"I relate most to Judas"

The sobering power of a relatable villain / Holy Week

Lamps flickered cheerily in the room as two friends and I sat talking. We chatted about college studies, latest reads, and other topics until someone asked: “Which disciple do you relate to most from the gospels?”

One of my friends said Peter, citing his constant see-sawing from spiritual highs and spiritual lows. If my memory serves me correctly, the other said John.

“I think I relate most to Judas,” I said.

(In hindsight, I should have explained my reasoning before that announcement. Their expressions at the moment are not to be forgotten.)

Yet in some ways, it’s a position I still hold years later. That “which also betrayed him” disciple haunts me with how easily our places could have been switched.

And I can point very easily to the reason why: the masterpiece that is Dorothy Sayers’ The Man Born to Be King.

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I was introduced to this cycle of twelve plays through a happy accident. Years ago, I received an unexpected gift certificate to Classical Academic Press.

After sorting through a few astronomy books that looked interesting, I still had $20, and The Man Born to Be King showed up on their page of books as a recommendation to read.

Since then, my worn copy of Sayers’ plays has traveled its way across oceans time and time again. Beginning in 2023, I’ve followed C.S. Lewis’ example and incorporated it into my Lenten devotions each year.

Throughout Holy Week, I aim to walk the ancient story alongside The Man Born to Be King. Palm Sunday finds me at the eighth play, Royal Progress. Maundy Thursday I read The King’s Supper and The Princes of this World; Good Friday is marked by The King of Sorrow; Holy Saturday—and this is crucial—I read nothing, only to greet Easter Sunday with the majestic victory of The King Comes to His Own.

It’s a hallowing tradition that makes this week one of my favorites of the entire year. The greatest of all stories lives around me, fills my dreams, echoes in every quiet moment.

But through the crowds shouting hosanna and the glorious beauty of the high priestly prayer, there’s Judas.

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Sayers first brings Judas Iscariot into the second of her twelve plays, The King’s Herald. She imagines him as a disciple of John the Baptist’s, only coming to Jesus in the fourth play, The Heirs to the Kingdom.

He then remains onstage for all but the last two plays, which occur after his death. That means that a full two-thirds of The Man Born to Be King is, to a significant extent, dedicated to exploring Judas’ character.

Sayers slowly and intentionally chronicles each step in his downward spiral. She gives in-depth notes for actors and directors concerning his motivations, his fears, his desires.

She gives him the dignity of being human.

And it is terrifying.

Let the actor get out of his head any notion that Judas is insincere, Sayers writes in her notes before the fourth play. He is passionately sincere. He means to be faithful—and he will be faithful—to the light which he sees so brilliantly. What he sees is the true light—only he does not see it directly, but only its reflection in the mirror of his own brain; and in the end that mirror will twist and distort the reflection and send it dancing away over the bog like a will o’ the wisp.¹

She continues this theme in her notes before the eighth play: He makes it clear that what he admired in Jesus was not really Jesus at all, but only the projection of his own ideas in another person—“my dreams—my prayers—all I had ever imagined”.²

Judas as Sayers depicts him is a genius. He understands things that send the rest of the disciples staggering; he glimpses, in some complex way, the need for a substitutionary atonement.

He could have been, Sayers says, the greatest of saints. In his fall, therefore, he is the greatest of sinners.

It is this about Judas that so haunts me. Like Judas, pride is constantly lurking near me. Yet through The Man Born to Be King, Sayers is there, too, ready to counter each of pride’s suggestion with the reminder that potential is just that—potential.

Potential for good is just the same as potential for evil.

(Wasn’t Lucifer the most beautiful of the angels, before the fall? And again, again, that same sin tore him down—pride.)

Any time I consider my way of telling the world’s story as better than God’s; any time I put too much trust in my ability to understand, to reason, to follow—I am dancing near the edge of a cliff that has no bottom.

In her notes about the horrifying last hours of Judas’ life, Sayers writes this:

He sees the truth about himself—the itch for suffering that was only an inverted cruelty; the refusal to believe in innocence that was rooted in the envy and hatred of innocence; the farther he goes, the more he finds hatred—he hates Caiaphas and Jesus and God and himself. He sees the truth, not only about himself, but about sin—he sees the need for the untainted priest and the spotless sacrifice; he even knows obscurely who is the untainted Priest and Victim who could do for him what Caiaphas cannot do—but he cannot be saved because he will not be saved. He goes on, down and down to the lowest pit of all, where sits the devil of pride and makes the sin unforgivable because the sinner resents and hates and refuses the forgiveness. At the bottom of that pit is only himself and his self-hatred, and here there is no place for repentance.³

Even the demons believe, St. James tells us—and shudder.⁴ Intellect is not enough. Genius is not enough.

Salvation and faith and repentance all require humility, and that is the one thing that Judas cannot muster.

What an ironic fall, from the world’s eyes. The only thing that could have saved him is something they would have laughed at, something to hide in dimly-lit corners. All those qualities that the world applauded—his rhetoric, his brilliance, his insight—they can do nothing.

In the end, they are the very things that make him fall. To a soul without humility, a gift is a very dangerous thing.

“Is God merciful?” Judas asks Caiaphas, moments before his death. “Can He forgive? … What help is that?—Jesus would forgive. If I crawled to the gallows’ foot and asked for his pardon, he would forgive me—and my soul would writhe for ever under the torment of that forgiveness…”⁵

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There’s a trend in modern fiction to glorify the villains, and in some ways, it’s a troubling trend. Sin is brushed aside as nothing. Explanations are confused with excuses, when they’re two radically different things.

Yet despite the troubling turns it can take, a relatable villain is a uniquely powerful piece in a storyteller’s hand. Rather than excusing the villain, it indicts the audience along with them.

You and I, who carry Adam’s blood in our veins, are capable of just as great horrors as we are of glories.

We need stories to remind us of this.

We need stories to warn us of just how far we could fall, just how easily little acts of pride or selfishness could spiral into monstrosities.

I could have been Judas.

You could have been Judas.

Let us praise God for his mercy that we’re not—and beg for his grace to keep us from it still.

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Today is Maundy Thursday. Some sources claim that the word maundy comes from the Latin mandatum, referring to the mandate (or command) of Jesus found in John 13:34:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. (John 13:34, ESV)

As we remember the washing of the disciples’ feet, the Last Supper, the prayer in Gethsemane—and, yes, the traitorous kiss of Judas—let us glory in the love of our Savior. Let us seek to love each other with the same humility found in the God-become-man—the humility that never had a home in Judas Iscariot.

By his wounds, we are healed.

Happy Easter, my friends.

1. Dorothy Sayers, The Man Born to Be King, Classical Academic Press, p.100

2. Ibid, p.195

3. Ibid, p.250

4. James 2:19

5. Ibid, p.261