Judas Iscariot
Among the disciples of Christ, so open and understandable at first glance, Judas of Kariot stands out not only for his notoriety, but also for the duality of his appearance: his face seems to be sewn from two halves. One side of the face is constantly moving, dotted with wrinkles, with a black, sharp eye, the other is deathly smooth and seems disproportionately large from the wide open, blind, eyesore-covered eye.
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When he appeared, none of the apostles noticed. What made Jesus bring him closer to himself and what attracts this Judas to the Teacher are also unanswered questions. Peter, John, Thomas look - and are unable to comprehend this closeness of beauty and ugliness, meekness and vice - the closeness of Christ and Judas sitting next to each other at the table.
Many times the apostles asked Judas what compelled him to commit bad deeds, and he answered with a grin: every person has sinned at least once. Judas’ words are almost similar to what Christ tells them: no one has the right to condemn anyone. And the apostles faithful to the Teacher humble their anger at Judas: “It’s nothing that you are so ugly. Even less ugly ones are caught in our fishing nets!”
“Tell me, Judas, was your father a good man?” - “Who was my father? The one who whipped me with a rod? Or the devil, the goat, the rooster? How can Judas know everyone with whom his mother shared her bed?”
Judas' answer shocks the apostles: whoever dishonors his parents is doomed to destruction! “Tell me, are we good people?” - “Ah, they are tempting poor Judas, they are offending Judas!” - the red-haired man from Kariot grimaces.
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In one village they are accused of stealing a kid, knowing that Judas is walking with them. In another village, after Christ’s preaching, they wanted to stone Him and His disciples; Judas rushed at the crowd, shouting that the Teacher was not at all possessed by a demon, that He was just a deceiver who loved money, just like him, Judas, and the crowd humbled themselves: “These strangers are not worthy to die at the hands of an honest man!”
Jesus leaves the village in anger, walking away from it with long strides; the disciples follow Him at a respectful distance, cursing Judas. “Now I believe that your father is the devil,” Thomas throws him in the face. Fools! He saved their lives, but they once again did not appreciate him...
Once at a halt, the apostles decided to have fun: measuring their strength, they lifted stones from the ground - who was bigger? - and are thrown into the abyss. Judas lifts the heaviest piece of rock. His face shines with triumph: now it is clear to everyone that he, Judas, is the strongest, the most beautiful, the best of the twelve. “Lord,” Peter prays to Christ, “I don’t want Judas to be the strongest. Help me defeat him! - “Who will help Iscariot?” - Jesus answers sadly.
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Judas, appointed by Christ to keep all their savings, hides several coins - this is revealed. The students are indignant. Judas is brought to Christ - and He again stands up for him: “No one should count how much money our brother has embezzled. Such reproaches offend him.” In the evening at dinner, Judas is cheerful, but what makes him happy is not so much the reconciliation with the apostles, but the fact that the Teacher again singled him out from the general crowd: “How can a man who was kissed so much today for stealing not be cheerful? If I had not stolen, would John have known what love for one's neighbor is? Isn’t it fun to be a hook on which one hangs damp virtue to dry, and another hangs moth-spent intelligence?”
The sorrowful last days of Christ are approaching. Peter and John are arguing about which of them is more worthy in the Kingdom of Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Teacher - the cunning Judas points out to each his primacy. And then, when asked how he still thinks in good conscience, he proudly answers: “Of course, I do!” The next morning he goes to the high priest Anna, offering to bring the Nazarene to trial. Anna is well aware of Judas's reputation and drives him away for several days in a row; but, fearing rebellion and interference from the Roman authorities, he contemptuously offers Judas thirty pieces of silver for the Teacher’s life. Judas is indignant: “You don’t understand what they are selling you! He is kind, he heals the sick, he is loved by the poor! This price means that for a drop of blood you give only half an obol, for a drop of sweat - a quarter of an obol... And His screams? And the moans? What about the heart, lips, eyes? You want to rob me!” - “Then you won’t get anything.” Hearing such an unexpected refusal, Judas is transformed: he must not concede the right to the life of Christ to anyone, but there will certainly be a scoundrel ready to betray Him for a buck or two...
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Judas surrounds with affection the One whom he betrayed in his last hours. He is also affectionate and helpful with the apostles: nothing should interfere with the plan, thanks to which the name of Judas will forever be called in the memory of people along with the name of Jesus! In the Garden of Gethsemane, he kisses Christ with such painful tenderness and longing that, if Jesus had been a flower, not a drop of dew would have fallen from His petals, nor would it have swayed on its thin stem from the kiss of Judas. Step by step Judas follows in the footsteps of Christ, not believing his eyes when He is beaten, condemned, and led to Calvary. The night is thickening... What is night? The sun is rising... What is the sun? Nobody shouts: “Hosanna!” No one defended Christ with weapons, although he, Judas, stole two swords from Roman soldiers and brought them to these “faithful disciples”! He is alone - until the end, until his last breath - with Jesus! His horror and dream come true. Iscariot rises from his knees at the foot of the Calvary cross. Who will snatch victory from his hands? Let all the peoples, all future generations come here at this moment - they will find only a pillory and a dead body.
