Judas is the quintessential villain of the Bible. He was in Jesus’ inner circle, one of the trusted 12, yet he betrayed Jesus – he sold his master for a few coins, then in guilt he killed himself. We love to hate him. Peter, on the other hand, is the clumsy but loveable sidekick: passionate and rash, he often puts his foot in it but he has a good heart. We see a lot of ourselves in Peter and we love to love him.
It’s easy to assume that Judas was doomed from the start, rotten at the core, and that’s why he met a sticky end. Yet he and Peter are more similar than we realise.
For a start, they were probably good friends. As disciples of Jesus they would have shared bread and wine together; slept alongside one another; talked, laughed, cried, prayed, bathed, dressed and travelled together as they shared life on the road over many weeks and months. The Gospels contain no hints that Judas was disliked or treated with suspicion by the other disciples. In fact, Judas was the keeper of the group treasury, which implies great trust in him (we’re told in John 12:6 that Judas wasn’t so honest with the money in his keeping, but there’s no indication that the other disciples knew this). Certainly it’s unlikely he would have been among Jesus’ closest companions if he was simply the evil, one-dimensional baddie we so often like to paint.
Both Judas and Peter also sinned. Obviously they did, they were human – that’s one of the things that makes the disciples so relatable! But both of these guys messed up big-time, personally letting Jesus down: Judas betrayed Him (Luke 22:1-5) and Peter denied Him (Luke 22:57-62).
So there’s good and bad in both men; so far, so similar. Yet look at the difference in their lives after their big mess-ups: Peter went on to be a passionate leader of the early church, eagerly obedient to Jesus’ great commission, while Judas died a cowardly and messy death alone in a field.
So what’s the lesson here? What did Peter do differently from Judas? It seems to come down to this: it’s not about your sin, it’s about how you respond when you’re confronted with it.
At the moment when Peter realised that Jesus’ prediction of his desertion was accurate, he broke down and wept (Matt 26:75). He’s portrayed as being genuinely sorry for his disloyalty and lack of courage. Certainly his sorrow led to repentance – a literal ‘turning around’ – as he went on to be hugely influential in the spread of Christianity and eventually died for his loyalty to Jesus. And when meeting with Jesus after His resurrection, Peter is keen to stress how much he loves Him (John 21).
Yet when Judas realised the weight of his betrayal he simply wallowed in remorse and despair, running wretchedly from the temple with no money, no friends and no pride. Worried more by the consequences of his actions than the wrong attitude that motivated them, Judas went straight to a field and killed himself, overwhelmed by shame (Matt 27).
Judas let his sin crush him, and he ran away from Jesus in his guilt and fear. Peter let his sin convict him, and he ran towards Jesus knowing forgiveness could be found.
At the end of the day we can’t guarantee we won’t mess up, but we can decide where we’re going to run when we do. So that’s the question: who are you going to be like? When sin calls to you, when you give in, when you slip up and get it wrong – where will you run to? To the world, to despair? Or, like Peter, will you run to Jesus?
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