IIC 46: Shame and Tragedy: Judas Iscariot and You

Dr. Peter walks through a deep psychological profile of Judas’ Iscariot, really understanding him in three dimensions, with a discussion of Judas’ parts and how he defended against shame through narcissism.  There is also an exercise for you to focus more on God’s love for you rather than your sins, failings and weaknesses.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up to embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth, right now, in these days, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience to rising up to the challenges in our lives and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski. I am here with you to be your host and guide. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up the natural foundations for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor. In short, this podcast is all about relationships. It’s all about becoming much more relational in our daily lives and in our faith. This is episode 46. It’s released on December 14th, 2020, and it’s titled Shame and Tragedy: Judas Iscariot and You. It’s the 10th episode in our series on shame. I really thank you for being here with me. Last episode, we discussed how shame can lead to idolatry. And now we’re going to look at an example of how shame did lead to idolatry, the rejection of the true God for a false god. The story of Judas Iscariot, whose life ended in tragedy, the tragedy of abandoning and betraying Jesus Christ, true God and true man. I’m really excited about this episode.

[00:01:55] We’re really going to get inside of Judas’s mind, his heart, his body, and his soul. Today we’re really focusing on understanding what happened in his life. Why did he act the way he did? Why did he do it? I don’t accept the typical explanations for Judas’s behavior because they seem too simplistic. They don’t resonate with me at all as a psychologist. In our fallen world, in our fallen human condition, all of us have elements of what Judas struggled with. I believe there’s the potential in you, I believe there’s the potential in me, to repeat what Judas did. We live in a fallen world. We have fallen natures. There’s the old saying, there, but for the grace of God, go I. There, but for the grace of God, go I. We can all wind up in these kinds of situations. None of us are immune from this. We can learn from Judas’s mistakes, though. We can learn from his mistakes so that we don’t have to make the same mistakes that he made. Now, in this podcast, we’re continuing to really immerse ourselves in the spiritual dimensions of shame, how shame on the natural level can impact us in spiritual ways. Remember, grace perfects nature. So disorder in the natural realm undermines the spiritual life. That’s why I’m so focused on the natural foundations, because disorder in the natural realm, in the psychological realm, undermines the spiritual life. It undermines our capacity to enter into that deep, intimate relationship with Christ.

[00:03:47] I like to teach through familiar stories. I like to weave stories together, especially through Scripture, really getting into the Word of God. I love to get into a deeper understanding of the people in the Bible stories, to see them in three dimensions, to bring them to life. Scripture is a gift from God to us. It’s a precious gift. It’s a gift of love. It’s a way that God reveals himself to us. And it’s also a way that God reveals you to you. It’s a way that God reveals me to me. If you look carefully, you will see aspects of yourself, parts of yourself, in the people in Scripture. You can connect with their experience. You can enter into their phenomenological worlds. I am here to help you with that, so that we can draw even more from the holy Word of God. I want you to connect with the experience of the people in Scripture, and I’m here to help you with that. The stories help to illustrate the concepts that we are learning, and they help us to really connect with those concepts. Stories give us tangible examples so that we can really grip on to what we’re trying to understand. And, you know, that’s how we teach children. We teach children not through dry catechetical expositions of systematic presentations of complex concepts. No, we teach them through stories, through fables, through, you know, the stories of the Gospel.

[00:05:27] We need those stories too, because parts of us are very young. Parts of us really need to grip onto something at the level of a child. Back to Judas. Let’s get back to Judas. Judas was an important, powerful, evocative, and mysterious figure to me when I was growing up from about the age of five. I remember being five years old and insisting to my mother that Good Friday should really be called Bad Friday because of how Jesus died. I was deeply impressed by the story of the passion and death of Jesus. You know, five and six year olds, they think in black and white. They think in these dichotomous ways, clear, simple categories, yes or no. And I thought Judas was very, very naughty to betray Jesus and to tell the Jewish priests how to catch him, so they could nail him to a cross. That was very, very naughty. And Judas was a thief, too. He stole things. Right. That was really important to me as a kid, knowing that Judas was a thief. Because I’m going to tell you a little bit about my story of being a thief, right? I was not a very good thief, but I was a thief at one time. So this is how it went. Stealing was not tolerated in my family. And when I was five years old, we were in a road trip back from the Christmas visit with Grandma and Grandpa, and we stopped at a gas station, and inside the store there was this Christmas tree and it was decorated with all these striped candy sticks.

[00:07:06] You know, the striped ones, not the ones with little hook on them, not candy canes, candy sticks. And they weren’t just ordinary ones. You know, they weren’t just the ones that had the red and white stripes. No, they had all the colors of the rainbow. I mean, there was blue and green and yellow and red, all the colors, orange. It was amazing. And so I was like, whoa, pretty. And they look tasty. And they were shiny. They were pretty, tasty, and shiny. And I took one. Now I’m not even sure, I can’t remember if I really knew I was stealing at the time. But I was there in the car sucking on it on the way home, you know, I was making it kind of sharp and pointy. You know, I wasn’t crunching it. I was really enjoying it. It was really tasty. And and then somebody turned around, was either my mom or my dad, turned around and said, “Where did you get that?” I wasn’t being pretentious. I wasn’t trying to hide anything. I was like, “I got it at the gas station, off the Christmas tree.” Well, that led to a pretty rapid U-turn on the two lane highway.

[00:08:14] Mom and Dad drove me about ten miles back to the gas station. I had to go in and tell the manager what I had done. I surrendered the half-eaten little pointed striped candy stick, sitting there on the counter. I was mortified. Now the manager was very gracious. He made it no big deal. But I was experiencing real shame at the time, and I vowed to reform and never to steal again. You know, from my parents’ reaction, I learned that stealing was very, very bad. It was a rule not to steal. It was a commandment, because I’m sure something came up about thou shalt not steal. Right. And that included taking striped candy sticks off of Christmas trees in gas stations. Okay, so I got that now. So a part of me learned that in order to be good, you have to know the rules and you have to follow the rules, right? And this part of me said Judas was not following the rules about not killing Jesus and about not stealing money. Could Judas have been any worse? Judas was really, really naughty. Now let’s fast forward two years. When I was about seven, a man named Tim Rice came into my life. And Tim Rice, Mr. Rice, he told me a riveting story, portraying Judas in a very different way than just being very, very naughty. He told me about Judas’s feelings and thoughts and Judas’s worries, and how distressed Judas had been, and how Judas was worried about Jesus.

