Matthew 26b

 We left last week with a shocking turn of events. One of Jesus’ hand-picked disciples sneaks away to a secret meeting with religious authorities in order to betray Jesus, and he does it for the money. 

26: 14-16.  Then one of the twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” They paid him thirty pieces of silver. And from that moment he began to look for an opportunity to betray him.

 Judas has only been mentioned once in Matthew’s narrative, and that was during the introduction of the twelve disciples that Jesus picked. Judas was named last.

“...and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him” (Matthew 10: 4).

  Most likely, Iscariot means ‘from Kerioth’. His father has the same epithet (John 6:71), Kerioth is a village in Judea, so Judas was not from Galilee like the rest of the disciples. We know little else about him, except that he kept the purse of the group (John 13: 29). These are hints, although from another Gospel, about Judas’ character and connections. 

 Perhaps these hints help us understand how he could arrange a meeting with the chief priests (they lived in Judea) and why his first question was: “How much will you give me?”  

 This meeting came right after the woman anointed Jesus. Perhaps Judas saw in her action a failure to sell the ointment, in which case he could put the money into his purse. The value of the ointment was a “large sum of money,” but Judas settled here for “thirty pieces of silver,” perhaps that is what he would have skimmed off the sale price. Some have pointed out that “thirty pieces of silver” is about the price of a slave. 

 “If the ox gores a male or female slave, the owner shall pay to the slaveowner thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned” (Exodus 21: 32).

 That sum is also used in God’s prophecy as told by Zechariah. Thirty pieces of silver is the wages of a responsible shepherd of the sheep, that is, Israel.

 “I then said to them, “If it seems right to you, give me my wages, but if not, keep them.” So they weighed out as my wages thirty shekels of silver. Then the LORD said to me, “Throw it into the treasury”—this lordly price at which I was valued by them. So I took the thirty shekels of silver and threw them into the treasury in the house of the LORD (Zechariah 11: 12-13). 

 Interestingly, Judas will return in remorse in the next chapter to confess his sin to the chief priests. However, they are not concerned about his spiritual condition, so Judas throws the thirty pieces of silver at their feet. They decide that it is against the law to put it in the treasury. Where did they get their ethics that say paying a man to betray his friend is all right but putting the same money in the treasury is not? 

 Thirty pieces of silver. See how even the details of Jesus' life and Judas’ betrayal are full of Old Testament references. We will see more of this in these three last chapters.

 Finally, notice that Judas “began to look for an opportunity to betray him.” The Greek word for ‘opportunity’ here is eukairia from eu for ‘good’ (think of euphonia ‘good sound’ or euphoria ‘a state of happiness’) and kairos, a word for ‘time’. Much has been made of the difference between chronos, meaning time according to the clock or the calendar, and kairos, meaning a time of particular significance. You may have heard people speaking of a ‘kairos moment’, but not all of these are positive. 

 At the end of the period of temptation, Luke says that the devil “departed from him until an opportune time (kairia)” (Luke 4: 13). Then in a passage parallel to Matthew 26: 16, Luke says that Judas “began to look for an opportunity (eukairia) to betray him to them when no crowd was present” (Luke 22: 6). John says that ‘the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him” (John 13: 2). In the devil's way of thinking, this was a ‘kairos moment’, the opportune time that he had been waiting for.  

26: 17-19.  On the first day of Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Where do you want us to make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?” He said, “Go into the city to a certain man and say to him, ‘The Teacher says, My time is near; I will keep the Passover at your house with my disciples’.” So the disciples did as Jesus had directed them, and they prepared the Passover meal.

  Matthew moves resolutely from a contract for payment to betray a friend to a covenant for love to give life to friends.

 Matthew’s account is cryptic, that is, it does not include much information. It appears that Jesus had already made arrangements and now he is signaling that the time is right. The phrase “a certain man” is an appropriate translation of the Greek because it implies that the disciples know who Jesus is talking about even if others, including us, do not. 

 In addition, the message would not be very clear to a stranger but would make sense if it had been pre-arranged (R. V. G. Tasker, The Gospel According to Matthew, 1961, pages 244-245). It has been suggested that Jesus was being cautious about celebrating the Passover feast in Jerusalem where the temple authorities were looking for him. Luke tells us that Jesus gave this message only to Peter and John (Luke 22: 8), implying that even the rest of the disciples did not know the full details. Jesus’ time was near, but it had not arrived quite yet. 

 The ‘time’ Jesus is talking about is a kairos moment for him, the time of his ultimate sacrifice. However, the timing (chronos) is not clear. Perhaps Jesus meant it to be a secret. The Passover celebration begins the week-long Feast of Unleavened Bread. It may be that Jesus met with the disciples on Wednesday night, which according to Jewish time would become Thursday after 6:00 p.m. However, most of the Christian tradition settles on Thursday evening as the time of the Passover meal. 

 If the meeting for the Passover meal was secretive, what Jesus did and said was also not the norm. Although this was an annual tradition, Jesus took liberties with the ritual. In effect, Jesus both fulfilled the deeper meaning of the ritual, and transformed the celebration into what we call the Last Supper, the Holy Eucharist, or Communion. 

 Next week we will consider how Jesus draws from the old and intertwines it with the new so that the whole world benefits from God’s Covenant with the Jews. It was Abraham, nearly 2000 years before, who heard God say: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. … and in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12: 2-3). 

 The Apostle Paul developed a theology of God’s long-term plan of salvation that reached its zenith in Jesus Christ. The timing was all in God’s hands. 

 “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir through God” (Galatians 4: 4-7)

 “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1: 3-14).