Judas Iscariot was not a hero

May 22, 2006

Venansio Ahabwe’s article on Judas Iscariot (Why Judas Iscariot is the best Christian, The New Vision, April 18, 2006) was a classic case of religious literary sophistry.

By Mayanja Nkangi

Venansio Ahabwe’s article on Judas Iscariot (Why Judas Iscariot is the best Christian, The New Vision, April 18, 2006) was a classic case of religious literary sophistry.

God is essentially holy, and to suggest that He used deception, hypocrisy, bribery, treachery, and criminal conspiracy to achieve His end of rescuing mankind from the devil’s hold is both saddening and blasphemous.

God can never deny Himself and adopt the guile of the devil, and every sensitive Christian conscience should recoil at such a daring imputation. Judas Iscariot was never a divine agent, “an instrument of God” for securing the salvation of mankind, as Ahabwe insists.

God never arranged the mortal events of Calvary to savage His son Jesus so that He could then claim the honour of redeeming man by divine grace. This is not the God Christians serve.

Right from the Garden of Eden, after Satan had adulterated the hitherto innocent people of God, Adam and Eve, the battle lines were firmly drawn for the control of the eternal destiny of mankind (Genesis 3:15). God would never compromise with evil and the battle would be fought to the end, with the devil being finally thrown into the lake of burning sulphur, and the devil knows it (Revelations 20:10). Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8) and His father could not adopt the devil’s strategies to accomplish something so noble and righteous as the salvation of His people. The father would not run with the hares (the murdered Jesus) and hunt with the hounds (Christ’s enemies).

Judas was the devil’s agent. Indeed Jesus recognised Judas as being the “devil” he was (John 6:70), but you need to know how to form a Cabinet to realise why Jesus nevertheless chose Judas as one of His disciples: you keep your implacable enemy at close quarters for effective surveillance.

But Ahabwe credits Judas with heroism (he is the “best Christian” because he secured the arrest and eventual death of our Lord). Yet Judas was simply a despicable conspirator and traitor, and no amount of belated archeological rehabilitation can render him heroic.

He was a greedy deserter, if you will, who would shudder at the thought of anyone showering him with accolades for bravery. Ahabwe’s generosity is simply irrepressible. Deserters do not get the ‘honours of the Nile’ or victory crosses for valour.

Thus to acclaim Judas Iscariot as having been an “instrument” of God’s will in the gruesome murder of Jesus, uncommissioned as he was, is to practically beatify him for sainthood. Surely, Christians have more deserving candidates!

Fortunately Judas appraised himself more realistically. He tried himself by ‘court martial’ and sentenced himself to death by hanging (Matthew 27:4-5), lamenting that “I have sinned in betraying innocent blood” (Mathew 27:4). Yet, astonishingly, Ahabwe exonerates him, arguing that “Judas personally had NOTHING to do to prevent” Christ’s death because it was “voluntary.” But then if the question ‘to die or not to die’ was beyond Judas’ control, where does his heroism lie? A hero must take deliberate and determinate steps to cause an event. If Judas was indeed “mistaken” about betraying his master, as Ahabwe concedes, is his heroism not fortuitous? What have the Christians to exalt him for? Absolutely nothing!

Ahabwe, like Julius Caesar’s Mark Anthony, should bury Iscariot’s memory and not praise him. What Judas needs is Christian charity and not universal acclamation. So for Ahabwe to maintain that Judas was “more of a hero than a villain” is both to misunderstand the man and to devalue the redemptive act of Christ’s sacrificial death at Calvary. I am NOT judging Judas at all, but the halo of heroism is most inappropriate.

The writer is a practising Christian

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