V: Death of Judas
Matt. xxvii. 3-10; Acts i.16-19.
By a righteous retribution of human nature, the first victim of this iniquitous judgment was the very man who had been its prime mover and first cause. Standing unheeded among the rubble of onlookers, in silence Judas had looked long and intently upon his Victim, now finally separated from him; disquieted at heart, uneasy, still cherishing some secret hope perhaps that Jesus would overwhelm His judges and escape them in the end. But when he had witnessed His condemnation and had followed Him as far as the Governor’s Palace, remorse was at last fully aroused in him. The life of Jesus, as he had witnessed it day by day, seemed to repass before his eyes in one mighty but distinct whole, and the last words of the Master resounded in his ears like an audible rebuke. Crushed and distraught with shame, possessed with a sort of madness, he started forthwith, not in search of Jesus Who would have repaid him with peace and salvation, but bent upon finding the priests who had been his accomplices in crime. He had noted that, upon leaving the Palace of Caïphas, they turned down the street leading to the Temple; thither he repaired and mounted the stairway which divides the Sanctuary from the Gentiles' Court. Between the Priests' porches and those of the Jews stood there Hall of Gazith. Although it was no longer the regular assembly-chamber for the Sanhedrin, everything leads us to presume a that it was here Judas found the Priest and ancients gathered together.
" I have sinned," he cried; "I have betrayed the blood of The Just One;" and his shaking hand held out the thirty shekels before their faces.
The only reply to this wretched appeal with disdainful enough:—
"What does that matter to us? That is your affair."
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| Judas returns the thirty shekels. J-J Tissot. |
Judas drew back the silver; then, in a frenzy of despair, as he crossed the great entrance of the Holy Place, he flung down the price of his treachery, there on the threshold, and disappeared.
The Priests picked up the coins; hard by stood huge coffers destined to receive alms-gifts.
"It is not permitted to us," they said, "to put this money into the Treasury, since it is the price of blood."
O marvelous scrupulousity of these Doctors of Israel, so accustomed to listen to nothing but their own evil passions, yet requiring so much deliberation before deciding as to the disposition of thirty pieces of silver! Happily Judas came to their aid.
On quitting the Temple, he took the road which descends towards the Fountain of Siloë. At the spot where Kedron joins Brook-Hinnom, he started up the sombre recesses of the latter, whose aspect was not of a nature to soothe his despairing soul. Even today, Jerusalem has no chillier nor gloomier region,—the deep, narrow gorge, the beetling cliffs of jagged rocks, overshadowed here and there with dark olive trees, while still in this deep ravine, long ago coerced by Jeremy, the memory of those sacrifices to Moloch seems always to rise uppermost in one's mind.
Judas made his way up the acclivity which arises opposite Mount Sion, and came to a halt in a clay field belonging to a potter thereabouts. From this point his eye could sweep the whole pathway, along which he had last night dragged his Victim, from Gethsemane to the Pontiff's Palace; and, as he gazed, his mind altogether gave way under the burthen of mad despair. Then, says Saint Matthew, "he went and hanged himself;" and in the Acts it is added to that "the rope broke; his body, falling headlong to the earth, burst asunder, and his bowels were spilled over the Field of Blood." When informed of his death the Sanhedrin-Councillors hastened to dispose of their accomplice, whose conscience-stricken end would go far toward witnessing to the innocence of Jesus. The thirty shekels which were once Judas's, still lay in their hands; with them they purchased the Potter's field, in order to bury the body on the very spot where its bowels had gushed forth; then, hoping to efface the memory of his crime, they consecrated this region as a burial place for such foreign proselytes as should thereafter die in the city. But the citizens of Jerusalem were informed of the tragic end of Judas, and, as this accursed ground had drunk the blood of the traitor, they called it Haceldama,— "the Field of Blood."
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| Judas hangs himself. J-J Tissot. |
Saint Matthew, as he is wont to do, here again refers to the words of the ancient Prophets. This, then, was the very scene which and Jeremy had had before his prophetic vision when long since he descended Hinnom Valley, before ever it was blasted by God's maledictions. It was a garden of delight, whose wooded banks were freshened by the waters of Siloë; but beneath its shadowing arches and round about the faggots heaped up in honour of Moloch there had re-echoed unholy choruses, mingling with the clash of symbols and psalteries. The Prophet advanced, followed by the Elders of the priesthood and the people, holding in his hand a vessel of that very same clay which in after days was to enclose the remains of Judas; and he broke it in their presence, saying:—
" I will break this City and this people even as this vessel whose fragments can never more be put together, and Tophet shall become a field of sepulchres and corpses."
So, likewise, it was Judas' crime which Zachary had predicted when predicting the ingratitude of Israel, Jehovah's chosen flock, he describes these people giving it unto its shepherd, for a recompense, thirty shekels,—which is the price of a slave; and the shepherd seizes this goodly wage, the price whereat Jesus was valued in the eyes of the Jews, that's so it might be thrown to the Potter, in payment of his waste ground.
By these Prophecies the Lord had revealed His betrayal long beforehand, and now He had committed it to be fulfilled.
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