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[Music] The Trial of Judas Iscariot by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman, Part 2, The Defense. [Music] Let us give reverent attention to the reading of God's Word, as it is recorded in the Gospel according to Matthew, the 27th chapter, beginning the reading at the verse numbered 3.

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When Judas the traitor saw that Jesus had been condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the 30 silver pieces to the chief priests and elders. "I have sinned," he said. "I have brought an innocent man to his death." But they said, "What is that to us? See to that yourself." So he threw the money down in the temple and left them, and went and hanged himself.

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Taking up the money, the chief priests argued, "This cannot be put into the temple fund. It is blood money." So after conferring, they used it to buy the potter's field as a burial place for foreigners. This explains the name "Blood Acre," by which that field has been known ever since. And in this way, fulfillment was given to the prophetic utterance of Jeremiah.

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"They took the 30 silver pieces, the price set on a man's head (for that was his price among the Israelites) and gave the money for the potter's field, as the Lord directed me." May God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. If it please the Court, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is my responsibility tonight to speak in defense of Judas Iscariot.

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And I will confess to you at the very outset that I feel considerably disadvantaged. This is not because of the presentation of the attorney for the prosecution last week. It is not because of the evidence which he marshaled in his argument. Most of that evidence was circumstantial, as I shall demonstrate in a few minutes.

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Now, I hesitate to come before you with this matter, not because I fear your judgment, but because I fear your prejudgment. Because there is in me a deep anxiety that you come to try Judas with your minds already made up. That you are, in fact, a prejudiced jury. If this is true of you, you are in no way unique.

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It has been true of men for almost 2,000 years. It seems we all want somebody to look down upon, and Judas, therefore, receives the scorn of all of us. Men have even attacked his infancy. If you study the ancient writings of Arabia, you will find a book called "The Arabic Gospel of the Infancy,"

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and in that gospel you will come across the story of Jesus as a child meeting Judas as a child. And the suggestion of the story is that even when they were children, Judas attacked Jesus, and Jesus then delivered a demon from Judas, and the demon ran off in the form of a large black dog. It's a fantastic story, of course.

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But it demonstrates how men have built within themselves such a feeling toward Judas that they attack even the years of his childhood. And not only that, but his death. From the beginning of his life until the end, they exaggerate the awfulness of it. The scriptures tell us that Judas hanged himself.

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That is all they say of his death. Yet there are some writers in the early history of the Church, papists and apollinarius who followed him, who suggest that Judas died because of some hideous disease which caused him to swell up until he was wider than a wagon, until his head was so swollen with edema that his eyes could not be found.

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They argue that his body was filled with worms, that he died in a great agony, and that after his death, the stench of his dying was so intense that neither animals nor men would go there for years and years. So men have tried to heap scorn upon Judas. They have, like Dante, put him in the deepest hell and in the deepest part of that deepest hell.

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And I fear, lest you come here tonight with that same conclusion already yours. There was an episode during the days of the Civil War. It immediately followed the Battle of Bull Run. General B was mortally wounded in that battle and was taken to a small cabin near the battlefield where he was dying.

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As he lay dying, he kept saying to his aides and the soldiers about him, "Find Imboden. Find Imboden." The general had heard that another officer, Imboden, had believed that General B had betrayed him. Imboden somehow got the impression that B had withdrawn at a crucial time, leaving him, Imboden, to be caught and to be killed. And General B had not done that, and even as he was dying, there was in him an intense sense of urgency that Imboden learned the truth,

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that B not die having Imboden think him a traitor. And so his words were again and again, "Find Imboden. Find Imboden." And the soldiers went out and sought him everywhere and at last found him. And when they found him, they discovered that Imboden had already learned the truth,

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that he in fact no longer thought that B had betrayed him. But they told him that B did not know that, and so he hurried to the cabin. And he rushed into the cabin and he took the hands of the old general and he said, "I am here and I know it is true that you did not betray me."

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But it was too late. General B was already dead. And he died believing that others thought him a traitor. Well, Judas is gone. There is no word which we can utter here tonight which he will hear. And he died believing that all men would look upon him as traitor.

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But I rejoice that we are at least reopening the evidence tonight. For I come before you to argue that Judas was not traitor, but that he in fact sought to serve Jesus more earnestly than any of the twelve disciples. And I would ask you as you consider him in the dock to remember these words of Jesus,

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"As you judge, so you yourselves will be judged." I begin the defense then here. Judas was the only one of the twelve disciples who was not a Galilean. He was from Kiriath. He was a Judean.

