I had always admired Jesus, admired his honesty and godliness and his astonishing ability to explain exactly what was meant by any passage of scripture.  His miracles, too, were things that no-one else could do.  He and I had spent many hours together, mostly as part of a group, but at times just talking by ourselves, and I had really felt that he was my friend.  Jesus had a way of looking at you that was a bit different from anyone else.  When you were alone with him, you had his complete attention and he made you feel special.  If you said something to him, with a little bit of extra meaning left unsaid, he always understood, and I always felt that he was not a person I would like to try to keep secrets from.

For one thing, Jesus often seemed to know details about people when we couldn’t see how he could have found them out.  There was the time when the collectors of the temple tax asked Peter whether Jesus paid the tax or not.  The teacher wasn’t with Peter at the time, but shortly afterwards he talked to Peter about it.  How did he know?  I don’t know how he knew those things, but it seemed very clear that he didn’t know about my appropriation of funds, because he never said a word about it.

When I first began to take some of the money from the bag for my own needs, I began to avoid Jesus a little, just in case we ended up alone and he saw through me.  But the problem didn’t arise and gradually I forgot my worries – which fed my doubts instead.  By that time, I had found a use for the extra money in a little gaming.  There are always people around who are eager to spend some time with dice, and they are often eager to keep it all secret.  Naturally, I was very careful: only ever at night, and only when we were in a city.  I wasn’t an irresponsible gambler, but at times I lost, and the debts had to be paid.

And Jesus never knew.  That strengthened my doubts a lot, but I couldn’t tell anyone.  If the teacher was really the Messiah, he wasn’t following the path we had all been taught.  Helping the poor and healing the sick were not the hallmarks of the Messiah that we had learned about at school.  Jesus did lots of teaching, but there were none of the victories against the Romans that a leader like Joshua or King David would have given us.  And I began to see that it was all a bit of a farce.  Don’t get me wrong, Jesus was an amazing man and I had been happy to throw in my lot with him, but I felt maybe I had learned all I could from him.  He was an amazing giver and teacher, but he just wasn’t up to political leadership.  I turned over options in my mind endlessly.  Could we convince him to build up a force of godly, loyal men who could overturn the Romans using his miraculous powers?  Simon still had many friends among the zealots, and many of them would leap at an opportunity to strike at the Romans with a better chance of wider success than their normal cloak and dagger actions.  Could we convince him to take on the chief priests and highlight their corruption more, encouraging the ordinary people to join a rebellion?  But as I had walked with Jesus, I had seen that whenever things started to get really big, heading in the right direction to appoint him king, Jesus seemed to work to keep things under control, as if he was afraid of what would happen.

Maybe it would be best to cut ties with him completely.  Leave him and the entire small-minded enterprise.

My mind had been in turmoil for several months by the time Jesus first openly criticised me.  It was just six days before the Passover and we were all in Bethany where Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead.  The family was giving a feast to say thank you.  Martha was serving, and for some reason, her sister Mary took it into her head to pour more than a cupful of very expensive perfume all over Jesus’ feet.  Now I ask you, what was the point of that?  I could have sold that perfume for about a year’s wages.  Just think what the local poor people could have done with some of that money!  Families fed, children clothed, leaking roofs fixed, doctors’ fees paid, and so much else besides.  Well, I just dropped a simple hint of what could have been done, and the teacher criticised me in front of everyone.  He tore strips off me, telling me to “leave her alone” and supporting that terrible waste!

I swallowed my pride and carried on as if nothing had happened, but the scene kept repeating in my mind throughout the next few days.

Then, just two days before the Passover, it all happened again.  We were in Bethany again, this time at Simon the leper’s house, and another woman came in with some very expensive ointment in a beautiful alabaster flask.  Before anyone realised what she was doing, she had broken open the flask and started to pour the perfume over Jesus’ head!  Another year’s wages gone dribbling onto the floor; more families who would be left in poverty while children starved and shivered in the cold.  It was becoming an epidemic of waste and I started to remonstrate with her, but the teacher told me off again.  In public – again.  “You can do good to the poor whenever you want,” he said, and he looked at me pointedly.

Frankly, that did it.  If he was going to leave his roots of helping the poor, then what was left?  He kept refusing to be a real Messiah and stopping the crowd from making him king, and now he refused even to help the poor.

