays very gladly even into the sin-laden soul of the Iscariot but he will not have it. He insists on shutting out the vision. He cannot bring himself to believe that there is a chance, even for him.

It will be pertinent to prepare for what we propose to say in these pages by pushing our way through the trees and kneeling beside Judas, to try to discover what must have been the thoughts that filled his mind on that night of his sin.

The Training Of Judas

What a marvellous training he has had! For three years he has been a novice, and his Master of Novices was none other than Jesus Christ Himself. For three years he has been by the side of Jesus with unique opportunities of watching Him in the varying circumstances of His Public Life. He has seen Him at prayer, and he has listened to His sublime words about this sacred science. He has been a witness to Our Lord's utter contempt of the worls and its ways. He knew His poverty. Jesus had told the multitudes that the birds of the air had their nests but the Son of Man had not where to lay His Head. And Judas knew it was literally true. Judas had watched Our Lord's unalterable patience in the many trying situations to which men's perverse ways subjected Him. He had seen His miracles. He had listened to His teaching. Hr knew that he himself was chosen out of the entire world to be His priest, His intimate friend, to catch in his heart the fire of a deep personal love for the Man-God and then to go out into the whole world and spread this fire in the hearts of others.

He has been trained in the school of Christ to be a replica of Himself, another Christ. Such a vocation! No wonder the Master had told them: "Blessed are the ears that have heard the things that you have heard. Blessed are the eyes that have seen the things that you have seen." Blessed indeed? Is this blessedness? Why the man's mind is a torture. His head sinks deeper in his shame and misery. Is this the result of such a training? His life is a desolate ruin. All his ideals have been shattered, - and by himself. Such a vocation, developed with such care, and by such a Master! And this is what he has to show at the end of it all! "Judas dost THOU betray?"

He Was Trusted

Then there was the TRUST placed in him by Our Lord. Judas was regarded by the other eleven as a good practical man of business, with plenty of sound common sense. If the choice had been left to them it seems likely enough that they would have selected him to be the head of the apostolic band. And the attitude of Our Lord towards Judas justified the opinion the others had formed. Jesus had commissioned him to take charge of the purse. At the Last Supper He had told him to execute some business and the rest of the apostles did not know what it was nor it occur to them to ask. Apparently they were quite accustomed to hearing Our Lord send Judas off on special tasks demanding tactful handling, and by now they had come to look upon this as being the natural course to be expected. Yes, Jesus trusted Judas. But how he had betrayed that trust! "Judas, dost THOU betray?"...

What is the most effective antidote against relapse? As we have already insisted, avoidance of occasions, much prayer, constant contact with Christ through the Sacraments, and filial devotion to Mary. After that we should say: FORGET your sins, and REMEMBER your sins.

Forget Your Sins

FORGET your sins. Once you have made a good Confession be well assured that the worst crimes you ever committed are cast aside into the ocean of His merciful forgiveness. It is self-love which makes you ever fidgity about these sins. In the light of what we have been saying you must surely understand that Our Lord is not trying to "catch you out." Yet you will find many who seem to think He is. They are forever going back and re-confessing. It is very useful to remember that I am not bound to have absolute certainty that I have confessed all my past mortal sins. That is often impossible to secure, so all that is expected from me is that I have a reasonable probability that they are confessed. If I have made a careful General Confession, and have been told by a priest not to rake up the past sins any more, or if my ordinary practice is to confess my sins carefully, I may now assume that the past is all right, and leave it there. So, in so far as my past sins cause me to worry or anxiety, once I have done my best to make the past right, let me FORGET my sins.

REMEMBER your sins. If ever you committed a mortal sin, even one mortal sin, you proved to yourself the possibilities there are in you to degrade yourself. "Man when he was in honour did not understand. He compared himself to the brute beasts and became as one of them." If now through God's great mercy, you have crept back to the security of His arms, you can see more clearly the appalling degradation of sin. You, the son of your heavenly Father sat in the pigsty feeding swine. A graphic picture of the sinner! Dies it humiliate you? Does it make you strike your breast with the publican? Does it tend to deepen your solid humility, your vivid understanding of your innate depravity? Remember your sins in so far as the memory of them engenders humility in your heart for humility is the indispensable condition for intimacy with Jesus.

Remember Your Sins

Remember your sins too, in so far as they fill your heart with an ineffable sense of gratitude to God. For what would have happened to you after that mortal sin or after that long series of mortal sins, if He had not had mercy upon you? Recall for a moment the circumstances you were in when you were sinning. On that night, with that companion, in that place, - what a terrifying risk you ran! If you had died that night in your sin, you would at this moment be, not here reading these pages, you would now be suffering the torments of hell. That is the teaching of Jesus Christ - they who die in a state of enmity with HIM go to hell for all eternity. The gay world may scout the idea, and you perhaps tried to sneer at it too, and to persuade yourself that it is a bogey. Jesus speaks in most emphatic language about hell, and insists that it is "everlasting fire," "where their fire is not extinguished and their worm does not die." If hell be a bogey Jesus is not the son of God.

But in your saner moments you are not inclined to question the fact of hell or the torments endured for eternity by lost souls. St Teresa once had a vision of hell. Years later she put in writing what she saw. The passage is long, and it is with reluctance that one has to curtail it. "...I found myself, without knowing how, apparently plunged into hell...The entrance seemed to be by a long narrow pass, like a furnace, very low, dark and close. The ground seemed to be saturated with water, mere mud, exceedingly foul, sending forth pestilential odours and covered with loathsome vermin. At the end was a hollow place in the wall, like a closet, and in that I saw myself confined..."

St. Teresa[3] On Hell

"But as to what I felt....I felt a fire in my soul. I do not see how it is possible to describe it. My bodily sufferings were unendurable. I have undergone most painful sufferings in my life, and, as the doctors say, the most painful that can be bourne, such as the contraction of my sinews when I was paralysed......yet all these were as nothing in comparison with what I felt then, especially when I saw that there would be no intermission, nor any end to them. These sufferings were nothing in comparison with the anguish of my soul, a sense of oppression, of stifling, and of pain so keen, accompanied by so hopeless and cruel an infliction that I know not how to speak of it. If I said that the soul is being continually torn from the body it would be far from the truth, for that implies the destruction of life by the hands of another; but here it is the soul itself that is tearing itself to pieces.

"I cannot describe that inward fire or that despair surpassing all torments and all pain. I did not see who it was that tormented me, but I felt myself on fire and being torn to pieces....Left in that pestilential place and utterly without the power to hope for comfort I could neither sit nor lie down; there was no room. I was placed as it were in a hole in the wall, and those walls, terrible to look upon in themselves, hemmed me in on every side. I could not breathe. There was no light but all was thick darkness....yet everything that can give pain by being seen was visible...."

I was so terrified by that vision, - and that terror is on me even now while I am writing, - that though it took place nearly six years ago, the natural warmth of my body is chilled by fear even now when I think of it... Blessed for ever be Thou, O my God! How manifest it is that Thou didst love me much more than I did love Thee! How often, O Lord, didst Thou save me from that fearful prison!! Where was I? How could I possibly take pleasure in those things which led me directly to so dreadful a place?"

"Where was I?" It is a steadying question. Remember your sins in so far as they make your heart expand in deepest gratitude. If ever I committed a single mortal sin I deserved hell. The mercies of the Lord that we are not consumed!...

[1] The Judas Shuffle Peter and Paul Ministries
[2] Exerpts from "Dost Thou Betray", a pamphlet of unknown date by Rev. Robert Nash, S.J.
[3] St Teresa of Avila, Mar. 28, 1515 - Oct. 3, 1582.