ALAS FOR THE MAN WHO BETRAYS THE SON OF MAN

Wednesday, Holy Week/2024

Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP

Theme: Alas for the Man who betrays the Son of Man

We remain a little while on the case of Judas and the loss of souls to sin and evil. The agony of our Lord over the possible loss of one of his apostles is again put before us by the Church. The gospel is from Matthew’s account. It supplies extra information to what John the Evangelist presented yesterday about Judas being the treasurer of the apostolic group. According to the gospel, Judas bargained for a price to deliver the Lord to those who sought his life. He was well informed on the intention of the chief priests and the religious leaders to kill Jesus Christ. He went out to cash out on that opportunity. John called him a thief and revealed that he takes money from the purse to help himself. These descriptions of the person of Judas give us a window to look into his mindset. We see a personality that is self-centred and selfish. We understand a person always motivated by self-interest and eager to profit from any situation and opportunity, not minding who suffers loss. To this Judas, as described, God gave the vocation to be an apostle. Just like every one of us, we were not perfect when God called us to follow Christ; we were sinners through and through. But God still called us to repentance in Christ. The problem was not that Judas was such a person when Jesus called him but that he remained the same after staying with Jesus Christ for three years. Would the same be said of us? It is easy to fall asleep in sin.

The word of God is most effective for personal transformation, for it is Spirit and life. Judas did not hear the word of God from any ordinary person but from Jesus Christ, the Eternal Word of God himself in human nature. The failure was not from the word of God that is ever active and operative, sharper than a two-edged sword, but from the nonreceptivity of Judas, who had an apostolic vocation. He failed to cooperate with the grace of being an apostle of the Lord. “The Lord has given me a disciple’s tongue. So that I may know how to reply to the wearied he provides me with speech. Each morning he wakes me to hear, to listen like a disciple. The Lord has opened my ear.” It is one thing to receive a disciple’s tongue and another to put it to use in preaching the Good News to the poor and wearied. It is one thing to receive the gift of speech and another to speak the word of God. To preach the word of God, we must cooperate with the Holy Spirit; we must wake up when he wakes us to hear what the Spirit is saying and to listen to the word of God. He opens our ears, but we must be attentive to the Lord. Even until the last hour, Judas was not paying attention to what the Lord was saying to his apostles. His desire for money closed his ears and blinded his eyes that he could not hear or see. “The Son of Man is going to his fate, as the scriptures say he will, but alas for that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! Better for that man if he had never been born!” This obduracy in sin is a common sickness affecting us. Once we have habituated ourselves to a sinful attitude and rationalized it, it is difficult to evaluate our sinful state objectively. Hence, we betray our Lord many times in pursuit of self-interest. 

Let us pray: Grant us, Lord, the grace to wake up from our sinful slumber and submit to the spiritual training that will make us true disciples of your Son.