Jesus said to him, “Do quickly what you are going to do.” Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the common purse, Jesus was telling him, “Buy what we need for the festival”; or, that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.
John 13:27b-30
You just knew it was going to be like this. Judas’ demeanor from the beginning made it seem inevitable. He clearly thought he knew better, that Jesus was impossibly naive, and that the rest of the disciples were either feeble-minded or sycophants. He kept the self righteous smugness under wraps most of the time, but you could see it at the corners of his mouth whenever Peter got earnest or Thomas seemed needy. It’s a wonder that this didn’t happen sooner.
Maybe Jesus had a plan all along. Maybe he timed things out like an Olympian running some long distance race and saving his kick for the last stretch. Jesus seems clever enough for sure, but his temperament is not that of a schemer. He’s more of a “let the situation develop” kind of guy. So Jesus must have seen an opening, or maybe — more accurately — a closing. He’d done just about all he was going to do in this lifetime.
Not that Jesus was incapable of doing more. Sure, he could have precipitated the collapse of the empire. He could have created a new kingdom centered in Jerusalem and bent the course of humanity around his will. Judas may have initially been gratified by something like that, saying, “See! I knew you could do it!” But Christ knows that someone with a mind as critical as Judas would sooner or later grow disillusioned in a place where there is no darkness at all, particularly if he did not come to that place by his own choice. For better or worse, the Judases of the world would need to experience the night for themselves.
Not that we, who probably all have a little bit of Judas in us, have to stumble through the darkness forever. The gates of the City of God are famously never closed, and there is a certain kind of grace in the fact that we are always invited but not ever forced to enter them. Still, going out into the night never winds up being quite as fun as it look on TV. Even Judas discovered the deficits of a life without Jesus pretty quickly, but that was probably inevitable too.