Hanging with Judas

I have an eclectic group of friends. Or, I should say, groups of friends. Yet within each one, we keep talking about trust issues and friends who betray us. I've been struggling with that a lot lately. Not as in being the betrayer, but as in being betrayed. I kind of got mad at God about it, wondering how, yet again, I open up to trust someone, and I get stabbed in the back. So in conversations with these friends, I find they're all in the same place with someone else. Wondering how and why they let themselves get suckered in to a friendship that took so much out of them.

I've done a lot of traveling lately, and I'm finding the plane is a great place to read the Bible. So God and I have been using that time to chat about some things. He pointed out something interesting I hadn't ever realized before. Judas. We all know about Judas, and how he betrayed Jesus. What hit me, though, is that Jesus KNEW what Judas was going to do. I don't know at what point he knew, but can you imagine, knowing someone would betray you and allowing them to be one of your closest friends anyway? Jesus could have picked any number of people to be among the twelve. He didn't have to pick the guy who'd sell him out. But he did.

It had to take a lot of love to choose someone who ended up harming you. It had to take a lot of love to live with the knowledge of future betrayal and treat him no differently than the faithful ones. Even if Jesus didn't know until that night, it still took a lot of love to humble himself and wash the feet of a man who helped sign his death warrant.

I wish I had that kind of love.

Right now, my stomach is in knots. My heart aches. And I feel like the dumbest person in the world for letting someone treat me like this. I get angry every time I hear her name. Every time I see her doing what I suspect can only be what she'd done to me, to someone else. I hate how much I dislike this person. I hate how little she cares. I hate how after all we've been through, she can pretend I don't exist. I hate how, to my knowledge, I have done nothing to her, she acts like I am the worst of all enemies. I hate how, despite my attempts to talk to her about it, she pretends nothing is wrong.

There's a lot of ugliness in me right now. A friend of mine was describing similar ugliness in her heart, and I thought, yeah, I know that feeling. I have it too. The hate and rage just boils inside me.

Except that isn't what Jesus did. Maybe he thought about what Judas would look like, drawn and quartered, the stench of his burning intestines filling the air. But probably not. He just loved Judas.

Lord, make me more like you, because I certainly don't know how to love the Judas in my life.