[00:10:02] And he told me how Judas had done some bad things. But Judas was very human. And I listened to the story that Mr. Rice told me. I wanted to hear it over and over again. Judas was so different than I had thought. He was more than just a stealer who betrayed Jesus. So who was this Tim Rice? Well, Tim Rice wrote the lyrics for the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the music. Tim Rice wrote the lyrics. This is a blast from the past. Anybody going back to the 1970s with me, right? Anybody going back to 1970, when the rock opera came out in 1973, the motion picture came out? Well, Mom and Dad had the vinyl. They had the two volume set, the records, and although I didn’t have a TV growing up, we did have a nice stereo and I was allowed to play records on the turntable. And looking back on that, it seemed a little ridiculous to let a seven year old play records on this really, really nice audio equipment. But there it was. And so there seven, eight, nine years old, all the way up until my sophomore year of college, I really gripped on to this musical. Jesus Christ Superstar was so emotionally evocative for me. Emotions just welled up in me in so many ways that never happened when I was at Mass or when I was in religion class or in my spiritual formation.

[00:11:28] Tim Rice was really telling me the most compelling story of Jesus and Judas and the apostles, and the sufferings and the deaths of Judas and Jesus that I had ever heard. The musical, the rock opera, had a huge impact on my formation. The album came with this booklet that had all the lyrics for the entire musical, and I had them memorized. You know, and I could sing the whole thing from beginning to end. My family always went to the Good Friday liturgy. We went there and we went through the whole liturgy. But I could be distracted because I knew that the tradition in my family was that after the liturgy, we would come home and we would listen to Jesus Christ Superstar from the beginning to the end. All right, so now I want to introduce you to a part of me. I want to introduce you to my good boy part and tell you a little bit about his story. Good boy took on his protective role in that moment in the car with my family when I was five years old, when my parents reacted to my great candy stick thievery. Good boy was the part of me that was going to make sure that I always followed the rules so that I would never get in trouble and I would never be shamed.

[00:12:47] Now, this part of me got to be very concerned about doctrinal orthodoxy. This part of me focuses on making sure that I walk the straight and narrow path, and that I follow the rules, and that I don’t lead anyone else astray. Good boy protects me. He has led me to a lot of study and research about what’s right, about what’s wrong. And he’s kind of like a little self-appointed angel that sits on my shoulder telling me what he thinks right and wrong is. Now, if he’s disconnected from my core self, he can try to take over the role of being my conscience. He’s not very good at it when he’s on his own, because his vision is very limited and, you know, if he’s on his own, he’s not integrated with the rest of my system. And I’ll give you an example. For example, I was destabilized for a while in college and good boy took over and he led me into some really intense scrupulosity. Now, that was pretty brief. It was only about two weeks, but it was really intense. And so he was misinterpreting some things that were right and wrong. When good boy disconnects from the rest of me, he’s not very relational. He deals more in the realm of ideas and abstractions and philosophy and theology. And that’s all good and important. Good boy does not do relationships very well when he takes over.

[00:14:04] And he can be really judgmental, not only of me, but of other people as well. He can be really critical. He focuses on whether everyone is following the rules as he understands them, and he can be kind of impatient and unkind, and he can really underappreciate human weakness. He wants to figure out everything on his own if he is disconnected from my core self. He idealizes philosophical and theological knowledge. He wants to be self-sufficient and he reaches for God’s omniscience. He reaches for God’s omniscience. This is how this part of me, good boy, falls into idolatry. He assumes God is far away, like the vineyard owner who left his vineyard in the care of tenants and went away for a long time, or the man who left the talents to his workers and went away on a long journey. He just assumes that God is very far away. Not available, not close. But he’s going to come back and he’s going to have a lot of high demands, and you better have gotten your performance done. He believes that God helps those who help themselves. That’s a great saying for good boy. God helps those who help themselves. That’s one of the things my grandfather used to say. And he’s got to figure out how to please this distant God who is traveling far away, but he was going to come back, so we better have followed all the rules and we better have been productive.

[00:15:25] So good boy — again, this is if he’s on his own, if he’s not integrated or connected with my core self — good boy wants to be really big. And the way that he wants to be big is to be very knowledgeable and to command. He wants to command me onto the straight and narrow path. He doesn’t really resonate with the idea of a deep, personal, intimate relationship with Jesus or with Mary. When he gets disconnected, that’s totally out the window. He wants to be big by knowing things, especially about morality. Other parts of me want to be big in other ways. I’ve got parts that want to be big by being powerful. I’ve got a part that wants to be socially adept and know how to read people. Good boy wants to be big by knowing things. Now, some years back when I got into parts work, in Internal Family Systems, good boy became really open to integrating with the rest of my system. And once he saw how good that would be, once he could accept that IFS was really not some modernist new age, heretical nonsense that was going to lead me to hell, good boy got on board. And ever since then, he’s been much more cooperative, much more helpful to me. Good boy is now mostly integrated with me and the rest of my parts and with, you know, he’s integrated with my core self.

[00:16:39] And that’s really helpful. He’s not so autonomous now, but he’s still really focused on doctrinal issues. And that’s important because we need to have the truth. I really value this about this part of me. There are other issues that are also important though. Relational issues, emotional issues, all kinds of circumstances, all kinds of things that are important and need to be factored in, in an integrated self. Good boy plays an invaluable role in my system, informing my parts of my moral compass. He encourages me to read and study. He helps me to be cautious about what I say. And he helps balance out the more exuberant and emotional parts of me. All right, so there’s a message from good boy to all of you. Good boy wants me to announce at this point that there are lots of historical, theological, spiritual, and doctrinal problems in the messaging of Jesus Christ Superstar. There are lots of ways that the rock opera does not conform to a Catholic understanding of our Lord and the meaning of his life and death. And it’s no substitute for reading the Gospel and understanding it, right? He also wants you to know that Tim Rice, who had such an influence on me, said in a 1982 interview, “Technically I’m Church of England, which is really nothing, but I don’t follow it. I wouldn’t say I was a Christian. I have nothing against it.”

