Understanding Betrayal

It is not easy to write some things, and yet those things are meant to be written because in them lie some indelible lessons of life. The story of Judas and Jesus looked straightforward on the surface, but it was never that simple When two opposing ideologies clash, the outcome is rarely a straightforward narrative. It is the same as a Christian being best friends with a non-Christian; if the two of them are deeply committed to whatever they believe in, the end result will be a lot of pain and agony for both parties, the Christian especially will suffer seriously. It is like Eve being friends with the serpent. Eve will be Eve, and the serpent will be the serpent. Their friendship can only work if both of them understand the nature of the other party and make deliberate efforts not to take counsel or advice from each other.

Friendship, however, is not considered by many to be deep enough if either party cannot hold a closed-door session with the other and have discussions relating to their lives and destinies. Some people are very secretive; they keep their own issues to themselves, but they always want to put their mouth into the issues of other people. If you don’t share your issues with them, they will start probing, calling you endlessly to show their care and love for you, but you know virtually nothing about them. They have free access to your life and home, but you discover you don’t even know where they live, and you don’t know what is going on in their own lives. How can you truly call that a friendship? How can you in good faith call such a relationship balanced and of equal yoke? That is the relationship between Judas and Jesus.

Many of us still have such relationships today, and it is important that we audit our relationships and redefine the parameters if we notice we have overcommitted while the person we regard as our friend has not committed himself or herself to us at the same level The basis for every form of betrayal lies in the imbalance of the relationship from the beginning. Some couples also have this sort of relationship. The man saw a beautiful lady and puffed himself up in order to look big and capable to her in order to get her to consider him for marriage. In plain terms, he lies to her that he is able and capable not only to meet her needs but also to take her to Mars on SpaceX as soon as it opens for commercial use. With his mouth, he says a lot of things, many of which he forgets as soon as he says them because he really didn’t mean them.

The woman, however, believes him and commits to the relationship based on the things the man had said, convincing herself that she had met the man who best fits her picture for the future. After the marriage, things begin to unravel. The lady realised she had been lied to, and the man was not even worth up to ten percent of his claim. Sometimes she realises that rather than the marriage offering her rest from toil, it has in reality added another burden to her She had been hoping for relief, but in reality, she had bought herself a lot of work in terms of preparedness, ability to lead and guide a marriage, ability to provide, ability to dream and prosecute such a dream, manliness, and husbandness.

It is like being married to a forty-year-old who, in reality, is fourteen years old in everything. Where does one begin to work on it? If the wife looks at the true state of things and decides the marriage is not for her, everybody blames her for walking away The mantra is “You are supposed to work at it.

You young people only want ready-made things, you don’t give up on marriage that easily, you put in the work.” If the wife stays in the marriage, crying herself to sleep every night because her husband has landed himself a work mule and was not ready to change or become useful in any way, she gets frustrated and unhappy every day, and begins to look for a way to let off steam. At this point, another man walks up to her to ask her what the issue is, and she begins to seek relief in this new friendship, either emotionally or physically. At that point, she becomes a “Traitor” who had betrayed her wedding vows, and the husband becomes the victim. Life is never black and white… Such is the relationship between Judas and Jesus

What Jesus promised and what Judas heard Jesus promising were two different things Jesus promised a Kingdom of God, Judas heard “The establishment of a Kingdom of God in Jerusalem, which would overthrow the rule of the Romans.” Judas saw himself as a revolutionary who was buying into the vision of another Moses, who, with just a staff, would show forth the powers of Jehovah, with plagues and parting of the sea and clouds of glory and pillars of fire. To Judas, Jesus would rain hailstones, brimstones, and fire upon the Roman Empire and establish the Kingdom of God on the earth. It was not only Judas who believed this, the other disciples believed it too, and so did many of the Jews and Jewish authorities Even after the resurrection of Jesus in Acts 1:6, one of the prevailing questions asked by the disciples was, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the Kingdom of Israel?” James and John, the sons of Zebedee, had brought their mother to him earlier to petition Jesus to grant both of them a seat at his right and his left in His kingdom.

The Idea of the restoration of Israel and freedom from the Roman authorities had been the subject of many prophecies and prayers; one cannot but expect that with all the power Jesus had, he would deliver what the disciples, especially Judas, were expecting. When Jesus refused to follow this path, Judas felt disappointed. Just like a wife whose fiancé had boasted that he would turn her into a Rolls-Royce in bed after they got married, only to discover that the man could not even turn her into a toy car. What was expected was not what was delivered, and this leads to disappointment. Now, after being disappointed because a husband could not perform, it would be shocking to then discover that the same husband is cheating on the wife with another woman.

Why was Jesus recruiting more people into an imaginary kingdom? This leads to disillusionment, and from that point, dissatisfaction sets in, and from there, the desire to expose the fraud of a husband becomes the priority. I have seen and listened to many wives and husbands who find themselves dealing with this level of dissatisfaction in their marriages, share details of their pains and betrayals with people they naturally wouldn’t have shared with, when they get to that point because at that point they were tired of the lies and the coverups and needed to justify to people why they were walking away from the marriage. It was not what was expected, and they were tired of pretending all was well, so they bared it all, and once they felt justified in their explanations and consultations, they walked away from the marriage.

With Judas, there was no walking away empty-handed from a fraud who had cost him three productive years of his life There was no walking away from a Messiah who refused to match up to Moses but kept claiming he was greater than Moses. Selling Jesus to the religious leader was for him the only choice Not only was he walking away, he was cashing out and ridding Israel of the fraud all at once. It was only after he had done everything that he believed was right in his mind that he realised he had totally misunderstood the concept of the Kingdom of God, but by then it was too late He wanted to return the money and set things back to how they were, but it was not to be Judas’ regret and suicide proved that he didn’t betray Jesus out of spite, but he did so out of a misguided expectation Jesus was what he claimed He was, but he was not what Judas expected him to be.

PS: A lot of us are in relationships in which we were the ones who set the expectations of what the person we are in the relationship with should be This is wrong Each individual in a relationship must define himself or herself This is me, must be the obvious If you choose to be with me, this is who you will get Many of us have it the other way round He is a husband, so he should be this way She is a wife, so she should be this way When he or she then turns out not to be that way, we get disappointed, disillusioned, and disatisfied, and then we betray!