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And there was no love lost between the Galileans and the Judeans. The Galileans were prejudiced against the Judeans. The Judeans were prejudiced against the Galileans. And in the company of the twelve, the score was 11 to 1.

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I would suggest then that from the very outset, Judas understood himself to be somewhat set apart. He was not one with the others. In the Gospel according to Mark, the 14th chapter and the 10th verse, there is a very interesting phrase. In the Greek it reads, "Hohiaston dodeca."

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It means, if you translate it literally, "the one of the twelve." It clearly sets Judas aside from fellowship with all the rest. He is delineated. He is separated. He is set apart. And you know when one person is separated from a group, when one person is isolated,

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there will inevitably be a kind of bitterness, a kind of envy, a kind of disturbance of spirit, that arises not only within the one who is separated, but also amongst those who have pushed him aside. You understand this, for we do the same thing in our own day. We look at ourselves and our kind as a special edition of the human story.

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And we separate others who are not exactly as we would have them be. We live in neighborhoods that are carefully segregated. We are parts of clubs, the membership of which carbon copies ourselves. Even our congregations are carefully segregated so that only those are part of them whom we would have with us.

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And those who are different, we set aside. And when we set them aside, they resent it. And not only do they resent it, but they begin to shoot back at us, to say to us they don't care to be a part of us.

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So there grows within us a tension. Prejudice, you see, not only affects and inflicts pain upon those who are set aside, it also inflicts pain, indirectly but nonetheless really, on those who are themselves prejudiced. Henri Fabre, the great French entomologist, tells about an insect called a philanthos,

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which is a bee-eating wasp. Now, the manner in which this wasp kills a bee is quite horrible. It literally crushes the bee to death, and as it crushes the bee, the bee begins to exude through its mouth the honey which it has previously taken,

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and the wasp eats the honey from the bee's mouth even as it crushes the life out of the bee. And Fabre goes on to tell of one instance in which, while a killer wasp was so strangling and eating the honey from a bee, suddenly a praying mantis descended upon the wasp and grasped the wasp in its two saw claws and began to tear apart the stomach of the wasp.

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And even as the mantis attacked the wasp, the wasp continued to crush to death the bee and to suck its honey. In other words, at the very moment when it was killing another, it was itself being killed. And that's what prejudice does. At the very moment when we attack in narrowness and bitterness another, we are tearing ourselves apart.

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I give you an illustration from our own history. There was a man in Germany named Karl Heinrich. He grew up in the city of Trier. His parents were Jews, but they were converted to Christianity, and he was converted with them.

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Karl Heinrich wrote some beautiful peons of praise to Christ, some marvelous expressions of faith, some particularly sophisticated interpretations of the gospel according to John. He went to the university and earned his Ph.D. degree. He also fell in love with a girl, and wanting to marry her, immediately upon leaving the university, he sought work.

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He was employed by a Jewish newspaper editor named Moses Hess. Moses Hess had a newspaper in the city of Cologne. Now, these were very good days for Moses Hess. You see, he too was Jewish.

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And when Cologne was controlled by the Germans, he was regularly harassed and irritated by the Germans who looked down on him because he was a Jew. But at this particular time, the French had taken over that area. And the French had no prejudice against the Jews, at least no conspicuous prejudice,

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and so Moses Hess was freer than he had ever been in all of his life. And this newspaper, and his desire to hire this young Karl Heinrich to be the editor of it, was an expression of his joy and of the new breath of freedom which was his. But Karl Heinrich had not been with the newspaper very long.

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When the Germans returned in the form of Prussians and took over the area again, and once again Moses Hess and his newspaper began to feel the sting of prejudice. Now, at this same time, Karl Heinrich was sent to the parliament on one occasion to hear a debate which was occurring there.

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And this debate disgusted him. It was the rich and powerful people of the day deciding what punishments they would inflict upon the poor who, because they had no wood or coal with which to warm themselves, had been stealing rotten, fallen wood from nearby forests.

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And Karl Heinrich, hearing the rich discovering how they would punish the poor because the poor were simply laboring to keep themselves and their children warm, rose up in a fury. And Karl Heinrich went out and wrote editorials for that paper which inflamed all the populace.

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This prejudice against the poor, he could not stand and he railed against it so intensely that within six months the newspaper was closed down, never to open again. And Karl Heinrich, so inflamed by the prejudice against this Jewish editor, coming himself out of a Jewish background and feeling that same prejudice directed at himself,

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and feeling also this prejudice against the poor, Karl Heinrich went on to devote his entire life to upsetting everything about the system of that day that he could possibly upset. He gave himself with an intense and unyielding passion to bringing down the society of that time.