[00:18:01] So that ends the public service announcement from good boy. He just wanted you to know that. Let’s get into the heart of it. Now let’s get into profiling Judas. Judas is an absolutely critical figure for us as Christians to understand. We not only have the potential to betray Jesus like Judas did, but we do actually betray Jesus in a sense, when we sin. And we can learn so much about ourselves by really understanding Judas in all of his humanity. The temptation can be, for some parts of us, to just condemn Judas in a really simplistic story. Here’s how the bare bones, simplistic story of Judas goes. Judas was a thief who stole from the common purse. He liked money. He sold Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. That was a lot of money. Judas was motivated by greed. He betrayed Jesus with a kiss. He was a scoundrel. The Jewish authorities captured Jesus and they gave him a totally bogus trial. Then the authorities had Jesus beaten, tortured, mocked, and crucified to death. Then Judas freaked out with remorse and he killed himself, which is what he deserved for being such a traitor and betraying Jesus. Dante put Judas in the ninth circle of hell. What more do you need to know? End of story. Right. That’s it. That’s the very simplistic story of Judas. But we can do so much better than that.

[00:19:32] So in this episode, we’re going to be using Scripture tradition, the perennial teachings of the Church. We’re going to use commentaries, especially by Catholic saints. We’re going to check in with what the mystics have to tell us in private revelation. And we’re going to use the best of psychological theory and understanding to make inferences about what was going on in Judas’s system. Now we are speculating, and good boy used to really not want me to speculate. For about 25 years I avoided speculating because good boy said I could get something wrong. There could be a real fear of misunderstanding. I did not want to be led astray by emotions. Right. And there were times where I had been led astray by emotions in the past, when I had made bad vocational decisions in which others had manipulated my emotions and blindsided me, so I distrusted my emotional side. Good boy didn’t like the emotional side of me. Good boy motivated me when I was in college to repudiate Jesus Christ Superstar after I found out there were lots of problems with it. But also, I was very concerned about being emotionally moved in the spiritual life. I got rid of Jesus Christ Superstar because it moved my heart, and because it was no longer trustworthy to have my more emotional parts active, influencing my decisions because I felt like, good boy really felt like, and other parts of me, felt like those emotional parts had deceived me in a number of ways.

[00:21:01] I felt like I had made big mistakes, made bad decisions. Good boy was never going to let that happen again. Emotions were untrustworthy, emotions were unsafe. And this lasted a long time. When the Mel Gibson movie The Passion came out, I wouldn’t watch it. Good boy said, “Nope, we’re not watching that. It’s incredibly evocative. It’s going to bring up a lot of emotions, and it’s probably historically inaccurate in a number of ways. And there’s a lot of gratuitous violence, stuff like that. We’re not watching that.” Okay. But being more integrated, being able to balance things better, you know, we can actually approach these things. Good boy’s onboard because good boy knows now that actually we can learn a lot. Even if we make some mistakes, we’re probably going to get some of the particulars wrong, in fact, I’m sure we’re going to get some of the particulars wrong in our inferences about Judas, right? We are not God. We can’t read his soul. But the important thing is that we’re really trying to understand his human experience. We’re practicing. We’re practicing like we did with King David and crown prince Amnon and prince Absalom and princess Tamar in episodes 40, 43 and 44. There are elements of Judas’s experience, as I understand it, that are common to us all because we live in a fallen world, because of our fallen condition.

[00:22:14] It’s easy for good boy to just judge Judas and dismiss him, go with the simplistic story. It’s understandable, given how horrific Judas’s crimes were. But now we can get into this in a lot deeper way, and it’s going to be good for us. And good boy wants me to invite any of you that detect something theologically wrong or misleading to let me know, so that we can seriously consider it and offer corrections in case I presented anything inconsistent with the Catholic faith. All right, so Jesus Christ Superstar starts out with Judas discussing his concerns in a solo piece. The main character in Jesus Christ Superstar really is Judas. It’s an epic, tragic story about Judas. Judas is the protagonist. He speaks the first words in the rock opera, a long, distraught monologue. Judas is pretty sympathetically portrayed in Jesus Christ Superstar. I could emotionally engage with this characterization of Judas. He was approachable. He was understandable. He was human. He had three dimensions. And back when I was a kid, neither good boy nor any of my other parts knew that the musical wasn’t necessarily telling the story accurately. I was in a Catholic school, but it was the 1970s. It was the 1980s. Religion class in my catechetical formation never really told me the story of Jesus. I mean, we learned facts and we glued felt shapes to burlap banners that hung in the church and it symbolized something or other.

[00:23:36] But the more interesting and hip and groovy the teachers tried to make our education, the more they tried to make it fascinating and relevant, the more boring it seemed to me. They were all trying too hard to be relevant. I never heard the real story told well, with all the details and all the emotion and all the raw human experience and all the relational conflicts and the drama. And that’s what I’m trying to give you. I’m trying to make this in three dimensions so that you could really grip onto it with all of your parts, not just the highly intellectualized parts. So I’m going to look at Judas’s internal experience. I’m going to look at his internal dynamics. I’m going to look at his heart, his mind, his soul, his body. I’m going to look at his core self and his parts in a more nuanced way. So each part has a personality. And often we’re dominated by one part of us. Often a manager part takes us over, like when the different little characters in the Pixar movie Inside Out took over the control panel. We will be doing a whole course on Internal Family Systems and parts for community members. I am putting that course together now and there are two main sections. One section is just going to be on the basics of Internal Family Systems, IFS, how IFS understands the human person with parts and self.

