The word recorded for us by Matthew about what Judas the betrayer did with Jesus in Gethsemane as a sign of his handing him over to the Jews: \"Greetings, Rabbi!, and kissed him\u201d (26:49), crushes me. Greetings and a kiss in the service of crime! It is the world's disgrace for love's eyes to be extinguished or for love to turn into a dagger in our hands. People do betray. Yet, throughout history, there has never existed a man who pointed to another in this way, and walked with those who believed him to be a \u201ccriminal\u201d. When people wish to seize someone, upon seeing him, they cry out loudly: \"He's the one!\" or they apprehend him forcibly... Judas did not commit suicide only when he \u201changed himself\u201d, but first on the day he became blind to believing that love is a Person! Jesus was killed by two things: hatred, that is, here, the Jews' apprehension of Him as being a threat to their nation, and the refusal to believe that there is a love in this world worth for us to die for. This world, into which we emerged after Pascha, nothing protects us from its hatred like sincerely living a life of love!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The word recorded for us by Matthew about what Judas the betrayer did with Jesus in Gethsemane as a sign of his handing him over to the Jews: \"Greetings, Rabbi!, and kissed him\u201d (26:49), crushes me. Greetings and a kiss in the service of crime! It is the world's disgrace for love's eyes to be ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[343],"tags":[1740,361,1741,1742,1252,447,1743],"class_list":["post-9330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-betrayal","tag-church","tag-judas-iscariot","tag-love-and-hate","tag-orthodox-christianity","tag-orthodox-church","tag-pascha-reflection"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}