Still in Love with Judas

So you think Judas was nothing but a traitor? Look deeper, and you will find the positive power of the disciple famous for betraying Jesus.

God can surprise you from the strangest places. One day back in 2011, I turned on the TV and there was Lady Gaga all dressed up as Mary Magdalene and still in love with Judas. This was a new take on Judas—a hard-riding bruiser of a hell’s angel on a Harley.

Now I’ve been writing about Judas—as a bad guy, a good guy, a misunderstood guy, and an essential-part-of-the-story guy—since 1994. And suddenly a pop superstar blows my socks off by supplying a link that had been missing all those years.

“Jesus is my virtue, and Judas is the demon I cling to ...” Those words might be truer than most of us might like to admit.

In the “Judas” music video, Jesus is beautiful but sad and passive; Judas is active, aggressive, and sexual. We yearn to love and comfort Jesus, but we are drawn to the lower beast that feeds our passions. Most actors will tell you that they would rather play bad guys because they are just so much more interesting.

Judas is the ultimate baddie: the one who held the disciples’ purse, the one called the thief, the one who took 30 pieces of silver in return for leading the guards to Jesus; the one who betrayed his friend and master with a kiss. Most of us have fallen for the “bad guy” (or girl) at least once in our lives—perhaps our teenage crush on the rebel pop star, perhaps the dynamic loner we thought we could heal—boy, were we wrong about that!

But if we look deeper, Judas represents our resistance to spiritual growth, to financial prosperity, and to following our truth. Oddly, he’s also the one who makes it easy for us to focus on others as an excuse not to have time to honor our own spiritual path (theft from ourselves). He’s the one who makes us think we’re not good enough to do our own life’s work and helps us negate others who are trying to do theirs. He’s the one who often keeps us poor because we’re “too spiritual” to promote our work to others.

Perceptions over Judas and money are some of the biggest obstacles that people raised in a Christian society have to face and overcome if we want to make a good living from healing, teaching, or developing a holistic business. I’ve been teaching the spiritual laws of prosperity for 30 years now, and Judas is right in there as a powerful subconscious reason why money is seen as negative, hard to ask for, or somehow not kosher. You don’t want to seem greedy, after all, aren’t you here to help people, not charge them?

Unity cofounder Charles Fillmore says this about Judas in his 1930 classic published by Unity Books, The Twelve Powers of Man:

Judas governs the life consciousness in the body, and without his wise cooperation the organism loses its essential substance and dies. Judas is selfish; greed is his “devil.” Judas governs the most subtle of the “beasts of the field”—sensation; but Judas can be redeemed. The Judas function generates the life of the body. We need life, but life must be guided in divine ways. There must be a righteous expression of life. Judas, the betrayer of Jesus, must in the end be cleansed of the devil, selfishness; having been cleansed, he will allow the life force to flow to every part of the organism. Instead of being a thief (drawing to the sex center the vital forces necessary to the substance of the whole man) Judas will become a supplier; he will give his life to every faculty. In the prevailing race consciousness Judas drains the whole man, and the body dies as a result of his selfish thievery.

I understood this in theory, but it wasn’t until I watched the Lady Gaga video that I clearly saw that negative other side of the “life force” in Judas. Her Judas is a fighter, a drinker, and a womanizer—but still horribly attractive as only the bad boy can be.

This Judas aspect, when healthy, is the part of us that forces us to step up and out into the light. The one that makes us show up in our true glory and sexuality. We need positive Judas. We need that power and animal force. And, let’s face it, without Judas, we wouldn’t have the resurrection and perhaps no Christianity at all.

Judas as Good Guy

I’m not convinced that Judas was the bad guy. Apart from his name being just a little too convenient (it means “of the tribe of Judah” or “Jew”) and the fact that the betrayal isn’t mentioned once in St. Paul’s writings, the earliest we have, there is a distinct possibility he could be an added-in character.

In the 1970s, the noncanonical Gospel of Judas surfaced relating the story of Jesus’ death from the viewpoint of Judas himself. The manuscript (which when carbon dated showed a likely date between 220–340 CE) portrays Judas’ actions as done in obedience to instructions given to him by Jesus.

For a resurrection story to stick, there had to be clear evidence that somebody died first. And there’s enough speculation nowadays about Jesus not actually dying on the cross but bolting to India or Glastonbury (or somewhere equally unlikely) to demonstrate that people are looking for the Occam’s razor in any scenario. It would make more sense for him to have been still alive than to resurrect. Of course it would, but great stories— and great myths—are not about common sense. They’re about miracles!

For anyone to believe that Jesus was resurrected, his death had to be public and undeniable. How easy would it have been for those who hated him to have stabbed him in a back street or poisoned him while he ate with friends? Then any claim of a miracle could have been pooh-poohed with ease.

The killing had to be carried out in public at a time when people were in Jerusalem to witness it, and Passover was the one festival that everyone attended.

We do have reason to believe from the gospels that Jesus knew full well what was going to happen; he tells Judas to hurry with his mission and waits in the Garden of Gethsemane when he could easily have vanished quietly back to Galilee. He also asks the disciples to stay awake and watch with him, but instead they sleep. If they had stayed awake psychologically, they might have seen that the kiss—usually considered the final insult—just may have been a genuine greeting between friends with a sad but important mission.

Pilate gives Jesus as many chances as he can to be acquitted, but Jesus won’t take them. He’s determined to fulfill his destiny. Paradidomi, the word translated in the New Testament as “betrayed,” is just as accurately translated as “handed over.” There is a distinct difference in energy between the two meanings. Paradidomi would be just as accurate if the text made it clear that Judas was under orders to do what he did.

Plenty of people apart from noncanonical gospels have suggested this. In Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1952 book and the 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, his scenario of Judas as the good guy who did Jesus’ will in handing him over was drowned out by the furore over sex and Mary Magdalene, but that’s the world for you!

In my first novel, The Book of Deborah, published in 1997 by Little, Brown and Company, I made my heroine Jesus’ cousin and Judas’ wife, someone who loved Judas deeply and understood his motivation. But I tried to change the plot I had been given in an extraordinary cosmic download I received at Qumran in Israel because it made Judas the good guy and because I thought the book already seemed controversial enough as it was. The first time I did that, the file didn’t save; the second time, the floppy disk didn’t save either. The third time, my computer got disk boot failure. I was able to retrieve all my writing apart from those chapters. I got the message.

Betrayal of Self

In Jewish mysticism, Jesus represents the neshamah, the soul; Judas, as the life-force, is the nefesh, the animal soul that can support or corrupt the neshamah according to its level of health. So Judas the good guy or Judas the bad guy are equally important.

The negative-animal Judas is the inner voice that says, “You’re right and the others are wrong.” He’s the “It wasn’t my fault; they made me do it.” He’s the “another drink won’t hurt.” He’s also the hit of going to workshop after workshop and reading book after book without actually applying any of the principles so you live life on a roller coaster of hope and despair. He is very clever, very subtle, and he’s every betrayal of self there is. Judas did not betray Jesus; Jesus chose to die and to resurrect. Judas betrayed himself—whichever scenario you follow.

And that’s the greatest truth Judas can teach us. No one betrays you except yourself. No matter what the other does to us, it is our acceptance of their blame or accusation that hurts us. It’s our choice whether we apply the self-discipline to become the person we were truly meant to be or run with the excuses and betray our soul.

As the Gospel of Thomas says: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

This article appeared in Unity Magazine® and was a finalist and received a 2024 Folio: Eddie honorable mention.