[00:24:52] The other part will be on how we can make sure that this understanding conforms to the Catholic faith. What adjustments need to be made? How do we need to tweak it? How do we need to revise IFS to make sure that it really does conform with what we know to be true by divine revelation? This is one of the huge benefits of being a member of the Resilient Catholics Community. We’re going to be talking a lot more about IFS in the upcoming podcast episodes as well. One of the things when we talk about parts, though, is the importance of self-governance. Judas failed at self-governance. He let himself be carried away by his parts. Saint Thomas Aquinas would say that Judas let himself be carried away by his passions, and he did not govern them appropriately, and that led to great sins. So let’s talk about the history of Judas and what was Judas like as a person? Let’s just start with the fact that Judas is a human being, fearfully and wonderfully made in the image and likeness of God. He’s not a “bad seed.” The meaning of the name of Judas, it’s a Greek form of the name Judah. Most Hebrew dictionaries will define this as like praise or confession. This falls short a little bit of what the actual Hebrew means. The parent root of the name Judah in Hebrew, which is Yehuda, the parent root of this word is ydh, which means hand.

[00:26:28] And the child root in this word is derived from ydh, and it means to throw or stretch out the hand. So what Jeff Brenner does is he says, imagine that you’re standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon for the first time. And you throw your hands out and you say, “Wow, will you look at that?” That’s the kind of meaning of Judah, the Hebraic understanding of praise in the name Yehuda or Judas or Judas. Iscariot means that he’s either from the town of Kerioth. It may mean that he’s also from the tribe of Issachar, one of the 12 tribes. Saint John Chrysostom emphasized how Matthew described Judas in terms of his behaviors, in terms of being a betrayer, not as an enemy, not as an adversary. Saint John Chrysostom says, look, he does not say that, Matthew does not say that Judas was abominable or the utterly despicable one or anything like that. He described where he came from. Now, there’s a really interesting book that I really like called The Life of Mary, As Seen By the Mystics. And what it does is it brings together the stories of Mary’s life that were revealed in private revelations to venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich, Venerable Mary of Agreda, Saint Bridget of Sweden, and Saint Elizabeth Schenau.

[00:27:55] And when you bring those revelations together, this is what you get about Judas, right? Because there’s actually a whole chapter in that book about Judas. Judas was a good-looking man with black hair and a reddish beard. He was charming and clever. He had been in business. He was 25 years old. He was the illegitimate son of a dancer and an army officer. He was well-dressed, eager to oblige. He talked too much. He liked to make himself appear important. He was intensely ambitious for fame, wealth, and honors. He saw that people were identifying Jesus as the Messiah and the future King of Israel, and he wanted to get on board with that. He was active. He was zealous. He was critical of the human faults of his associates. He was especially jealous of the popularity of the Apostle John. Now Mother Mary loved him. She knew him. She loved him, but he rejected her. He rebuked her for suggesting that he was opening his heart to evil, that he was going down the wrong path. He rejected his mother’s love, which was what he really needed because Judas had his own ideas. Judas was following his own lights, he was following his own understanding. And Judas was developing a growing dislike for both Mary and Jesus, and a growing dislike for the hardships involved with being an Apostle. He also had objections to the choosing of poverty.

[00:29:24] Remember, Judas kept the purse for the community. He was involved in the financial transactions that happened, and he felt like there was just way too much of giving of the money away. That’s all from these mystics. That’s private revelation. It is not something that is definitively true, but it is interesting information, particularly the idea that Judas was born out of wedlock, that he had a disrupted family system from the very beginning. Jesus chose Judas to be one of the 12 apostles. It’s kind of, on the surface, seems like a bad idea. Why would you do that? Judas doesn’t seem reliable. I think Jesus chose Judas Iscariot because of Judas’s need. Judas was deeply wounded. He had a long history of shame. That’s what I think was what we’re seeing here. Jesus was going to work with him closely for years. Jesus doesn’t always choose his key players because of their strengths and talents. Sometimes he chooses them because the role that he has for them is going to help them or will help them, if they’re open to it, overcome whatever difficulties they have. He gives us positions that are suited to meet our needs. He gives us positions that challenge us, that cause us to struggle because they’re good for us. What’s going on in the culture at the time? It’s important to get a little background on some of the cultural factors. Remember, there was a Roman occupation of the entire land, and there’s a long history of the Jews being enslaved or dominated by other people.

[00:31:18] There was the Egyptian slavery, the Babylonian captivity, the Assyrian invasions. Now we’ve got the Romans taking, you know, taking over everything. There were deep desires in the Jewish community for a temporal savior. There was an assumption that the Savior would be a military leader. Deep desires to be free to govern themselves. And in the history of great Jewish figures, we have Joshua, who led the Israelites into the Promised Land after the Exodus and conquered the Canaanites. We have David. David was a type of Jesus. He was a forerunner of Jesus. And David had great military conquests. So it wasn’t unreasonable that the people would look for a military savior, a temporal savior that would bring them goods in the here and now, in the moment, not a spiritual savior. Often there’s this assumption that external changes are needed to make everything all right. This is sort of analogous to liberation theology, or this heavy focus on social justice that we often see. Revolutionaries are particularly prone to fall into this, into this mistake of not tending to their internal world, not tending to their internal systems, not looking to find peace in relationship with Christ in that deep and abiding intimacy with our Lord. Not repenting, not turning to God, not removing the beam from their own eyes.

[00:32:47] Instead, there’s an outward focus. There’s a focus on changing society and changing government, on revising or reforming the culture. That’s where we’re going to focus our energies. We need the proletariat to rise up and crush the oppression of the bourgeois. This perceived practical solution is not grounded in prayer. It’s not grounded in union with God, but rather the time and energy and the focus is on stopping election fraud or resisting government control. On and on and on and on. And I’m not saying those things aren’t important, but they’re not at the center. They’re not at the core of who we are. They’re not Jesus’s first message of repenting. That’s what he opened his preaching with. “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” Same thing, John the Baptist. “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” That’s what they started with. And it’s not the first commandment of loving God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, with all your strength, with all of you. That’s first. The first is the relationship with God. It’s turning away from anything that keeps us from God and entering into that deep, personal relationship with God. And then when you are focused on that intimacy with God, when you have that personal relationship, when you have that connection, then out of that position, you love your neighbor. That’s when the second great commandment comes in. You can’t really love your neighbor if you’re disconnected from God because God is love.

