A Good Friday Reminder of Why Judas Must Be Remembered

And a Good Day to Teach Our Young What Judas Learned

An unwittingly prophetic 2017 Central Park production of Julius Caesar had a Trump figure play the Julius Caesar role.

On April 13, 2003, Roy Williams, coach of Kansas University’s consistently successful basketball team, shocked the campus. He announced that he was leaving KU to coach at the University of North Carolina, his alma mater. The announcement so upset the students that they took to wearing T-Shirts that read “Benedict Williams.”

That day my daughter had some friends over. These were the smart kids, all seniors at good high schools. When the story of the Williams resignation popped up on the local TV news, one fellow asked out loud about the “Benedict Williams stuff.” None of his friends got it. I asked them if they knew who Benedict Arnold was. No one knew.

At a business luncheon a few days later, I told this story to my table mates. In telling it, I reiterated the thesis of Allan Bloom’s surprise bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom had argued that without commonly recognized cultural guideposts we lose the ability to share information with the young. “If they don’t who Benedict Arnold is,” I asked, “who do we point to as a universally accepted example of a traitor?”

“Judas,” said one fellow. Yes, of course. We all seemed to agree except for one confused looking young woman. Asked she in all innocence, “Who’s Judas?” If I did not know it beforehand, I knew it then—the culture was in trouble. Where to begin?

Matthew 27:5 is as good a place as any. The action described takes place on the first Good Friday in the hours before Jesus was crucified. The night prior, in exchange for 30 pieces of silver, Judas led Jesus’s enemies to the place where Jesus had been praying. There, they took Him prisoner.

The following day, upon seeing that Jesus was condemned to death, Judas “was seized with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders.”

“I have sinned,” he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.” The priests and elders could not have cared less. Said they to Judas, “What is that to us?” Disgusted with them and himself, “Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.”

In the early 14th century, Italian writer Dante Allighieri confirmed for his readers what their forebears had understood for the last 1300 years: there was no sin greater than betrayal. Dante reserved the 9th circle—the deepest and most frightening in his Inferno—for traitors. Judas’s sin was judged so grave that one of the 9th Circle’s four zones, Judecca, was named in his dishonor.

Of Judas’s circle mates, only one name still carries cultural resonance, Brutus, and his name has lost impact with the disappearance of Shakespeare from too many school curricula. Were you to ask a young liberal today for an example of a traitor, you would have to begin by explaining what a traitor is, and you would have no common source to pull from.

Still, what better a day to at least make that attempt. Traitors, you might explain, are, like Judas, generally prodded by self-interest but almost inevitably “seized by remorse” after the fact. Even if others are willing to forgive the treachery, the greater the betrayal, the more the remorse. The betrayal that ends in the death of the one betrayed—from Jesus Christ to Julius Caesar to the unnamed baby in a woman’s womb—will haunt the traitor for eternity. Just ask.