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You've heard of Karl Heinrich. You, of course, have not heard of him by that name. You've heard of him by his full name, Karl Heinrich Marx. Karl Marx, the philosophical father of atheistic totalitarian communism.

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It wreaks its ugly vengeance throughout the world today, but it grew in the heart and the mind of a man because he encountered prejudice. You see, prejudice not only hurts those who are destroyed, but it also hurts those who are destroying. And that's what happened in the company of the Twelve.

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Judas felt himself separated and apart, and it wounded him. And in the end, it wounded all of the disciples terribly. Finding himself separated, he decided that he would do his utmost to surpass them, and he succeeded. Very soon he was made the treasurer of the group.

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He earned a position of prominence in the fellowship. But from the very beginning, things were out of joint. He was separate from them in everything but one thing. He did agree with them, as with all Jews of the day, on what the Messiah would be like.

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The Jew of that time understood the Messiah to be a military hero, one who would come in great power and might, one who would come and restore Israel to its place of prominence in the world, one who would be a warrior, who would drive the Romans out,

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who would gather the Jews who were dispersed throughout the world to their homeland again, who would make Jerusalem the capital of all the world and require all men to bow down before the Jewish people. To the Jews of that day, the Messiah was a military, a materialist hero.

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Now, Jesus consistently explained to his disciples that he was not that kind of Messiah. He explained that he would go to the cross, but they rejected this explanation. Peter went so far as to deny that he could do this, and when he denied it, Jesus turned and looked at him and said,

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"Get thee behind thee, Satan!" Again and again, he presented to these men the kind of Messiah he would be, a Messiah whose only throne was a rude cross. But the twelve could never bring themselves to believe that.

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They were knee-deep in their own ideas, just like we are. For two thousand years, people have been trying to polish the diamond Jesus is so that he shines in the way they want him to shine,

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cutting off every rough corner, making sure that the Savior fits our particular landscape. You know, it's curious. A missionary will say that it's extremely difficult to get inside the mind

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and understand the mind of the people to whom you go as a missionary. Or a psychiatrist will testify to the fact that it's very difficult to get inside the mind of the patient, even when the patient wants you to get inside his mind. But in spite of these difficulties, men somehow seem to think

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that they can get inside the mind of Jesus very easily, understand his opinion about everything, announce that opinion, and, strange to say, come up with a Savior who suits their particular desires to the letter.

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Indeed, I would go so far as to say that most men's ideas about Jesus do not so much explain Jesus as they do the men who have manufactured the ideas. Well, this is exactly what the twelve disciples did. They tried to make Jesus into the kind of Messiah they wanted.

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Judas did this. They all did this. But Judas was the disciple who, because he was separated, because he felt discriminated against, was always determined to try harder. So if Jesus was going to be a military Messiah, as Judas understood him to be,

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he would try harder to win a great victory for his conquering Christ. And what better place for such a victory than Jerusalem? So when Jesus and the disciples came to Jerusalem, Judas set himself to determining how could he bring about

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some confrontation between Jesus and the Jewish leaders, which Jesus would win and thus begin his campaign to claim the whole world for God. It had to be some confrontation that would be occurring under very special circumstances.

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Judas knew that he could not get the Romans interested. They looked upon Jesus as some backwoods Messiah. It had to be something which would involve the Jews, and it could not bring the Jews and Jesus face to face right in the center of the city

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because Jesus had too many friends. The Jews would never dare attack him under those circumstances. No, something had to be arranged whereby in a private place, preferably by night when no one would be able to see it,

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that the Jews would come feeling quite safe. And there they would attack Jesus, and Jesus would repulse them and begin his march to victory. How could he get the Jews to come to a place where those circumstances would prevail?

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And then the idea came. A mock betrayal. He would pretend to betray Jesus. He would, as it were, lead the Jews into a trap.

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And of course he would be the one to do it because he tried harder. Every one of the exhibits advanced by the attorney for the defense tonight will be the same as those advanced by the attorney for the prosecution last week. But I would submit that the attorney last week did not interpret these exhibits properly.

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For example, he brought before you the 30 pieces of silver and said that Judas was greedy. But I would ask you, is it not true that Judas returned the money? He did not keep it.

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If Judas was greedy, why did he spend three years traveling with the disciples in relative poverty? Why did he join the Twelve in the first place if his only goal was money? Why would they have made him the treasurer of the group

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if he was dishonest insofar as money was concerned? Why didn't he barter with the Jews when they offered him 30 pieces of silver? Why did he accept their very first offer?