[00:34:20] We start with the first commandment, the greatest commandment, right, loving God. From that position, go to the second commandment of loving our neighbor. At the time in Judea there was active sedition. There were independence parties, there were uprisings. Simon the Zealot was another apostle that was affiliated with one of these parties that wanted to resist and revolt against Roman oppression. Barabbas. Remember Barabbas who was in prison? He’s often characterized as a “robber.” But according to Mark 15:7, Barabbas was in prison because he had taken part in a recent uprising. So he may have been a political and military rebel, a freedom fighter, if you will, and he may have been popular with the people because of his overt resistance to Roman rule. Well, what do we know about Judas from the Scriptures? Well, we know that Judas carried the purse. He was the treasurer. He managed, he wanted to manage the financial affairs of the small Christian community around Jesus. And he stole from it. We know that. The simplistic explanation is that he was greedy. He coveted things. But a more nuanced understanding asks the question, is there anything other than greed that leads people to steal? What about other possibilities? What about the symbolic meaning? I mean, we hear the stories about rich celebrities who get caught shoplifting.

[00:35:51] Sometimes people can’t tell you why they steal. Sometimes people steal for the thrill of it and they throw away the merchandise. It’s hard to call that greed. Something’s missing. Something is missing here in the explanation. So when people steal, sometimes they feel entitled to what they took. Judas is stealing from the community. He’s stealing from Jesus. He’s taking something from Jesus and the other apostles. He’s taking money, which is kind of, it’s a kind of sustenance. I think he had a void inside, some kind of hole in his soul, that he thought would be filled by the sustenance of Jesus. If he took Jesus’s sustenance, the money, because of what the money represents, something like that. Judas was in the community physically. He was physically present, but he was cut off from the community more and more over time relationally. He was the only one of the apostles that was not a Galilean, because again, he was from Kerioth, which was Judea. He was a Judean, not a Galilean. Now chapter 22 of Saint Luke tells us that Satan entered into Judas. It doesn’t say that Judas formally invited Satan in. He wasn’t necessarily, Judas wasn’t necessarily totally committed to vice and evil. He wasn’t necessarily seeking a relationship with Satan. Satan is sneaky about these things. We do know that Judas went to the high priest and the Jewish authorities before the Last Supper.

[00:37:30] Why did he do that? Judas relied on his own vision. He relied on his own understanding. I think he was taken over by a part of him, a narcissistic part that was defending against shame, that needed glory, that needed recognition, that needed to control events, that needed to manipulate Christ. Now remember, each part has a personality. If I’m right about this, that this part that was dominating Judas was narcissistic, let’s go into narcissism a little bit more. I’m going to draw a lot from a book called Psychoanalytic Diagnosis 2nd Edition by Nancy McWilliams. Excellent book, I use this to teach graduate students a lot, if you really want to understand personality dynamics. And so this part that I am offering to you that suffered from narcissism, this part, this theoretical part of Judas. What happens when there’s narcissism is that there’s something missing from the inner life. There’s a deficit model, there’s a feeling of being fraudulent and loveless. And what is common to narcissistic personalities, according to Nancy McWilliams, is this inner sense of insufficiency, shame, weakness, and inferiority. Narcissistic parts are terrified of those things, and McWilliam writes that, “Feelings of shame and fears of being shamed pervade the subjective experience of narcissistic people. Narcissistic parts hold the person up to unrealistic goals, ideals, and either try to convince themselves that they’ve that they’ve attained those ideals, which is when you get the grandiosity, or they fall short and feel inherently flawed and defective rather than forgivably human.”

[00:39:20] And that leads to people, you know, feeling more depressed. Also, folks that struggle with narcissism are always aware of being judged. They can’t tolerate being negatively evaluated. It’s really threatening. So when Mary, in her gentle way, according to these private revelations, tried to work with Judas, he would have none of it. Because this part that’s carrying this narcissism in order to protect him was so resistant and wound up, you know, feeling hostile towards Mary and wound up feeling hostile towards Jesus. Folks with narcissism fear the fragmentation of self. They are aware at some level of their fragility. There’s this sense that if I can climb high enough, if I can get enough external affirmation, respect, admiration, esteem, if I can get enough of that, then I will be all right. I will be fine. You have to understand that with narcissism, these parts are fighting for survival. And they think the way to survive is to be big. Narcissistic people avoid feelings and actions that express awareness of personal fallibility, or even realistic dependance on other people. They don’t like the idea of being dependent at all. So repentance and gratitude are very difficult, because any admission of guilt or dependency exposes something unacceptably shameful about the person. They make attempts to fill the void that can look like greed and vanity, but the intention is about self-preservation. Saint Cyril of Alexandria, in discussing Judas in his commentary on Matthew, said that, “Whenever Satan gains possession of anyone’s soul, he does not attack him by means of general vice. He rather searches for that particular passion that has power over him, and by its means, makes him his prey.”

[00:41:25] In other words, Satan attacks us through our vulnerable parts. And if we are struggling with a narcissistic part, that’s a real vulnerability. That’s something that Satan can try to take advantage of. Satan wants to take the core self of Judas down by approaching him through his narcissistic part that needs glory and recognition, and has the sense of entitlement because of the underlying shame that it protects against. So Judas is not content to be a disciple. He’s not content to be an apostle, even with all the miracles he wrought by the grace of God. Satan tempts him at a natural level through this defect in his system, through this burden of narcissism that this protector part of him carries. So what was his motivation? I don’t think it was for the 30 pieces of silver. Saint Jerome, in his commentary on this, said it was greed. He did it for the money. Yeah, I think that’s really simplistic. You know, 30 pieces of silver is, actually, it’s a chunk of money, but it’s actually not all that much money. It’s the price of a slave. Remember, 30 pieces of silver, 30 shekels of silver is what Joseph’s brothers sold him for to the Midianites. You know, when they took him down to Egypt.

