By J.L. Hartwell
The church says no. The heart says maybe. And the story—the story says only this: Without Judas, there is no empty tomb.
“What you are going to do, do quickly,” Jesus said. (John 13:27)
In the ancient Near East, the kiss was a greeting of profound intimacy: teacher to student, son to father. Judas weaponizes love. He turns affection into an arrest warrant. And yet—watch closely. Jesus does not flinch. He calls him friend . “Friend, do what you came for.” (Matthew 26:50) That word ( hetairos ) is not the deep love of agape or philia . It is a colder word. It means “comrade” or “companion.” It is what you call someone you once walked with, before they chose a different road. And the story—the story says only this: Without
We will never know. But perhaps that is the point. Judas remains what he has always been: a locked door, a purse full of silver, a tree, a rope, and a question that will not die.
Judas is not a bug in the system. He is the system.
The early church wrestled with this. Origen suggested that Judas was a tool of divine necessity. Augustine called him a “son of perdition” by his own free will. But the logic is inescapable: If Christ’s death was foretold (Psalm 41:9: “Even my close friend, whom I trusted, who shared my bread, has turned against me”), then the betrayal was scripted. Judas was not a rogue variable. He was a verse. Judas weaponizes love
And somewhere, in the silence after the rope tightens, there is a question no gospel answers: Did God forgive him?
Judas is not our opposite. He is our mirror. He is the part of us that knows the right thing and does the other thing. He is the disciple who walked three years with God and still chose thirty pieces. He is the friend who kisses and kills in the same motion.
He is the door that had to be opened from the inside. Even if it meant walking through fire to do it. In 2006, the National Geographic Society published the Gospel of Judas , a Coptic text from the third or fourth century. In it, Jesus laughs at the disciples for worshipping a god other than the true, hidden one. He tells Judas, “You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man who clothes me.” Judas, in this telling, is not a traitor. He is the only one who understood the assignment. The kiss was not a betrayal. It was a blessing. After the act
The other disciples call him “Iscariot”—likely from Ish Kerioth , meaning “the man from Kerioth.” He was the only Judean among a band of Galileans. An outsider. Perhaps he always knew he would be the one to leave the circle broken. The scene is Gethsemane. Olive trees. Torches. The sound of sandals on stone. Judas approaches Jesus—not with a sword, not with a shout, but with a kiss.
For two thousand years, we have reduced him to a single verb: to betray. A hiss of a name. The kiss that became a synonym for treachery. He is the ghost at every feast, the thirteenth chair at a table built for wholeness. But what if we have been reading the story wrong? What if the most hated man in history was not a monster, but the most necessary one?
But the money is a red herring. Thirty pieces were not a fortune; they were an insult. This was not greed. This was something stranger.
He throws the money into the temple. He goes away. He hangs himself.
That makes him less a villain and more a tragedy. He is the man who had to burn so that the world could be saved. After the act, Judas does something no other villain in the Gospels does: he feels everything.