Tuesday, April 15
“Master, who is it?”
As someone whose name, Thomas, means “twin”—and who accordingly looks in paschal trepidation not only to the heartbreak of the Passion, but also to being liturgically called out alongside Doubting Thomas (Jn 20:19–31) a week later (what I refer to as Self-Conscious Sunday)—I’ve always enjoyed a good scriptural foil. Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Mary and Martha, the rich man and Lazarus, perhaps even Mary and Elizabeth, or Peter and Paul. Turning to today’s gospel, I hope you can forgive in turn my (birthright) suspicion of our undue fascination with Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, rather than Peter’s triple denial of Jesus, with which it is here narratively twinned.
Why this pairing? What would it look like to read Judas and Peter, black sheep and poster child of the disciples, as inextricable halves of a shared paschal meditation? And what happens when we don’t?
It is noteworthy that we find the disciples “at a loss” to identify Jesus’s betrayer (Jn 13:22).
There is no such consensus that Judas is the frontrunner. If anything, we might ask what motivates Peter’s desire for a definite answer; and why instead of asking directly, he uses the beloved disciple as an intermediary. Unresolved tension also likely remains since Jesus’s first mention of an unnamed devil among the twelve (Jn 6:70) following the Bread of Life discourse (Jn 6:22–59). Does Peter worry he is likely to betray Jesus when the time comes? That he is all messianic insight (Mt 16:16) and no kenosis; all faith and no love? At his best, he avidly desires to lay down his life for Jesus (Jn 13:37); but it would not be the first time his over-confidence led him to get (as it were) cold feet (Mt 14:30).
We might further question Peter’s exegetical privilege. Both Judas and Peter betray Jesus in the darkness (Lk 13:30, 22:55)—even if the latter, in cozying up to a fire, seeks comfort in the wrong light of the world in order to avoid it; both almost immediately begin to repent, Judas in deep regret (Mt 27:3–4) and Peter in bitter weeping (Lk 22:62); and at least initially, all of the disciples were sought out by Satan to be sifted “as wheat” (Lk 22:31–32). Yet Judas was chosen.
Regardless of whether Judas died by suicide (Mt 27:5) or by accident (Acts 1:18), we can fruitfully ask: is Judas somehow more worthy than Peter of the Christian tradition’s censure, given that the devil entered the former and not the latter before their respective betrayals?
Indeed, what follows when we tell ourselves that Judas deserved to be demonically possessed for his alleged greed, disloyalty, or otherwise? Why does it not haunt us instead that Peter’s ultimate forgiveness (Jn 21:15–17) was a gift, and undeserved?
The interpretive danger here, perhaps, when we don’t twin Peter’s presumption with Judas’s despair of following Christ, is that whenever we enshrine Judas as paradigmatic sinner, suicide, devil, and damned, we take Peter’s place and deny Christ anew. Peter as head of the Church first betrayed Christ by refusing to acknowledge Him before others; will we continue to betray Christ by refusing to recognize not only Judas as our kin, but also all those who despair, all those entrapped in self-harm, all those who are dehumanized today?
In Peter denying Christ (the third denial being all the more conscious and stubborn for occurring “an hour later,” Lk 22:59), we might say that he lies not only to others but ultimately to himself.
He deceives himself of being incapable of betraying his friends; a shocking confidence, given that Jesus explicitly warns him that he will do precisely that (Jn 13:38). In this sense, it is one of the painful paradoxes of being a Catholic Christian that Christ built his apostolic church upon a man who is memorialized for gaslighting strangers and betraying loved ones when he feels threatened.
And, not least as we penitentially approach Good Friday, it is worth holding in our hearts the ways in which this institutional betrayal is all the more catastrophic for its antisemitic wake: the centuries of European Christian persecution and ghettoization of Jews, normalized theologically by Christian popes, theologians, and poets alike by imagining Judas as uniquely deserving of punishment for deicide (see Dante’s “Giudecca,” the lowest zone of the lowest circle of the Inferno, reviling Judas in the jaws of Satan as its eternal prisoner and moniker). Hold too in our hearts the no less self-blinding violence these past 18 months of horror, and bipartisan European and Catholic attempts politically to atone for one genocide with another.
This holy week, let us ask: how many times will we lie to others and to ourselves on the way to Calvary? How might we be Catholics without self-deception?
Thomas Graff is a theologian based in Cambridge, UK, whose research explores the intersections
of theology, literature, and incarceration. He enjoys running, footnotes, and conifers.