[00:42:42] 30 shekels, that works out to be about ten Troy ounces of silver. And at current prices, that’s about $243. Ten ounces of silver is what this amounted to. And that makes sense. That’s about like what you could throw around pretty comfortably in a temple if you needed to. If you look at those 30 shekels, that would probably be about 70 days’ wages. So, you know, depending on if you want to look at it that way, like what’s the equivalent in terms of a day laborer’s wage, a wage, it’s probably about $5,000, something like that. You could also think of the 30 shekels as the price of a field, right? Because remember, the leaders of the Jewish people bought the potter’s field with the blood money after Judas returned it to the temple. I think that even at $5,000, Judas wasn’t interested in it for the money. The backlash would have been huge. I mean, selling your teacher out, selling your master into death. Not worth it. That would be too much condemnation for that. Jesus had a huge following, right? Even Judas’s life could be at risk. You don’t know what his followers are going to do. Some of them are really radical, right? And his reputation would be shot.

[00:44:02] I don’t think that Judas was doing this for 30 pieces of silver. I just don’t think that’s very much money. I don’t think that Judas thought that betraying Jesus to the Jewish authorities would actually lead to his death. I don’t think Judas intended for Jesus to die. I don’t think this was a vengeance thing. I don’t think this was, I’m going to get you because I hate you. I think it was something entirely different. I think Judas’s dominant manager part was basically narcissistic, and this narcissistic manager was motivated by a mixture of idealism and a need to matter, a need to be big. I think Judas thought that Jesus was neglecting temporal issues. He was not paying enough attention to social justice. He was not paying enough attention to the political situation. He was not paying enough attention to the domination of the Romans, this offense to the Jewish people. Judas saw that Jesus’s approach was not going to get rid of Roman oppression. But if Judas could turn Jesus over to the authorities, Jesus would have to act. Jesus would have to get large and in charge. He would have to manifest his power. And then the revolution could begin. The timing was perfect. Everybody was in Jerusalem for the Passover. It was the moment when the revolutionaries could make their move if they just had the leadership. This was the golden moment. This is the moment where everything could break open.

[00:45:48] Jesus, he’s not going to allow his mission to be destroyed by death. Jesus isn’t going to let that happen, thought Judas in his narcissistic part. Jesus would rouse himself. He would get away from all this spiritual navel gazing, all this inward focus and all this spiritual abstractions and all the shoulder rubbing with all these social outcasts and sinners, and get down to dealing with the real issues, which was getting rid of the Romans and the Herodians and the Sadducees who were in league with them, those traitors to the people. All that external focus is what I think was driving Judas. Judas wanted to bring about a society that would be much closer to heaven on earth. And Judas Iscariot would be the one who prompted Jesus, who gave Jesus the push that Jesus needed, who opened Jesus’s eyes to the magnitude of his mission, who set up the situation that would launch the revolution. And when Jesus took over as the supreme leader, when he climbed the heights of temporal power, when Jesus was crowned as King of the Jews, then Judas could bask in the reflection of Jesus’s glory. And by association with Jesus, and by Judas’s role in catapulting Jesus into action and taking the mantle of power, Judas would shine in the reflected light of Jesus’s earthly glory. Then Judas would get what he was entitled to. He would get what he worked for, what he had slaved for and lived in poverty for, had set up through years.

[00:47:21] Judas would then be important. He would matter. He would be big. He would be recognized as the master strategist for Jesus’s ascent to power, because Judas would have called the tactics. He would have called the shots. Judas may have thought even that he was called by God in this mission, that God supported him in this. And this is actually laid out in a historical novel called The Spear by Louis de Wohl. And his last name is spelled De and then Wohl. It’s a really fascinating historical novel about the passion and death of Christ, and it really gets into the psychology of Judas in a really interesting way. So if you want more about that idea, I’d recommend that novel. But let’s go to the Last Supper. We know that Jesus washed Judas’s feet. We saw Jesus place Judas right beside him in the place of honor, giving him honor, attention, physical proximity, yearning, willing to connect with him. Because remember, Jesus loved him with a tremendous love, knowing everything that was going on in the darkness of Judas’s heart. In Luke 22, it’s after the first Eucharist, after Jesus gave Judas his body and blood, soul and divinity in the Eucharist, in the First Eucharist, after Jesus united with him in that way, that Jesus discussed Judas’s betrayal. He did it with such great love.

[00:48:57] He did it with such great understanding. What does Jesus say? He says, “But yet, behold, the hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table. And the Son of man indeed goeth. But yet woe to the man by whom he shall be betrayed.” Notice, this is from Saint John Chrysostom. Saint John Chrysostom points out, you know, see how he spares the traitor. He did not say, Judas, you will betray me. But he only said, one of you will betray me. This was to offer time for repentance by keeping Judas’s identity concealed. Jesus loved Judas so much that he allowed the other disciples to be alarmed, this is from Saint John Chrysostom, to be alarmed just for the sake of hopefully redeeming this one apostle, this apostle that had hated him, that had turned against him, that had already been negotiating his betrayal, put a price on his head. He had washed his feet. He had given him the place of honor. He had done everything possible in heaven and on earth to increase the chances that Judas would come around. He knew exactly what Judas needed. Judas’s heart was closed. Judas chose not to receive what he really needed, but to continue with this narcissistic manager part with its limited vision. You know, the other apostles aren’t looking great here in this moment anyway, because by verse 24, the apostles are again striving among themselves about who is the greatest.

[00:50:38] This business is even going on at the Last Supper. They ask Jesus, though surely, Lord, you don’t mean me? And here is where Saint Jerome points out something really interesting. All the other apostles referred to Jesus as Lord. But when Judas spoke to Jesus, he referred to Jesus as a teacher, not as Lord. Right? As though he were betraying just a teacher, not the Lord. Okay. I’ve said that I don’t think that Judas anticipated that Jesus would be taken, imprisoned, and executed by the Jewish and Roman authorities. I think he thought, because he knew Jesus’s power, there was no doubt. He had a front row seat for everything Jesus did in terms of the miracles. He had seen Jesus raise men from the dead. He had seen Jesus make the blind see, the lame walk, multiply loaves and fishes. He knew that Jesus was powerful. He knew that the Romans would not be able to dominate Jesus. That’s what made him such a great messianic leader. That’s what made Jesus so attractive as a candidate to lead the opposition, to lead the resistance, to lead the revolution. It never occurred to this narcissistic manager part of Judas, that Jesus would be willing to die, even though Jesus had foretold his death over and over and over again. This part couldn’t hear it. It didn’t fit with how this part wanted reality to be.