Judas looks at the ground. How small she suddenly became under his feet! Time no longer moves on its own, neither in front nor behind, but, obediently, it moves in all its enormity only together with Judas, with his steps across this small earth.
He goes to the Sanhedrin and throws it in their faces like a ruler: “I deceived you! He was innocent and pure! You killed the sinless! It was not Judas who betrayed Him, but you, who betrayed you to eternal shame!”
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On this day, Judas speaks as a prophet, which the cowardly apostles do not dare: “I saw the sun today - it looked at the earth with horror, asking: “Where are the people here?” Scorpions, animals, stones - everyone echoed this question. If you tell the sea and the mountains how much people valued Jesus, they will leave their places and fall on your heads!..”
“Which of you,” Iscariot addresses the apostles, “will go with me to Jesus? You are scared! Are you saying that this was His will? Do you explain your cowardice by the fact that He ordered you to carry His word across the earth? But who will believe His word in your cowardly and unfaithful lips?
Judas “climbs the mountain and tightens the noose around his neck in full view of the whole world, completing his plan. The news of Judas the traitor spreads throughout the world. Not faster and not quieter, but along with time this news continues to fly..."
Leonid Andreev - Judas Iscariot
Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev
Judas Iscariot
1
Jesus Christ was warned many times that Judas of Kerioth was a man of very bad reputation and should be avoided. Some of the disciples who were in Judea knew him well themselves, many had heard a lot about him from people, and there was no one who could say a good word about him. And if the good ones reproached him, saying that Judas was selfish, treacherous, prone to pretense and lies, then the bad ones, who were asked about Judas, reviled him with the most cruel words. “He constantly quarrels with us,” they said, spitting, “he thinks of something of his own and gets into the house quietly, like a scorpion, and comes out of it noisily. And thieves have friends, and robbers have comrades, and liars have wives to whom they tell the truth, and Judas laughs at thieves, as well as at honest ones, although he himself steals skillfully and is uglier in appearance than all the inhabitants of Judea. No, he is not ours, this red-haired Judas from Kariot,” said the bad ones, surprising the good people, for whom there was not much difference between him and all the other vicious people of Judea.
They further said that Judas abandoned his wife a long time ago and she lives unhappy and hungry, unsuccessfully trying to squeeze out bread for food from the three stones that make up Judas’s estate. He himself wandered around senselessly among the people for many years and even reached one sea and another sea, which was even further; and everywhere he lies, grimaces, vigilantly looks out for something with his thief's eye; and suddenly leaves suddenly, leaving behind troubles and quarrels - curious, crafty and evil, like a one-eyed demon. He had no children, and this once again said that Judas was a bad person and God did not want offspring from Judas.
None of the disciples noticed when this red-haired and ugly Jew first appeared near Christ; but for a long time now he had been relentlessly following their path, interfering in conversations, providing small services, bowing, smiling and ingratiating himself. And then it became completely familiar, deceiving tired vision, then suddenly it caught the eyes and ears, irritating them, like something unprecedentedly ugly, deceitful and disgusting. Then they drove him away with stern words, and for a short time he disappeared somewhere along the road - and then quietly appeared again, helpful, flattering and cunning, like a one-eyed demon. And there was no doubt for some of the disciples that in his desire to get closer to Jesus there was hidden some secret intention, there was an evil and insidious calculation.
But Jesus did not listen to their advice; their prophetic voice did not touch his ears. With that spirit of bright contradiction that irresistibly attracted him to the rejected and unloved, he decisively accepted Judas and included him in the circle of the chosen. The disciples were worried and grumbled restrainedly, but he sat quietly, facing the setting sun, and listened thoughtfully, maybe to them, or maybe to something else. There had been no wind for ten days, and the same transparent air, attentive and sensitive, remained the same, without moving or changing. And it seemed as if he had preserved in his transparent depths everything that was shouted and sung these days by people, animals and birds - tears, crying and a cheerful song, prayer and curses; and these glassy, frozen voices made him so heavy, anxious, thickly saturated with invisible life. And once again the sun set. It rolled down like a heavy flaming ball, lighting up the sky; and everything on earth that was turned towards him: the dark face of Jesus, the walls of houses and the leaves of trees - everything obediently reflected that distant and terribly thoughtful light. The white wall was no longer white now, and the red city on the red mountain did not remain white.
And then Judas came.
