22 March 1989
Abruzzo, Italy

My dear Sisters and my dear Nurses,

The Gospel this evening is a sad one, for it tells the story of how a man, who was a close friend of Jesus Christ and who, for some obscure motives known only to himself, facilitated the arrest and execution of Jesus Christ. The whole of the Christian world condemns Judas for what he did. For the Christian, Judas will remain for all time the classic example of what it means to betray a friend. Mention the name of Judas Iscariot to any Christian, and the word betrayer will enter his or her mind at once. When listing the twelve Apostles, all the evangelists place his name in the last place and rather sadly add the phrase, "who also betrayed Him."

St. Vincent often said, quoting St. Francis de Sales, that if an action of a person presented one hundred different interpretations, we should try to take the most favorable one. Reflecting on Judas, who figures so prominently in the Gospel of this evening, could I say something in his defence or, if not in his defence, at least to help us to better understand him and his dismal betrayal of Jesus Christ, "to know all is to forgive all"?

Is there anything we could know about Judas Iscariot that would make it easier for us to forgive him for what he did? Sometimes I reflect on the priest character in a novel I read once: the priest as he sets out on his bicycle to do his parish rounds always prays a Hail Mary for the soul of Judas Iscariot. Certainly Our Lord used no harsh words against Judas when they met each other for the last time in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus just posed one simple, searching, question: "Dost thou betray the Son of Man with a kiss?" That question is not the utterance of an unforgiving person. These are the last recorded words that Jesus addressed to Judas, words that are less terrifying than those He had spoken earlier about the sin which Judas would commit in betraying the Son of God.

"To know all is to forgive all," we say. Once I read an article by a psychologist who was using his skills on the twelve Apostles. This author made the suggestion that, of all the apostles, Judas alone was from the south of the country, all the others were from the north of Palestine. Perhaps because of this, the author suggested, Judas felt himself a little bit outside the community and, to compensate for his sense of isolation, he began with petty thefts first and ended by asserting himself in the betrayal of Jesus to His enemies. Regardless of the correctness of the psychologist's report on Judas, we would do well to reflect on what we might be doing to someone whom we tend to ignore or isolate, simply because we consider her odd or because she sees things differently from the way we see them.

As for our own betrayals of Jesus Christ, they are in the last analysis an assertion of ourselves against Him or against others or against what we know to be His Will for us. We want this or that, so we make things difficult for this or that person. Often, while we may have an uneasy feeling that our motives are basically selfish, we press ahead nonetheless.

Whatever our betrayals in the past have been, great or small, they can be the experience out of which conversion comes. It was so with Peter. For Peter, his betrayal of Jesus Christ spelled out repentance and a deeper attachment to the person of Jesus Christ. For Judas, betrayal spelled out only remorse.

Remorse and repentance, there is a world of difference between them, a difference of heaven and of hell. My prayer for all of us this evening is that we will see more clearly that in betraying Jesus Christ, we betray ourselves. We hand ourselves over to something that is of much less value than the upward call of our vocation in Christ Jesus. In betraying Him, we are betraying much more than the material purse He entrusted to Judas. For He continues to hand Himself over to us in Holy Communion. He continues to give us a privileged vocation of special service to the sick poor: privileged because He gives it only to a minority of the baptized, and specialized because your service is to His poor, whom He regarded and still regards as a special category of people in His Kingdom.