Judas

J

Rev dear Rev: Given that November is the month for the holy souls in Purgatory, what is the Church's position on the soul of Judas Iscariot? One person told me that Judas is in Hell, but in the gospel Jesus said it was better that (Judas) were not born. Given Jesus's Teaching on Forgiveness, is Judas's soul thereby in Purgatory?

A thoughtful and intelligent and finely crafted question from someone in London called Paul. Such a good question that I was thinking that it could have come from Paul Atreides of the movie Dune, the messiah figure to his community called Moadibh in the movie, whose advent is predicted on the planet called Arakis, now in cinemas across the country. Anyway, a good question. In fact, it is such a good question that I shall feature it with a star on the website, since the answer to this question will cause many to rise and some to fall, depending on their own private assumptions. The answer will disappoint the more judgmental of Christians if they are Jansenists but then they will be judging in absentia propria, since nobody is a good judge in his own cause, as the roman lawyers of the classical period used to put it, nemo iudex in sua causa, and many Christians that easily and blithely condemn Judas to Hell do so because they simply have not come to a spiritual self-awareness of the issues surrounding the death and the survival of Judas into the next kingdom. But I digress - Our greatest inspiration in modern times for the recovery of this Judas debate interestingly enough does not come from the Christian Gospels or even the Jewish scriptures, but actually from a young boy who vowed to take his own life in a suicide pact with his own soul, took a train out of a busy London flat in Kensington to do the deed, but got diverted into a church in the countryside in Essex near Tiptree and spent 4 hours meditating in the church on the subject of the soul and the many issues of damnation. There in that quiet silent church, much like my own time in the church of Grantchester after a vicious fire that could have killed myself and the two lads living with me in the presbytery at the time, almost did kill me, there in that silent quiet church, this young boy achieved a reckoning with his own soul, pondering on the predicament of Judas Iscariot, analysing all the scenes with Judas in the Gospels, and he then achieved peace, and moreover he resolved not to kill himself there and then - how useful country churches of the old kind really are -a tonic for the soul, thank God for the Church of England that preserved them, thank God for the Catholic Church that built them in the first place - Deo Gratias, as we say in the decency of a dead language which I often deploy when I go into those old churches so that the ancient walls can hear the old language of prayer once again and find comfort in vernacular times.

Indeed so inspiring was that meditation session in that little rural idyllic church in Essex, that he took the evening train back to London and began work on a musical, he was a musical lad, and it came to be called Jesus Christ Superstar. Andrew Lloyd Webber was that boy. We have all been to such churches - they are an inspiration, an inspiration not to judge others too quickly, even Judas.

As my friends in the Church of England often say out the central issue, we have all fallen short of the glory of God, for we have all sinned, one of the central preoccupations of St Paul's Letter to the Romans, as he grapples with the unheard of and shocking dogma of the Christians and their messiah-Moadibh when they asserted, contrary to the feelings of the pharisees, that everybody has sinned but the messiah of course. But anyway the teaching of the early Christians that everybody has sinned was so shocking to the purity of the pharisees that they were soon hushed, shushed, and ushered out, out, out of the synagogues and royally kicked out of them by order in AD 85 at the Jewish council of Jamnia in Palestine. So no prizes there for guessing why the racially pure pharisees did not like the concept of universal fallenness. As one spiritual director at a strict monastery once said, in one of his private chats to me, we all have moments when we more resemble Judas than we do Jesus. "Indeed", he explained, "for your penance you can listen to the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, and ask yourself why this musical was so successful, was it because it sees Jesus from the point of view of the Iscariot?" So yes, we have all become Iscariots from time to time in our sinful little lives, some more than others, but all at some point having betrayed Jesus, except for Mary the Myriam of the gospels of course - she was innocent and sinless. Often Peter is pointed to in this connection of this lively theologian's debate, popular among the flocks, when it is said that he too betrayed Jesus, denying him 3 times before the morning cock crew, but he was saved, they often say because, unlike Judas, as it is insisted upon and popularly said by the flocks and their lay theologians, Peter repented, Judas did not.

Cave canem autem - Jesus himself seems to suggest that his soul was ultimately lost in his prayer to the Father when he says that he had not lost any of the apostles, except the one who chose to be lost. So it might seem that the thesis of the first part of the question could well be true. But here we must say that a sociological truth is not automatically to be regarded as a theological truth. The above phrase could simply have meant that Judas had gotten lost from the troupe of the apostles as apostles, not necessarily that he had lost also his faith and also his soul. The famous scene of a similar kind in the autobiography of James Joyce has a fellow boy called Cranfield or whatever say to Joyce - So now that you have lost your faith, will you become a protestant?" But Joyce the boy, here appearing as Stephen Dedalus, responds sharply, "I said I had lost my faith, I did not say I had lost my reason." But here we digress in to those little modern moments of an Iscariot kind. Back to the Christian Christ-backed Gospels. When Jesus says though that it would be better that Judas his betrayer were not born, this too can mean many things, and does not automatically mean the spiritual abortion of damnation - since after all the messiah could have been pointing out a sociological truth of a lateral human kind, namely that Judas as betrayer would eventually, after the death of Jesus, have a terrible time with other humans and the vengeful apostles after the crucifixion of his master and sovereign Lord, n'est-ce pas? So it does not automatically mean that Judas was lost in his soul. After all, as Paul the Questioner has rightly pointed out, Jesus himself went about doing good, healing souls, delivering humans from the dark side, and preaching a gospel of forgiveness, so it seems unlikely on the strength of all that evangelical activity, and here we record a debt to the fabulous evangelicals too, that Jesus himself would thereby also have condemned the poor lost soul of lonely old Judas. Sociological truths, of which there are many in the Four official gospels, are merely sociological truths, period; though here we add a caveat, that these are not the only gospels, just the Four officially accepted biographies, accepted as the Four Inspired ones, inspired and touched by angels, which is not to say we shall not turn up more gospels in the silt and the caves of the Nile Delta one day, all is possible, all is feasible. So in those other gospels, Judas is resurrected and rehabilitated as after the death of Jesus his name is appendixed to an unofficial gospel of Jesus and Judas. Indeed even in the impressive Five volume work The Poem of the Man-god by Maria Valtorta mystic, still to find official approval in a stuffy snobby city of Rome, but there too in this Five volume work, it is noted that Jesus had liked Judas a lot, and wanted Judas to be the original prince of the apostles, until directed firmly and painfully otherwise to Peter by the intervention of the all-seeing and all-knowing Father. An interesting insight. If it is true then, there is something finally to what the mystical saint St Vincent of Lerins says when he once stated that he had had a vision of purgatory, and this will concur with Paul of London, that the soul of Judas was indeed saved because he did repent in his dying moments, and was forgiven by the triumphant and heavenly Jesus in any case, simply because as the poets used to say, "to err is human, to forgive is divine." So yes, evidently, according to the witness of the mystics, the soul of Judas made it to purgatory. Concurred. A good question to send in.