He came, bowing low, arching his back, carefully and timidly stretching his ugly, lumpy head forward - and just as those who knew him imagined him to be. He was thin, of good height, almost the same as Jesus, who was slightly stooped from the habit of thinking while walking and this made him seem shorter; and he was strong enough in strength, apparently, but for some reason he pretended to be frail and sickly and had a changeable voice: sometimes courageous and strong, sometimes loud, like an old woman scolding her husband, annoyingly thin and unpleasant to the ear: and often I wanted to pull the words of Judas out of my ears like rotten, rough splinters. Short red hair did not hide the strange and unusual shape of his skull: as if cut from the back of the head with a double blow of a sword and put back together again, it was clearly divided into four parts and inspired distrust, even anxiety: behind such a skull there cannot be silence and harmony, behind such a skull there is always the sound of bloody and merciless battles can be heard. Judas’s face was also double: one side of it, with a black, sharply looking eye, was alive, mobile, willingly gathering into numerous crooked wrinkles. On the other there were no wrinkles, and it was deathly smooth, flat and frozen: and although it was equal in size to the first, it seemed huge from the wide open blind eye. Covered with a whitish haze that did not close either night or day, it met both light and darkness equally; but was it because there was a living and cunning comrade next to him that he could not believe in his complete blindness? When, in a fit of timidity or excitement, Judas closed his living eye and shook his head, this one swayed along with the movements of his head and looked silently. Even people completely devoid of insight clearly understood, looking at Iscariot, that such a person could not bring good, but Jesus brought him closer and even sat Judas next to him.
John, his beloved student, moved away with disgust, and everyone else, loving their teacher, looked down disapprovingly. And Judas sat down - and, moving his head to the right and left, in a thin voice began to complain about illness, that his chest hurts at night, that, when climbing mountains, he is out of breath, and standing at the edge of an abyss, he feels dizzy and can barely hold on from a stupid desire to throw himself down. And he shamelessly invented many other things, as if not understanding that illnesses do not come to a person by chance, but are born from the discrepancy between his actions and the precepts of the Eternal. This Judas from Kariot rubbed his chest with a wide palm and even coughed feignedly in the general silence and downcast gaze.
John, without looking at the teacher, quietly asked Peter Simonov, his friend:
“Aren’t you tired of this lie?” I can't stand her any longer and I'll leave here.
Peter looked at Jesus, met his gaze and quickly stood up.
- Wait! - he told his friend.
He looked at Jesus again, quickly, like a stone torn from a mountain, moved towards Judas Iscariot and loudly said to him with broad and clear friendliness:
- Here you are with us, Judas.
He affectionately patted his hand on his bent back and, without looking at the teacher, but feeling his gaze on himself, decisively added in his loud voice, displacing all objections, like water displacing air:
“It’s okay that you have such a nasty face: we also get caught in our nets who are not so ugly, and when it comes to food, they are the most delicious.” And it’s not for us, our Lord’s fishermen, to throw away our catch just because the fish is prickly and one-eyed. I once saw an octopus in Tyre, caught by the local fishermen, and I was so scared that I wanted to run away. And they laughed at me, a fisherman from Tiberias, and gave me some to eat, and I asked for more, because it was very tasty. Remember, teacher, I told you about this, and you laughed too. And you, Judas, look like an octopus - only with one half.
And he laughed loudly, pleased with his joke. When Peter said something, his words sounded so firmly, as if he was nailing them down. When Peter moved or did something, he made a far-audible noise and evoked a response from the most deaf things: the stone floor hummed under his feet, the doors trembled and slammed, and the very air shuddered and made noise timidly. In the gorges of the mountains, his voice awakened an angry echo, and in the mornings on the lake, when they were fishing, he rolled round and round on the sleepy and shining water and made the first timid rays of the sun smile. And, probably, they loved Peter for this: on all the other faces the shadow of the night still lay, and his large head, and wide naked chest, and freely thrown arms were already burning in the glow of the sunrise.
Peter's words, apparently approved by the teacher, dispelled the painful state of those gathered. But some, who had also been by the sea and seen the octopus, were confused by its monstrous image, which Peter so frivolously dedicated to his new student. They remembered: huge eyes, dozens of greedy tentacles, feigned calm - and time! – hugged, doused, crushed and sucked, without even blinking his huge eyes. What is this? But Jesus is silent, Jesus smiles and looks from under his brows with friendly mockery at Peter, who continued to talk passionately about the octopus - and one after another the embarrassed disciples approached Judas, spoke kindly, but walked away quickly and awkwardly.
And only John Zebedee remained stubbornly silent and Thomas, apparently, did not dare to say anything, pondering what had happened. He carefully examined Christ and Judas, who were sitting next to each other, and this strange proximity of divine beauty and monstrous ugliness, a man with a gentle gaze and an octopus with huge, motionless, dull, greedy eyes oppressed his mind like an unsolvable riddle. He tensely wrinkled his straight, smooth forehead, squinted his eyes, thinking that he would see better this way, but all he achieved was that Judas really seemed to have eight restlessly moving legs. But this was not true. Foma understood this and again looked stubbornly.
