The real reason why Judas’ treachery caused Our Lord such anguish
It was the only wound that Christ's love would not heal. Christ bore every blow, but the traitor’s final refusal may have been the greatest source of sorrow in his Passion.
It was the only wound that Christ's love would not heal. Christ bore every blow, but the traitor’s final refusal may have been the greatest source of sorrow in his Passion.
Editor’s Notes
In this part, Fr Coleridge tells us…
How the Gospels silently contrast Peter’s fall and repentance with Judas’s despair and ruin.
That Peter’s salvation came through grace embraced; Judas’s damnation through grace resisted.
Why our Lord’s greatest interior agony may have been Judas’s final rejection of his love and mercy—not just after his betrayal, but all through his ministry.
Coleridge shows us that the Sacred Heart endured a hidden martyrdom of love in the face of chosen rejection.
Caiphas
The Passage of Our Lord to the Father
Chapter VII
St. Matt. xxvi. 59-75, xxvii. 1-10; St. Mark xiv. 55-66, 72; St. Luke xxii. 55-71, xxiii. 1; St. John xviii. 17-8, 25-27.
Story of the Gospels, § 162-4
Burns and Oates, London, 1892
Our Lord delivered to the Romans
The deliverance of our Blessed Lord to the Roman Governor marks the close of the first stage of the actual and external Passion. He had more than once predicted that He was to be betrayed, and by the priests and scribes delivered to the Gentiles, who were thus to have their appointed part in His Death.
The stage of the Jewish ecclesiastical tribunals was now over, and He was at the mercy of the Gentiles, the Roman rulers of the world, men with some sense of natural justice and fairness, but accustomed to deal hardly with those who fell into their hands, with less idea of the value of human life and less mercy for human suffering than the chosen people of God, whose modes of punishment were more severe, and who were not accustomed to spare any one who seemed to resist or to rebel.
Pontius Pilate now takes the place of Caiphas as the chief actor in the great drama, and we have to study not only his character and his acts, but also the manner in which our Lord dealt with him, the gentle way in which He took hold of occasion after occasion to lead him on to better things, and help him to be faithful to whatever good feelings and principles of right he possessed.
But before we pass on to his part in the history we must linger for a few moments on a contrast which is perhaps intentionally though silently drawn for us in the Gospels, with regard to two of the persons of whom we have lately been speaking.
The pain caused by St Peter and Judas
We have spoken of the one great triumph and subject of consolation which may have come to the Sacred Heart in the very midst of the dark scene of the mockeries and insults which He had to endure, in the course of the long time during which He was made the sport of the rude crowd of servants and others, who witnessed His detention in the hall of the Chief Priest after His first condemnation as guilty of blasphemy by the Sanhedrin.
The greatest pain that our Saviour had to suffer in those hours of continual insults and mocking may very likely have been that which was caused by the knowledge of what was hardly noticed by most of those who witnessed them—we mean the repeated falls of His own chosen Apostle, who during that time repeatedly denied Him, as his Master had foretold to him.
The words of St. Peter cost our Lord more than a hundred buffets and plucking of His beard or hair. But it was the arrangement of Providence that the bitter pain of knowing of the denials of St. Peter was at once to be compensated by the bitter tears shed by the Apostle, after the tender look of love and forgiveness which is recorded by St. Luke, and which we cannot be wrong in considering as the means of his conversion, and as accompanied on our Lord’s part by a great infusion of the grace of perfect contrition into his soul.
But yet there was another and perhaps a still deeper pang which was to pierce the Sacred Heart, and for which there was to be no remedial consolation, save that which He mentions in His prayer in the Garden, ‘Nevertheless if this chalice may not pass from Me except I drink it, not My will, but Thine be done.’
We have just had to speak of the so-called penitence of Judas, and it seems impossible to doubt that we are meant by the sacred historians to understand that the repentance was unavailing, followed as it was by despair and suicide. This blow therefore was driven home, this victory of Satan was never reversed, and the saints who have studied deeply this history, and are most familiar with the sorrows of the Sacred Heart, tell us that this was the pang of the greatest agony that our Lord had to undergo.
Why was one saved, and the other damned?
It is not our business to ask or answer questions that may occur to the mind concerning the secret judgments of God, and if any such were to be raised here, it might perhaps rather seem to be the subject of inquiry, why St. Peter was spared than why Judas was not.
There can be no doubt that in each case the human will had the choice of the ultimate result. Judas remained unconverted, if so it was, until the end of his life, because it was his choice so to remain, and the will of St. Peter must have yielded to the grace of conversion by means of which his salvation was secured. But beyond this there is always something hidden to us in each case which remains the secret of God.
But we may see in the two cases before us some circumstances which may help to the intelligence, in some degree, of the mystery. The fall of Peter was the fall of a loving soul, who trusted to his own human feeling and strength, and neglected precautions which he might have taken, and which might have fortified him against danger. In particular, he neglected prayer, and exposed himself to the plain occasion of sin, and none can do that without peril—but even in the hall of Caiphas his heart was full of love for the Master Whom his lips were denying.
The history of Judas was that of a long continued resistance to grace, habitual and continual faults against a holy rule, which for some time must have steeled his heart against loving devotion to our Lord, and thus have sapped the whole life of grace in the soul. One effect was an utter estrangement between him and his Master, Who nevertheless continued to lavish upon him the demonstrations of His love, which fell upon that hardened heart like soft smiles on a blind man.
This secret cross our Lord had borne, it seems, for a year at least. And one of the great revelations which await the eyes of the blessed in Heaven will perhaps be the history of the patient and loving struggle of the Heart of the Saviour of the world with that of His obdurate child, the struggle that ended at last by his choice of the unrelenting despair, which threw down the pieces of silver in the Temple, rather than go and ask for the pardon which his tears might have won for him as well as the tears of Peter.
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Caiphas
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