Read Matthew 26:14–16
ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Even my best friend, the one I trusted completely, the one who shared my food, has turned against me.” (Psalm 41:9 NLT)
Altars reveal what we worship. Some are obvious—raised platforms of stone and flame. Others are quieter, constructed in systems, reputations, loyalties, and assumptions. Lent is a season of holy examination. It calls us to look closely at what we have built, what we defend, and what we trust. In this series, we conduct an audit—not of budgets or buildings, but of allegiances. Lent strips away every false altar until only Christ remains.
Part 16: The Altar of Betrayal. Not all decisions are made out in the open. Some take shape quietly, in conversations that never make the record, in tensions that linger just beneath the surface. By the time something finally happens, the conditions have already been set.
Holy Week is full of those moments. Judas’ act of betrayal is one of them—and it changes everything.
We know this story, or at least we think we do…
Judas becomes the easy answer—the betrayer, the villain, the one who sold Jesus for silver. But the Gospels do not begin there, and if we begin there, we have already stepped away from what the text is actually doing. “Judas” is not a strange or cursed name. It is Judah, a common name, a shared identity. Over time, the Church has taken that name and turned it into a symbol of ultimate betrayal. Not just a person remembered, but a category created—a warning label. That move is not neutral. It creates distance. It allows us to point and say, “That is not us,” without ever asking how close the story actually comes.
The Gospels do not present a group of disciples who all understood Jesus while one stood apart. They show a community wrestling, misunderstanding, arguing, and resisting. They debated who would be greatest. They pushed back when Jesus spoke of suffering. They followed, yes, but not always with clarity and not always with courage. Judas is not introduced as the outsider. Judas is one of them.
And then the text tells us something both simple and unsettling. Judas went to the religious leaders. No summons. No recorded coercion. No dramatic recruitment. He went. And yet, the deeper question remains: how did he know where to go? By this point, the Gospels are clear that the leadership had already begun considering how to remove Jesus. Not publicly, not recklessly, but deliberately and quietly. The system was already in motion.
So we hold both truths at once: Judas went to them, and the system was already waiting to receive him.
No one had to explicitly tell Judas. He already knew exactly where to go.
This is how power often works. It does not always issue commands; it creates conditions. It signals what will be rewarded and makes certain actions thinkable long before they are taken. It maintains distance while leaving the door open.Someone close enough to see both sides—close enough to feel the tension—steps through it.
One person crosses the threshold. And it only takes one.
From that moment, everything begins to move. Access is granted. Timing is set. The arrest becomes possible. Once the machinery turns, others are caught in its wake. Peter, who swore loyalty, denies. The others scatter. Leaders justify. Authorities comply. The crowd follows. The chain of unintended consequences unfolds, pulling even the strongest voices into actions they never imagined they would take.
Judas is not the whole problem. Judas is the turning point.
Because it is easier to isolate betrayal in one person than to recognize the conditions that made it possible. It is easier to name a villain than to examine the system. It is easier to condemn Judas than to ask how often we have participated in quieter versions of the same thing. Systems still reward what they will not openly request. Truth still becomes inconvenient. Insiders still know exactly where to go when following Christ begins to cost too much.
We do not need silver. We only need a moment where allegiance becomes negotiable.
And here is the hardest truth of all. By turning Judas into a caricature, we have not protected the story—we have distorted it. We have made betrayal something distant, something obvious, something we would never do. In doing so, we have avoided seeing how close it actually is.
Judas betrayed Jesus.
But when we reduce him to less than human, when we refuse to see ourselves in the same circle, and when we pretend we would have stood firm while others faltered, we betray them both.
THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Betrayal begins long before the act—when following Christ becomes something we are willing to negotiate.PRAYER
God, search us where we are most certain of ourselves. Reveal where our allegiance has become conditional, where comfort has replaced courage, and where we have chosen distance over truth. Give us the grace to remain faithful when it costs us, and the honesty to see ourselves clearly in the story. Amen.
]Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).
