What if we're more like Judas than Jesus?

Rethinking betrayal, belief, and the spaces in between

I often wonder why we are so quick to project our beliefs onto others... Why this compulsion to gather people who will validate our newfound revelations. Why, when we stumble upon a eureka moment, we immediately run to broadcast it to the world... before it’s even taken root inside us. Before we’ve even asked: Was that God? Or just a red herring?

Remember Jesus: Son of God, flawless in divine power and authority, who still needed 40 days in the wilderness. Forty days to be tempted, to reflect, to wrestle. If he needed that time, why do we try to assemble tribes around our beliefs in 40 hours or less? Why don’t we give ourselves the grace to expect the devil’s test before declaring our truth?

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

What is this urgency to find people who believe what we believe—immediately, fully, enthusiastically? Somewhere deep in our psyche, we’ve been programmed to equate belonging with safety. Tribe means identity. Tribe means someone believes in me. But not everyone will believe in you. Not everyone believed in Jesus. Even after he picked his disciples, they experienced him differently. That’s why we have four gospels. That’s why Peter tested him. That’s why Judas rebelled.

That leads me to Judas. The betrayer. The villain in the Jesus narrative. But what if we’ve misunderstood him? We say everything that happened to Jesus was part of God’s plan—his death, his resurrection. So could it be that Judas... was part of that plan too?

And here’s where it gets uncomfortable. What if Jesus, in the eyes of his own Jewish faith tradition, played a similar role? What if he was the rebel, the betrayer of the established faith? Imagine generations of faithful obedience—law after law, tradition after tradition—and then a carpenter appears, claiming to be God’s son, performing miracles, speaking in parables. Are we really surprised the religious leaders were alarmed? Would we have reacted any differently?

In 2025, if someone did what Jesus did—miracles, riddles, divine claims—they’d be labelled a lunatic and sent to an asylum. We might call them a false prophet. Dangerous. Delusional. Too much.

Not everyone is Jesus. Most of us are Judas. Most of us are silently betraying inherited frameworks in small ways: a woman drinks cold water during her confinement period. A student ditches a parent-approved career to chase a dream. A child grows up and dares to think differently from their ancestors.

Any woman who has endured postpartum confinement rituals in this part of the world knows the pressure. The whispers. The disapproval. You follow or you betray. You obey or you rebel. And if you rebel, you risk exile—from your family, your tribe, your history. But sometimes, exile is the only path to freedom.

We’ve demonized Judas for playing his part. But maybe the evolution of every generation doesn’t rest in the bold charisma of a few Jesus-like figures. Maybe it lies in the quiet rebellions of a thousand Judases—those who could no longer pretend, who quietly stepped out of the tribe. We call them selfish. We call them lost. But maybe they’re just… honest.

We carry the habit of judgment into every space: with our friends, we advise them with good intentions but project our own fears. With our colleagues, we try to improve things but end up imposing. With our families, we repeat ancestral blueprints without asking where they came from. With our children, we cloak our anxiety in love and call it guidance. But it’s still projection.

Then we gather in prayer communities. We raise our hands, sing our songs, surrender our lives to God... just so that we can emerge feeling validated, vindicated, superior. And in that glow, we go out into the world to convert others to our truth. But what makes you so sure your truth is the truth? What makes you so certain that other people’s truths are sinful, dangerous, hell-bound?

What makes you so sure that you’re going to heaven and they’re not?

Have you the wonderful Christian ever wondered... what if you die, and the Buddhists were right after all? Has that idea flickered across your brain ever so occasionally and then you, remembering the social programming you had wittingly succumbed to, you quickly shove that flash of an idea aside just because… you have to say “no way” because…it is how it is?

We don’t like the discomfort of not knowing. The vulnerability of I don’t know what I don’t know terrifies us. So instead, we encase new ideas within the familiar: our existing religious frameworks, family values, ancestral expectations. We rush to share our seedling thoughts with our tribe, seeking affirmation, not growth. But the moment we show that seedling to the world, we encage it in expectations. Now it must thrive. Now we must defend it. Even if it was never meant to grow that way. We forget that growth requires mystery. We forget that some seeds need darkness before they sprout. We forget that the wilderness is holy.

What if the truth was never a rigid set of answers, but a sacred wilderness we were invited to walk through... alone, unarmed, unhurried?

What if the greatest betrayal... is rushing past that invitation?

(Hey I’m at Part 5! And there’s actually a sixth piece bubbling already in the cauldron, so hang on)