Walking With Christ

Luke 15: Lost sheep, lost coin, and the prodigal son
Matthew 5:44: Love your enemies.
Matthew 6:24: You can’t serve two masters.
Matthew 23:27-28: Woe to hypocrites.
John 13:5: Washing the feet of the disciples.
Matthew 26:24-25: A very blunt warning to the one who would betray Jesus.
John 13:26-27: The bread given at the last supper.
John 17:12: Prayer for the remaining disciples.

To save some room I’m not including the actual verses today.

Forgiveness can be such a hard thing. When you don’t know someone, they can’t hurt you in the same way that people close to you can. It’s easy to forgive and forget even the worst in people you don’t know and who don’t know you. When you get closer to someone, that changes. The shared experiences we have as we do life together changes the dynamics of our relationships.

The verses above give some of the most important lessons from the ministry of Jesus and His time on earth. His only reason to come to earth was to make a way for the lost and broken to find eternal peace and happiness through an everlasting relationship with Him that included forgiveness, mercy, and grace because of the love God has for the world. By the act of being born into this world each of us is, at once, the lost sheep, lost coin, and prodigal child. By our very sin nature that we inherited from Adam, we are born an enemy to God (forgive the broad nature here since by relation to Adam we share in the original sin and until we actively choose to reject that sin we, in essence, reject God thus becoming an enemy), are slaves to our nature (loving anything above God such as money in this specific verse), and we are hypocrites (claiming to be good when only God is good).

The last four verses narrow down the story to a single person, Judas Iscariot, who followed Jesus closely and was called a disciple and even became an apostle. Judas witnessed the miracles and was treated the same as the rest of the crew. He was given the same power and authority as the others. Jesus knew that it would be Judas who would betray Him even before Judas joined the band. Jesus still treated him with the same love and respect that everyone else got. Jesus did try to warn Judas about what was coming. Jesus saw what was in Judas’ heart. He still washed his feet. Jesus knew that the actions of Judas were a part of the events that had to take place, but He still honored him by giving him a piece of bread at the last supper. This act was typically meant to honor the person who received the bread. Jesus was holding out the olive branch one last time.

Jesus has accepted His role in the events taking place long before He was even born of this earth. Jesus came to this earth for that very reason. Yet, He still tried to stop Judas. He still tried to offer him ways out. He did everything He could short of grabbing him and shaking him until his teeth rattled while shouting “DEMON, BE GONE!”.

Jesus knew that someone had to betray Him. Someone had to turn Him in to the authorities so that His life could be used as the sacrifice it was meant to be. Someone was going to be in the role that Judas filled. Jesus could have let some random person who He had never actually interacted with on earth take that role. That would have cheapened the events. If the betrayal had been just a random stranger then the story would have lost the intimacy of true betrayal. A parallel that many people miss that explains why it had to be someone close to Jesus, was the fall of Lucifer.

Lucifer was a close and favored angel who turned against God for selfish reasons that closely mirror the betrayal by Judas. Like Judas, there is room for repentance until the gates of hell are shut on judgement day. Judas could have repented and turned back to God even after the brutal betrayal. There is no evidence that he did and Jesus confirmed that Judas was lost in John 17:12 when He said, “not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction”. Even though Jesus knew what the result would be, He still offered forgiveness, mercy, and grace to Judas.

That is how we handle betrayal. That is how we are to deal with our enemies. That is how we are to treat each other. We constantly offer the love and grace that God has shown to each and every one of us even while we were still enemies of the cross. He loved us to His own death on the cross even while we were still slaves to our sin. He still loves those who He knows will never accept His gift.