via Red Letter Christians
We find it disconcerting and uncomfortable to view Jesus as fully human. We want to perpetuate the belief the He was different from the rest of us, that He had powers and knowledge that were super-human. We conveniently forget that He learned the Scriptures, grew into spiritual maturity and performed no might works in His own power (see Luke 2:52).
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Jesus really did abandon power when He lived among us. He wasn’t simply holding back and pretending to possess our physical limitations–He truly was one of us. Sometimes we react negatively to that fact and try to suppress it. We want to think of Jesus as a God who disguised Himself as an ordinary man but, at will, could step into a phone booth, rip off His robes and show us who He really was: a first-century Superman.
Judas refused to accept a limited Messiah. On Palm Sunday, power was within his Master’s grasp. It was the logical time for a political takeover, so far as Judas was concerned. It was the opportunity to rally the masses to the cause; it was an hour when Jesus should claim power, and Jesus let it all slip away. Some think that Judas betrayed Jesus in order to force Him to play the power game when the Roman soldiers came to arrest Him–to force Him to establish His rule. This theory suggests that Judas felt that if Jesus were left with no alternative, He would overcome His reluctance to use power and seize the throne of Israel.
If that was Judas’s plan, it backfired. Perhaps Judas hung himself when he realized that his attempt to manipulate Jesus ended in the death of the only One who had ever loved him unconditionally.
