Maundy Thursday commemorates the Last Supper, and thus the institution of the Eucharist. But it also was the night of Jesus’s prayer in the Garden, and of his betrayal into the hands of the authorities by Judas. I’m sure there are number of worthy reflections, Christian and non-Christian, whether in prose or in art-works of various sorts, that attempt to capture who Judas was and why he did what he did. Feel free to share with us the ones you know.
One comes from the brilliant film Jesus of Nazareth, which posits that Judas at some point stopped believing that Jesus was the Messiah, and saw that he was no longer useful to the anti-Roman cause. It does this through a particularly powerful scene with an invented character, the politically astute scribe Zerah, available in this Judas-themed montage from the film someone put together, about 4 minutes in. Jesus of Nazareth also posits that Judas didn’t know that the authorities intended to kill Jesus if he betrayed him, an idea I don’t see supported by evidence from the gospels, and don’t recall being supported by any Christian tradition. It seems the film wanted to provide us with a Judas more like a modern betrayer, someone plagued by doubts and too politics-focused, but nonetheless averse to murder, and thus not to explore Judas’s deeper darkness of heart that was fully prepared, and indeed wanted, to see Jesus die.
So a far better representation of the matter comes from this Russian painter, Nikolai Ge, 1866, The Last Supper. A painting that awards careful study.
I’m not exactly clear why certain critics at the time criticized it as too beholden to a Renan-esque ”materialist” understanding of Jesus. Better to focus on the painting itself. Here’s a brief reflection.