The Feast of Unleavened Bread, called the Passover, is near (verse 1). Two threats converge in this short scene, and Luke lays them side by side. The religious leaders were seeking how to put Jesus to death, 2"for they feared the people." The leaders have motive and no method, since they are seeking how to do it. They have momentum and one obstacle: the devotion of the crowd makes a public arrest dangerous. Their plan needs one thing, a way to reach Jesus quietly. Into that gap steps the last person anyone would expect, Judas, who was 3"of the number of the twelve."
That phrase names one of Jesus' own chosen apostles. This is no outside enemy infiltrating the group. It is someone who has walked every mile of the Gospel, heard every parable, seen every healing, and been sent out with authority over demons and disease. If betrayal can find an opening in a man this close, nearness to Jesus was never, by itself, a guarantee of loyalty to him.
A thread from earlier in the Gospel returns. After the wilderness temptation, the devil departed from Jesus until an opportune time (Luke 4:13), a phrase Luke left unresolved. Here is that time, arriving as no wilderness showdown but as a quiet, private entry into the heart of a man already close enough to do damage. John records that Judas kept the money bag and helped himself to it (John 12:6), and Luke names no motive of his own. Whatever disillusionment, greed, or fear was already working in Judas, Luke names something behind it too. The devil resumes a battle that never ended in the desert.
And Luke's next sentence keeps Judas accountable: 4"He went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers how he might betray him to them." Satan's entry works through Judas's agency and leaves it intact. Judas walks, deliberately, to the men plotting Jesus' death, and negotiates. 5"they were glad, and agreed to give him money." Luke names the officers, the temple guard, among those Judas confers with, and he leaves the sum unnamed here, though Matthew gives it as thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:15). A betrayal set in motion by spiritual forces becomes, in the actual transaction, an ordinary calculated deal, glad priests and a willing apostle settling on a price. Judas 6"sought an opportunity to betray him to them in the absence of a crowd." He goes looking, patiently, for the moment when the crowd's protection thins.
The scene closes on a searching note, an opportunity still being sought. Passover is near, the feast that commemorates Israel's deliverance through a lamb's blood, and inside that same season a different lamb is being quietly marked by one of his own.
Judas heard everything the others heard, and the opening he left was small and private. Ask God to guard whatever is quietly working in you, and bring it into the light with someone you trust.
Prayer
Father, keep us from assuming that nearness to you, however long and however close, makes us safe from the opening Judas gave the enemy. Guard our hearts against whatever disillusionment, fear, or greed might be working in us before we notice it has taken root. And thank you that even this betrayal, planned in secret and sealed with money, became the means of our deliverance, unable to move your purposes off course. In Jesus' name, amen.