Judas rebuked by Christ.
I. It will give increased interest to the sayings of our Lord in the text if we suppose that they were uttered with a special reference to Judas, with the merciful design of warning him of the enormity of his projected crime, and thus, if it were yet possible, of withholding him from its commission. The Son of Man was about to go as it was written of Him nothing was about to happen to Him which had not been distinctly prearranged. The part which Judas was about to take in the fearful tragedy was every jot as accurately defined in the Divine plan as if Judas had been simply a passive instrument in the Divine hand; but nevertheless, woe unto that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! And if the wretched Judas dreamt, as possibly he did, of its being a sort of apology for his treachery, that it was needful in order to the accomplishment of prophecy, it should have brought home to him an overwhelming conviction of the falsehood which he harboured that Christ could thus combine the certainty of His being betrayed, and the criminality of His betrayer.
II. Glance next at another delusion to which it is likely that Judas gave indulgence. This is the delusion as to the consequences, the punishment, of sin being overstated or exaggerated. It might have been that Judas could hardly persuade himself that a Being so beneficent as Christ, whom he had seen wearying Himself to bless even His enemies, whom he had beheld weeping bitter tears over the infidel Jerusalem, would ever wholly lay aside the graciousness of His nature, and avenge a wrong done by surrendering the doer to intense and interminable anguish. In all the range of Scripture there is not, perhaps, a passage which sets itself so decisively against this delusion as the latter clause of our Saviour's address in the text. "It had been good for that man if he had not been born." Better, indeed, better never to have been born never to have risen in the world, a being endowed with the magnificent but tremendous gift of immortality if sin incur the surrendering of that immortality to a portion of fire and shame. The saying of our text roots up utterly the falsehood to which Judas and his followers are so ready to cling.
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1,866.
References: Matthew 26:26. Contemporary Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 182; Durrant, Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 277. Matthew 26:26; Matthew 26:27. G. Calthrop, Words to my Friends,p. 177.