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Why didn't he try to jack up the price? Why, because the money was only a dodge. It was only being used by him to convince them of the authenticity of his treason. The money was never important to Judas.

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That's why when the whole episode was over, he threw it away and never touched it again. Look at the sop, the sop of honor, which was given by Jesus to Judas there at the Passover feast.

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Why did Judas do what he did in the face of receiving this sop of honor? That was the question put last week. I will answer that question. Judas understood that Jesus always knew what was going on

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in the minds of his disciples. Therefore, Judas thought that Jesus knew exactly what he was planning to do. And when Judas came to the feast and was given the chief seat, he understood this to be Jesus saying to him,

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"You're doing a very good job." And when Judas received the sop of honor from the hand of Jesus, this convinced him all the more that he was doing exactly what Jesus wanted him to do.

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And when Jesus spoke of his betrayal and deliberately omitted the name of Judas, he understood this to be part of the plot. And when Jesus leaned over to him and said, "Go and what you are to do, do quickly."

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Judas understood this immediately to be an encouragement. "Go out and lead the Jews into the trap." I would respectfully remind you that it is nowhere recorded in Scripture that Judas went to Jesus and asked to sit on his right or his left hand.

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James and John did that, but you never see that kind of attempt on the part of Judas. No. Judas simply tried harder. And when at the last supper Jesus honored him,

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he understood this to be approval of what he was doing. And the fern. Last week Judas was accused of profaning the quiet beauty of Gethsemane. But that was one of the most brilliant parts of the traitor's plan.

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You see, Judas knew that Jesus and the disciples spent many evenings in Gethsemane. They knew every nook and cranny of that place. They knew every cave. They knew every tree. If they were to be fighting on that ground,

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they would be fighting on the ground which they knew the best. While the Jews were being led onto territory with which they were in no way familiar. If Judas could bring the Jews into Gethsemane, he would be bringing them into what he understood to be a trap

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where his military messiah and the assembled disciples would easily be able to defeat them. And the kiss? Well, the kiss was simply Judas going up to Jesus and saying to him, "Master, my mission is accomplished."

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When they got to the garden, the scriptures say, "Judas saw Jesus come forth alone." And he understood by that. Jesus was ready. The disciples were all hidden behind bushes and rocks,

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ready to descend upon the Jews as soon as the master gave the word. So he kisses Jesus. "Here they are, master. Work your will upon them. As of tonight, our victory begins. Hallelujah!"

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And it is recorded that when Jesus first spoke, the Jews, in awe of him, fell to the ground. And how that must have thrilled the heart of Judas. All his messiah had to do was speak and his enemies would fall over.

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But then as Judas watched, something went wrong. Jesus didn't fight. Jesus let them capture him and bind him. And when Peter drew a sword to defend him,

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Jesus told him to put the sword away. "Master, now is the time!" cried out Judas. "Here is the opportunity. Begin the victory!" And Jesus only turned and looked at him

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and permitted himself to be led away. And soon the garden was empty. The disciples had fled. Jesus was taken prisoner.

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And all that could be heard within the quiet of the place was the crying of the disciple who tried so very hard. His mistake, you see, was that he prayed a prayer that was the opposite of Jesus. Jesus prayed, "Thy will, not mine, be done."

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And Judas prayed, "My will, not thine, be done. Be the messiah that I want you to be." You know the prayer. We pray it all the time.

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And Jesus will not yield to it. He's not a plastic prince. He's not a malleable master whom we can form to be what we want him to be. I was approached by one the other day who's very much into the transcendental meditation movement.

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And this person sought to enlist my support as a Christian. They said, "Our only goal is to help people to function better." You see, as a disciple of Christ, that's not my goal. I don't want the racist to function any better.

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I don't want the pimp to function any better. I don't want the drug pusher to function any better. I don't want the price fixer to function any better. I don't believe that you can hook Jesus Christ up to any wagon that happens to come along.

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He is not interested in the success of the mafia don. He is interested in the success of the nun who is sacrificing herself in service to lepers. There was a man out in the Midwest named Jake who went into a store once and bought a cheap suit right off the rack. He took it home and he discovered that the one sleeve was too long and that it didn't fit him right in the neck.

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So he took it back. And the salesman said, "The reason that the sleeve is too long for you is that you're not holding your arm properly. If you will hold your arm like this, the coat will fit you properly." And Jake said, "Well, what about my collar?"