[00:52:27] This was not the way that this part looked at Jesus. So Judas realizes that Jesus is sentenced to death and that Jesus is allowing the death to happen. There’s this horrible realization that just rocked Judas’s narcissistic part to the core. This narcissistic manager came totally unglued and chaos entered in to Judas’s system. A great sense of shock. He was horrified that all of his plans had been unraveled. This was a totally unexpected turn of events. Judas was now going to be ridiculed, condemned, treated with disgust and contempt. He was going to be shamed. Everything that his narcissistic manager part was trying to avoid is going to now come crashing down on his head. There’s a principle in Internal Family Systems that when a part acts autonomously, when it’s acting separate from the core self, when it’s acting as a loose cannon, when it’s taking over the self, when it’s not guided by the core self, when it’s loose cannon, when it’s just driven by its passions, that part always winds up getting exactly what it’s trying to avoid, right? So this part, this narcissistic manager, part of of Judas is trying to avoid shame. It’s trying to avoid feeling inferior. And look what it just heaped upon itself. Why? Because it used totally illegitimate means. So Judas runs back to the priests. He runs back to the temple. He is now going to return the money.

[00:54:08] And there’s this defense of undoing. Undoing is an unconscious effort to counterbalance some affect, usually guilt or shame, with an attitude or behavior that’s supposed to magically erase it. In German, this is called rückgängig machen. And what we’re talking about here is basically transliterated, if you just translate that German directly where it came from, making unhappen. Right? The fantasy is that if I do this thing, it’ll unhappen. So in taking the money back to the priests, I think there were a number of things going on. I think Judas wanted to make his betrayal unhappen, right, to wash it away, to make it as if it had never happened. But I also think he was trying to make a human connection. He was looking for human content. But the priests were very direct. They said, it’s blood money. No bones about it. Yep, you sold them for the price of a slave and we’re gonna kill them. There was no empathy for Judas. They had used Judas and discarded him. And the priests did not want to see the remorse of Judas, because that remorse might activate in them their own guilt, their own shame. It might start troubling their consciences. So you don’t want to see that remorse in this apostle of Jesus. You got to get rid of him. So what did they do? They shamed Judas. They compounded Judas’s misery. And they brought him another step closer to despair.

[00:55:35] Right? They can’t put the blood money in the treasury because it’s so tainted. Right? So they buy the potter’s field with it. Now, what kind of thoughts are running through Judas’s head at this point? Jesus will never forgive me. Jesus, this is too huge. I have betrayed Jesus. Judas, he couldn’t imagine the love of Jesus at this time because he was casting Jesus in his own image and likeness. He was looking at how he would react, not how Jesus, true God, true man, would react. So what’s happening? Right? Beliefs that I’ve ruined everything. There’s no hope for me. I’m horrible. I’m evil. I can’t bear the shame. I can’t bear the humiliation, the loss of my reputation, the scorn that is waiting for me, the rejection, the condemnation, the infamy. All of that is going to come crashing down. I am the killer of Jesus. I am Jesus’s murderer. That’s how I will be remembered for all time. Notice how Judas continues to rely on his own strength, on his own knowledge. He’s trying to be big. He totally misunderstands God. He’s blind. He’s confused. He’s lost. He is not praying. He doesn’t reach out to the people who can really help him. He doesn’t reach out to Mary, his mother. He doesn’t reach out to the other apostles. He doesn’t reach out to anyone other than his co-conspirators in the murder of Jesus.

[00:57:20] And despair is now here as the murder weapon. What does he do? He hangs himself with a halter. Now, what is a halter? Right. Not everybody knows what a halter is. A halter is the straps. It’s the headgear that’s used to lead or tie up livestock. It’s like like a bridle almost. It’s like what you put around the head of a cow or a sheep. And here on the farm, here at Nourishing Acres, we use halters, especially for our milk cow and calves, and we’ve also used them at times for sheep. Halters are used to guide and lead animals, right? They really help in guiding and leading animals. Now, what’s the symbolism here? Judas put the halter on himself. Judas led himself to death. He led himself to his own destruction. Judas would not let himself be led by the Good Shepherd. He did not listen. He did not pray. He relied on his own understanding. He relied on the limited, distorted perceptions of his narcissistic parts. He looked at their distorted images of God. He looked at his own autonomy as what was going to save the Jewish people, his own agency, his own actions. I think he had good intentions. I think there were good intentions in Judas. I don’t think he was totally evil, but he used sinful means. He was driven by parts that were not connected with his core self, that were not integrated, that had that limited vision, and that used sinful means, even if their intentions were good.

[00:58:59] And I’m not saying all of his intentions were good. Now what do we know? There was a huge possibility of redemption here. Judas could have been the hero of the greatest comeback story ever if he had repented. Judas had the opportunity for the greatest repentance ever. There was the real loss. That’s why I think Jesus let him get into that situation, because there was still the possibility of repentance. I remember when I was five years old and thinking that that Judas was very, very, very naughty and sort of having the sense of self-satisfaction that he killed himself, that my mom said, well, I hope that he repented. I hope that when he was hanging on that halter, that he made an act of contrition. I hope that he’s in heaven now. My mom is a tender-hearted soul, right? She’s really warm, really loving. I remember thinking, that’s just strange. You know, I remember thinking, you know, that’s pretty unlikely. And I think it’s hard to know. We don’t know definitively that anybody is in hell. Dante isn’t the last word on this. But given some of the things that Jesus said, you know, for example, that in Matthew 26:24, when he was speaking of Judas, it goes like this. Jesus says, “The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would have been better for that man if he had never been born.”

