The Greatest Saint Meets The Greatest Criminal Series

Wednesday of Holy Week 2025

Is it possible for the greatest criminal not to know he’s doing evil? Today we have a case study from Scripture on the greatest saint who ever lived, and the greatest sinner. The saint, of course, is Our Lord Jesus Christ. The sinner—and we are all sinners, after all—was Judas Iscariot. The Scripture readings this week all seem to touch on this wretched man’s life and doings.

We don’t know what was going through Judas’ mind as he took the bread and wine offered by Jesus as His Body and Blood, but we can be pretty certain that he didn’t think he was doing evil. He was doing something that subjectively seemed to move him toward some objective that he saw as good in a way. Nobody does evil in order to do evil. The thief steals in order to increase his net financial worth. The adulterer fornicates in order to have some good feeling. Even the murderer takes a human life, thinking it will make his own life better. Judas, like all of us, made bad decisions from stupid thinking.

Our first reading is one of the Isaian “servant songs” and is rightly placed in the heart and mind of Our Lord. We see that God has given Him a tongue of those who are successfully taught. The end result is with one word, He can prop up someone who is weary. He can just with a word keep the other from collapse. How does one achieve that objective, that master stroke of counseling? The answer comes right away: “Morning by morning he wakens, he wakens my ear to hear as those who are taught. The Lord GOD has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I turned not backward.” In other words, to achieve that end, we must learn to shut up and listen. Otherwise, our words will all fall on deaf ears.

Jesus listens to the weary and then gives them one Word to sustain them. What is that Word? Right at the beginning of his Gospel, John the evangelist tells us. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Word became flesh and pitched His tent among us. The closer one finds himself to Jesus Christ, the more this Eternal Word can sustain us, even when we are too weary and beaten down to stand up.

The remainder of this chapter from Isaiah tells us what we can endure when we have the Word of God internalized in our minds and hearts. That would be beatings or floggings, beard-pulling (have you ever had someone tug out hair from your skin without an anesthetic?). Also being shamed by someone’s words, to the point of enduring his spit. If the Word sustains us, then Jesus Christ Himself stands near us to support us.

The psalmist today keeps that idea going. The Servant is being persecuted, even by His relatives. Nobody pities Him; no one comforts Him. He is insulted. This man is the crucified Jesus, isn’t He? Now we go to the key event in the relationship between Jesus and Judas Iscariot, the Last Supper, as the evangelist Matthew remembers it.

It is Passover, the most solemn time of the Jewish liturgical year. The seder meal commemorates the last meal their ancestors shared in Egypt, before those slaves were released by Pharaoh. But it’s not just a nostalgic recalling of something happening long ago to people they don’t really remember. Each Passover is celebrated as though today’s Jews were going through it today. The commemoration makes real the anticipation, anxiety and relief felt by those about to be set free.

That would be particularly meaningful for Jesus and His disciples because Jesus has been preparing them for a new experience of liberation. It would be a liberation from sin, once and for all effected as this Passover, begun on a Thursday night, continues through the sacrifice of the true Lamb of God, Jesus Messiah, in His arrest, phony trials, Via Dolorosa, and crucifixion. It would only conclude when Jesus, almost dead from pain and blood loss, cries “I thirst” and takes the sour wine from a hyssop branch-sponge given by a Roman guard. Only then, when He takes for the last time in this life the fruit of the vine He has longed for, can Jesus say, “It is finished,” and conclude His last Supper, His final Passover.

As we participate in the coming liturgies of the “Three days” let’s make this not just a memory of a movie or a compelling Scripture lesson, but rather a re-presentation of the greatest day given us by the greatest Man for the greatest goal. Let’s let go of our own wants and desires and even needs, and walk with Jesus again on the path toward our own theosis, our own becoming like Christ.