Matthew 26:25

25. Master, is it I? After Jesus gave Judas the sop, which was the sign of guilt, then Judas, as out of due season, and quite mechanically, repeats the question. Thou hast said This is an affirmative answer, and identifies the traitor to himself. The gradual exposure is brought to the final point.

He is the man. And John tells us that the traitor forthwith arose and went out into the congenial darkness of surrounding night.

Ingenious men have in modern times exerted their skill in framing apologies for Judas, and discovering innocent motives in his case. He might, forsooth, have expected that our Lord would deliver himself by miracle. He might have purposed to compel our Lord to declare himself openly as king of the Jews, and set up his government. Very plainly this is not the view of the Saviour or the evangelists. Reserved as the sacred writers are in declaring the character of the various men whose acts they describe, they speak very plainly of Judas. Whatever his previous character was, in process of time he was “ a devil,” “a thief, and carried the bag.” A hypocrite in feigning care for the poor, he hastened, under the immediate impulse of resentment for a trifling offence, to join the Saviour’s enemies. But impetuous passion so blended with cold calculation that he gratified revenge and avarice together. He seems not to have calculated upon our Lord’s miraculous interference, or his asserting his royalty. He simply meant to obtain a price by surrendering his life to his enemies. Hence our Lord’s terrible woe upon him, and the terms of detestation with which the apostles uniformly load him. His repentance was wrung by divine compulsion from him, in order to place on record the testimony of Christ’s vilest enemy to the innocence of his character. It was not a repentance like that of Peter, restoring him to holiness and apostleship; but the repentance of the devils, by which, in the agony of remorse, they throw out their involuntary testimony for God and goodness. And the fact of this final attestation of the innocence of Jesus justifies the remark, that the truth of Christianity is not more sustained by the life of Paul than by the death of Judas.