October 28, 2019 – 1 Corinthians 2:8

None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
—1 Corinthians 2:8

In thinking of [Judas] we must start from this, that Christ loved Judas.26 Christ believed in Judas, Christ chose Judas, with prayer and deliberation, as one of the Twelve whom he loved best to have beside him and of whom he hoped the most. Judas was a great soul—or had the makings. And when we come upon that horror, scarcely human, lying mangled there at the cliff foot, we look up and, with a shudder, see how high he once walked and from what he fell.
The gospel writers are, frankly, not fair to their fallen colleague. Always that ghastly end of his is there before their eyes, and from the very first they find it difficult to mention him without adding, “who betrayed him” (Matt. 10:4).
So doing, unconsciously they leave the impression that [Judas] was chosen for the traitor’s part, as an actor is cast to be the villain and is marked villain from the start. But it was far more terrible than that. It is a most noble nature that we watch crumble to ruin. How did it happen and Christ’s confident dreams and hopes for him go out in such a starless night?
Some say that Judas’s sin was rather this—that Christ’s prolonged delay amazed him—set his mind arguing, “Isn’t there here a lack of nerve? Doesn’t he see the tide is at the full, and he must launch out now? That it is turning, that if anything is ever to be done, then it must be at once?” And still Christ let chance after chance, as Judas judged, go by and waited—and for what? Things were not growing better but much worse. The opposition of the leaders had been given time to harden. The people had lost much of that first passion of enthusiasm with which, had it been seized at once and rightly used, anything might have been done. Christ was drifting, Judas felt, straight on the rocks. But vigorous action even yet might save the situation, and he planned to bring Christ to a test that he could not evade, to place him in a position that would lay compulsion on him to take action. He had lost patience with Christ, thought his plans were bungling and crude and clumsy and by far too slow. Judas was looking for a shortcut; he thought that he had found it; he took it—and it ended in that horror and the cross!
—Arthur John Gossip