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He said, "Well, the reason the collar doesn't fit you right is because you're not holding your left arm properly. If you'll hold your left arm like this, then the collar will fit you right." And with those words of encouragement, Jake went out of the store walking down the street. And two of his friends across the street saw him and one of them said, "My, Jake's arthritis must be terrible."

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And the other one said, "Yes, but doesn't his suit fit him well?" Jesus, encountering someone like Jake, would say, "Stand up! Put your arm down! Rip out the seams that don't fit!"

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You see, he disturbs the little molds into which we try to fit ourselves. He won't let us get away with that. He won't let us deform ourselves so that we become less than he intends us to be. He wants the complete surrender of our wills to his, never of his to us.

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Ernest Gordon was imprisoned by the Japanese for 18 months on the River Kwai. And he tells of how the Japanese treated the prisoners like animals. They were diseased and starving. And like animals, these soldiers robbed each other, beat up each other, took advantage of each other.

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There was no camaraderie, no desire to support one another, just each did his own thing. And then, and then one of the men became captured by the will and the spirit of Jesus Christ. And he began to share this with others of that number. Until those British soldiers became Christian.

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So Christian that they sought to serve each other and they gave medicines for one another. They actually laid down their lives for one another. Please turn your cassette to the other side. [silence]

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On one occasion they were being transported on a train with some Japanese soldiers who had been wounded. And they went over to these Japanese soldiers who were being neglected and they tried to minister to them. And a British officer who had recently come to the camp yelled out to them, "Don't touch those people! Those are the ones who are keeping you here! They're swine!"

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And then it was that Ernest Gordon got up and looked at the man and said, "Have you never heard of the Good Samaritan?" And the British officer replied, "What does the Good Samaritan have to do with this situation? That's a story out of the Bible. These men are your enemies. Do not touch them."

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And Ernest Gordon, looking back at him, said, "My Lord tells me that my enemies are my neighbors." And he and the other British soldier boys set about helping the wounded. And Gordon wrote later that that night he realized what a miracle had happened in his life. Where he'd been filled with hate, now he was filled with love.

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Where he had been filled with the desire for vengeance, now he was inflamed with a great compassion. And this was because he was no longer following his will, he was seeking to follow the will of his Lord. Now let those of you who are perfectly following the will of your Lord condemn Judas, because he failed when it came to that.

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You see, the prosecuting attorney last week didn't bring to you one very important exhibit. He did not bring for you to see the noose with which he hanged himself. Has it never occurred to you that Judas vanishes immediately from the story after the act of betrayal? The Jews looked for someone to testify against Jesus.

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Why didn't they use Judas? Because Judas would not so testify. Why did he take the silver and throw it down on the ground saying, "I have sinned in that I have betrayed innocent blood"? He did it because he suddenly recognized that he'd been following his will instead of Christ's will. And so he did something which none of the other disciples were willing to do.

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Only one disciple was willing to die when Jesus died, and it was Judas. The rest, they hid in the hills. But Judas offered his life even as his Lord died. And Origen, one of the great fathers of the faith, argues that the reason that Judas hanged himself

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was in order that he might immediately meet Christ in the world of the dead and there ask his forgiveness. So don't be too hasty as you judge Judas. He was just prejudiced like we are prejudiced, and knee-deep in his own opinions as we are knee-deep in ours. Our nationalisms, our theologies, our denominations, our thrones, our beliefs.

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To us, Jesus said what he said to Judas. "You betray me with a kiss. Bring the nails. Bring the cross. The only throne I want is on that rude tree." Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what would Jesus have said to Judas

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if he had met Judas at the very moment before Judas hanged himself? Would he have allowed him to do so? Or would he have reached out in great tenderness and compassion and forgiven? What verdict then do you render?

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There is an old legend which says that at the time of judgment there was a great party in heaven and all the redeemed of the world were there. And there was feasting and gaiety and the place was filled with the sound of happiness and music. And suddenly in the midst of the party someone discovered that Jesus wasn't there.

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And they began to look for him. And they searched from one end of heaven until the other. And at last they found him. They found Jesus at the gates of Pearl, looking down the long road which leads to heaven.

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And they said to him, "Master, why are you not at the party? For whom are you looking? Why do you wait?" And Jesus turning to them said, "Why I'm waiting for Judas." I love that story.

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For if you'll wait long enough for Judas, then he'll wait long enough for you and me. Let us pray. Our Father, we forbear to judge, for we are sinners all. We just close his eyes and draw the curtains close and all to silent, prayerful meditation go.

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And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves his peace.