betrayer

Reading the Biblical narratives around Judas I do find myself asking whether there is ever a point at which God just gives up on us, where we are so totally sold out to evil and so totally unlovable that we are consigned as wastage in the human race. I cannot find that place. The God which the New Testament presents is not a God who gives up easily. Even if you go back to the vengeful and seemingly angry God of the Old Testament - God clings on to God's people, even as they do everything in their power to squirm away from both love and covenant.
And then there is Judas who, at face value anyway, seems to put himself beyond any possible redemption. Personally I find this difficult - even the man who betrays Jesus can surely be forgiven.
John is writing a cosmic narrative on a cosmic scale. His Gospel starts big - the Word which has been from the beginning, the creative force, is made human. There is a good argument that in this carefully constructed and cleverly themed Gospel the characters who appear are chosen as much for what they represent as for the part they actually play.
If Judas, in the narrative as it heads towards its climax, represents all that turns away from God, in fact the possibility of rejection of Divine love, then it perhaps makes his character and his treatment by the Gospel writers easier to understand. It may be possible for a human being to stand in the presence of God and to say no, that is, after all, the basis of both our ordinary sin and of the free choice to follow Christ. If we can say yes, then we must be able to say no.
Or perhaps Judas is simply the bad soil, one who looked to be growing healthily but in fact is rooted in the shallow earth of Judaism - a religion which is condemned by to its own rule heavy folly.
The Gospel we often proclaim in the liberal Church is a universalist sort of message - so yes everyone has the ability to say no, but really, faced with the overwhelming love and splendour of the Divine would anyone actually choose to. And so we manage the endless funerals and other difficult questions which come our way on a notion of generalized goodness and a death bed naming, or at least acknowledgement, of God.
If Judas is condemned, truly beyond salvation, it begs the question of what sort of God would allow one man out of all humanity to suffer such a lonely fate, unless there are others, unless the damned come from every walk and race as the redeemed do.
Judas raises enormous questions, not just about falability, but about the resonance and reason of redemption itself.
Of course it does not make sense, God often does not and it cannot be neatly tucked in to 500 words. But when I hear liberal theologians condemning Judas, talking about him as if he had lost it all, I wonder whether really that is a strong foundation, or the beginning of a house of cards.