I bit my lip and stepped back.  I was angry and felt that Jesus had humiliated me.  Looking back, I was probably too sensitive, but I always have been and Jesus must have known that.  As soon as I could do so without attracting attention, I left the room and walked back to Jerusalem.  As I walked, the words that the teacher had said earlier in the day rang in my ears: “after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified.”  Already the city was becoming busier, with visitors coming for the Passover from places all over the world, and the streets were quite crowded as I made my way to the High Priest’s palace.  Palatial it certainly was, and it wasn’t easy to get in until I mentioned that I was a disciple of Jesus.  Apparently, just that morning, the chief priests had been discussing how they could arrest Jesus.  They had largely given up the idea of being able to get him before the feast, but my appearance rekindled their hope and they were eager to welcome me in.

I don’t know who will read this record, but whoever it is, I need to say that the chief priests were not the sort of friends I would ever choose.  I find money too attractive myself, but my attachment to it is nothing compared with that of the chief priests.  For them, money is the start and end of life, the blood in their veins and the air they breathe.  I think that Jesus went a bit too far in his condemnation of money – after all, we do need money to live – but the chief priests go much too far in their embracing of it.  Being in their company made me feel ashamed and so mixed up inside.  But my anger was still carrying me on, and the money they were promising was a help too.

Betraying Jesus was always going to be an easy thing to arrange.  Jesus always seemed to assume that everyone could be trusted, although there was a funny wrinkle with that the very next day which made me wonder a little.  Still, I’m sure that the teacher didn’t suspect anything at that time.

Thirty pieces of silver were given to me and I was to come and collect a group of people at a convenient time when I could lead them to Jesus when there was no massive crowd around him, hanging on his every word as they always did.

After leaving the chief priests, I went and visited some poor families that we all knew well so that I could report that part of my activities when I went back to join the others.  That night, we slept on the Mount of Olives as we had been doing all that week, but I didn’t sleep very well, although I was sure that I was doing the right thing.

The next day the teacher wanted to have an early Passover feast with us and I was wondering if this might be the opportunity to have Jesus arrested, but here was where the funny piece of secrecy happened.  Jesus arranged a strangely secret meeting to show where the feast was to be, so I didn’t know where it was until Jesus led us there to start the feast.  Apart from that, it would have been an ideal opportunity, but it didn’t matter in the end.

There was one other disconcerting event that happened early on as we ate.  Jesus made a strange comment about being betrayed, which got my attention immediately, of course.  Everybody else was looking terribly sad, so I put on my sad face, but by this time, I had made up my mind and it wasn’t going to change.  Too many little reasons, and Jesus’ public criticism of me had been the last straw.  The money sealed the deal.  Three years of my life wasted!  I was really quite bitter about it.

Anyway, one by one each of the other disciples asked if he was the one who would betray the teacher, and finally it was my turn.  Jesus answered me with a simple, “You have said so,” and the conversation continued.  The moment had come and gone so quickly that I almost couldn’t believe it.  Did Jesus really know?  Surely he couldn’t have known – I must have misheard him.  Anyway, shortly after that I left and went to get the supporters I needed from the chief priests, but I wasn’t sure whether Jesus would still be in the upper room when we got there, so I told them there was no hurry and instead, a few hours later, led them to the familiar place on the Mount of Olives.  Jesus was arrested easily enough and all of the other disciples ran away like cowards.  Jesus even called me “Friend”, so he can’t have really known what was happening.

Back to Jerusalem in the dead of night for a secret trial.  They didn’t want me as a witness – maybe they were afraid I would show up their false witnesses, but they showed themselves up with the foolish stories they told.
Despite all that had gone wrong between us, I really did hope that Jesus would show them all up, demolish the charges and maybe even escape to start a serious rebellion.  But it didn’t work out that way.  Jesus was found guilty on some trumped-up charges and it was clear that the chief priests were going to harass the Roman governor Pilate until he agreed to execute Jesus.

Jesus had prophesied that he would be crucified⁠[1] and it was only the Romans who could do that.  And that fact was the end of the road for me.  Jesus was right, despite all the things he seemed to be wrong about, including the fact that he didn’t seem to notice my little problems with money.  Jesus knew.

So what had gone wrong?  Jesus had promised life, but here it was ending in death – for him, and also for me.  I couldn’t face having betrayed an innocent man, and the chief priests didn’t want to help me sort out my problem.  I went to see them in the temple, trying to convince them to leave Jesus alone, but all they could say was, “What is that to us?”  Priests arranging false witnesses to kill an innocent man, and yet they couldn’t work out what it should be to them?  No wonder Jesus condemned them as hypocrites!

I threw the money back at them and turned away.  I can still see the coins bouncing on the floor of the temple.
My commitment to God’s law has been corrupted.  My honesty has been lost.  My integrity lies in tatters.  I have betrayed the son of God, and his last few responses to me have all been critical.  There is nowhere I can go.  It would have been better if I had never been born.

[1] Matthew 20:19