[01:00:40] Now, that’s always been really troubling to me. So, you know, it would be better if he wasn’t born. So why did you let him be born? It seems like you’re setting him up. It seems unfair. Here’s the answer. Right? All things work together for good for those who love the Lord. If Judas had loved the Lord, he could have made good out of even the betrayal of Jesus to death. That’s how awesome this could have been. That’s how amazing this could have been. Judas was at the high stakes table. And lots of times when people have complex trauma, when they have difficult histories, they’re at the high stakes table. There were graces flowing onto Judas. Jesus himself reaching out to him at the Last Supper in ways that were so clearly recorded in the Gospels. Grace is abounding. Parts operating on their own, like this narcissistic manager part of Judas, they become our own worst perpetrators. They can really harm us. We have to govern our internal systems from our core self and be integrated. And the other thing that comes out of this is that highly traumatized people, because I believe that was the case, especially if, you know, especially if Judas was an illegitimate son of a dancer and a military officer, that was a terrible place to grow up from, in Israel. You know, you’re going to catch a lot of flack.

[01:02:16] There’s going to be a lot of shame about that. Nevertheless, highly traumatized people are still morally responsible for their actions. You don’t get a pass because you happen to have been traumatized. So God knows. He knows our weakness. He knows our faults. He is loving us with every fiber of his being. He’s loving us. The road to hell, though, can still be paved with good intentions if we use wrong means, if we let ourselves be dominated by our passions, if we let ourselves be dominated by parts of us that are operating autonomously. All right, so now we have a practical exercise. I’m going to invite you to look at the Judas in you, especially the narcissism. It’s not necessarily in everybody, right? I’m not saying everybody has narcissism, but we all seem to have parts that do defend against shame, and often use means that are maladaptive. I wonder if we can get below that to the need for approval, the need to be admired, the need to be big, the need to be important. I talked a little bit about that earlier in this podcast, about how my good boy part had a need to know, right, to find safety in always doing the right thing in order to please this remote God.

[01:03:53] How do you do with the idea of being inadequate, unable to save yourself, needing the love of God, being dependent on God? How does that, how do you react to that? What happens inside? What happens in your body? To think of yourself as being so dependent, like a sheep, like a child. How does that land with you? To be small, to be weak, to need help, to know that you’re not perfect, to know that you’re fragmented, that there’s parts that aren’t integrated very well. What does that bring up for you? What are the impulses that go with that? What is it that parts want to do to compensate for that if they’re acting on their own? What means are they wanting to take? And most importantly, how do they see God? We can invite these parts of us to join with the core self. We can invite these parts of us to not take on the responsibility of leading and directing our lives. That can take time. That’s a big focus of IFS. It’s really that part of it’s really consistent with Catholicism. And that’s what we’re learning about here on these podcasts. How about your sins, the things that you have felt guilty about or ashamed of, the things you’ve tried not to think about, that you’ve tried to hide from yourself and from God?

[01:06:02] Do you really think they’re worse than what Judas did? Do you really think they’re worse than betraying Christ and sending him to his crucifixion? Remember how Jesus treated Judas, with what love and what gentleness, with what compassion? Let’s look at Jesus. Let’s look at Mary, our mother. Let’s see the love of God our Father that is bigger than whatever sins we’ve committed. God’s love is bigger than our unlove. God’s love is bigger than our lack of love. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. God’s love is bigger than that. Bigger than murder, bigger than rape, bigger than abuse, bigger than extramarital affairs, fornication, pornography, masturbation. There’s nothing there that can’t be forgiven. All of these can be forgiven if we approach the love of God, if we stop looking just at ourselves, if we don’t just get caught up in looking inside, looking inwardly, just getting trapped within ourselves. We need to break out of ourselves and approach God with confidence in him. Not confidence in us. Confidence in his love. Because otherwise, in our despair, in our hopelessness, what we’re saying is that our badness, our sinfulness is bigger than God’s love. That’s what we’re saying. And we don’t want to say that. So let’s focus on the love of Jesus. Look at how he loved Judas, how he stayed with him till the very end. And let’s make the decision that we’ll trust God enough to bring him whatever it is that we feel is so wrong, so bad in our lives.

[01:08:06] Let’s trust that he’s bigger than that. So next week, in our next episode, instead of discussing a story of shame and tragedy, we’re going to discuss a story of shame and redemption. We’re getting it into the story of Saint Peter. We’re going to look at the difference between Saint Peter and Judas. And I’m also going to do a little bonus tidbit episode on Saint Dismas, the thief on the cross next to Jesus. I’m also going to discuss his story. That’s going to be in a bonus podcast that’s just for Resilient Catholics Community members. So that’s another reason to get on the waiting list. You know, to get ready. You’ll have access to that once you’re able to join the community. I’m super excited about the Resilient Catholics Community. I’m going through this process right now about focusing it on healing. The whole community is about removing psychological obstacles to loving and being loved. It’s about your core self really leading your parts in this integrated, ordered, governed, loving way. It’s about being together too, in community, as Christians, as Catholics on this journey, on this mission, to really enter into an intimate personal relationship with Jesus Christ as our brother, with the Holy Spirit who is Love himself, and with our spiritual parents, God the Father and Mary our Mother. It’s about sharing our experiences on this journey.

[01:09:37] It’s about sharing our experiences in this mission together. God has called us together as a people, as one body in Christ. We need each other. God intends to use us to help each other along the road. So get on the waiting list at soulsandhearts.com/rccd so that you’ll get information before the general public does. I’m going to be reaching out to people on the waiting list soon. We’ve got some people that are already there. Thank you for being there. I’m going to be reaching out to you soon. And you can also share this podcast, you know, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Amazon, put it out there on social media. Let other people know, especially people that you think could really get this. You can also reach out to me at (317) 567-9594. That’s my cell phone. Or at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Last Wednesday, December 9th, we had a great discussion in the community about shame in the spiritual life. It was really focused on parts, really focused on how do we work with these parts. People are getting it. It’s making sense to so many people about how our parts cope with shame, and how does that impact our prayer life? How does that impact our God images? How does that impact our personal relationship with Christ and with each other? All right. And so with that, we’ll call upon our patroness and our patron. O Mary, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.