Judas Proves Life is a Gift...From Conception!!

“It would be better for that man if he had never been born” might be the most misunderstood line in the Passion narrative. Patrick Mason sits down with Father Matthew Keller of Sacred Heart Cathedral to discuss the passage, beginning with a simple question: why would the Gospel passage covering Christ's betrayal, trial, and judgement be called one of the most hopeful readings? 

Father Matthew proposes that the argument hinges on a single word: born. Jesus doesn’t say Judas would be better off if he had never existed, but that he would be better off he had never been born. The discussion expands from this passage to discussing why Catholic philosophy and theology belong together, how “being is better than non-being,” and why God’s act of creation is never a mistake.

Father and Patrick also cover: what does God’s mercy mean for the unborn, for children who die before baptism, and for a world marked by abortion and suffering? Father draws on St Thérèse of Lisieux’s unforgettable “plank over the mud puddle” image, talk about Mary’s preemptive salvation in the Immaculate Conception, and land on providence, free will, and the hard but consoling truth that God is never surprised and still gives each soul the best chance for salvation. If this impacts how you think about Judas and mercy, subscribe, share the episode, and leave a review."

Transcript

A Shockingly Bleak Gospel Line

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Our Lord says here to him, it would be better if you were not born. Okay. What it does not say, right, and this is careful listening as well to the scriptures. He does not say it would be better if you never existed.

Welcome, Prayer, And The Setup

SPEAKER_02 0:24

Welcome back to Chris DereoCast. I'm your host, Patrick Mason, and I'm again joined by Father Matthew Keller of Saganar Cathedral. Thanks for being with us, Father. Good to see you, Pat. Um, for those that are watching, please remember to like and subscribe and share this among your friends. It really helps our channel. Uh Father, would you start us out with a prayer? Certainly.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Amen.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen. Amen in the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

Amen. Thank you, Father.

Reading Matthew 26 On Betrayal

SPEAKER_02 0:58

So we're running through your greatest hits. And next on, I'm going to tell a story about this. So I uh you were, I don't know, director of vocations, or maybe chancellor. I can't remember what your role was, but you were at the Chancery office of the bishop, and they had a nice chapel in there, and we I'd go sometimes for daily mass. It was me and a lot of the staff of the chancery. And we're sitting in there, and I'm going to read you what the homily for that day was. And this comes from Matthew chapter 26. And the the title of this chapter, at least in this version of the Bible, is called The Betrayer. And it's uh verse 20. When it was evening, he reclined at table with the twelve, and while they were eating, he said, Amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me. Deeply distressed at this, they began to say to him one after another, Surely it is not I, Lord. He said in reply, He who has dipped his hand into the dish with me is the one who will betray me. The Son of Man indeed goes, as is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born. Then Judas, his betrayer, said in reply, Surely it is not I, Rabbi. And Jesus answered, You have said so. And so bleak bleak, I mean, every time this one comes up, you're like, Man, like here's Ju Jesus saying to Judas, basically to his face, it would be better had you never been born. Right. And so in this context, we're all sitting in there uh in the chancery office, and it's it's a bleak homily, and everybody's like, I wonder what Father's gonna say about this dark homily.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

And you mean passage of scripture, not gospel.

SPEAKER_02 2:43

Yeah, gospel, yeah, yeah, not homily, yeah, it's gospel. And you get up there on the on the pulpit and you have this huge smile on your face, just like beaming with like a little bit of a mischievous smile, but beaming with joy and say, and you start out by saying, This is one of the most hopeful readings in all the gospels. And then you went into your exposition of why this was so hopeful.

Born Versus Never Existed

SPEAKER_02 3:07

So, why is this dark passage so hopeful?

SPEAKER_01 3:09

So I'll start by saying this is a really good example of where philosophy is the handmade of theology, right? In other words, philosophy is uh good philosophy is what helps us to understand what our Lord says here and not uh and not misunderstand it to our own uh destruction. But our Lord says here um to him, it would be better if you were not born. Okay. What it does not say, right, and this is careful listening as well to the scriptures, he does not say it would be better if you never existed. Uh-huh. Right. And so this is where philosophy is our handmade, right? What it teaches us is that existence is better than non-existence. So Jesus can't, and he doesn't say it would be better if you had never existed. He said it'd be better if you had never been born. What's the difference, right? Right. Well, first of all, you start with, you know, nine months in your mother's womb in which you are perfectly innocent, right? I mean, you you're in you've inherited original sin, but you have no personal sin at all, right? Um, and you know, you've yet to be you know experience any of the the negativities of of this life. And so we know, uh, as the church teaches us, right, to pray with great hope uh that you know God's mercy, right, extends to we don't know the mechanism, right? To the unborn. So when when yeah, children are you know stillborn or something that they're not you know doomed to hell, right? They they don't have personal sin, especially if they're born being born into a family that would have baptized them had they lived and so forth. God foresees that, right? It's you know, baptism of desire, all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_02 4:54

If he can have mercy on this dirty sinner, then he probably has mercy on those innocent beings.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

But the church is careful, right? We don't want to canonize them immediately because we don't know the mechanism of uh how they share in God's you know eternal plan. What we do know is that they don't have they're not gonna be punished for eternity for uh for personal sins, have none, right? So imagine our Lord is comparing Judas, who's been given the inheritance of you know, of being an Israelite and all the promises God made to the people of Israel, right? The commandments, the the sacrifices, and everything that God has blessed them with and and you know, and given them as an inheritance, the scriptures of the Old Testament, all of that. Jesus Christ, right, in his midst, who chose him to follow him as an apostle, all of that he's been given this pile of you know, embarrassment of wealth, and he's betraying our Lord, right? And he's gonna answer for that. Compare that to a little child who's been in his mother's womb for a number of months and had done nothing wrong, but doesn't make it to birth. Which one like would you want it's behind door number one or door number two? Right. So do you see our Lord is making a very uh there's nothing controversial about what he's saying? No, like you've been given all this and you're betraying me, right? Wouldn't

Mercy, The Unborn, And Real Hope

SPEAKER_01 6:18

you have been better off um an innocent baby, an innocent baby that died before birth? So our Lord's making a comparison there that's indisputably um true, nothing controversial about that. Right. And he's not denouncing God's creation, uh, right? There's no mistakes. God does not make mistakes in creation. Uh, right. Uh so what uh but anyhow, so that's really the comparison that's being made there. And when you see it in those terms, you say, well, obviously. Yeah, obviously, it would be better had he never been born. But he doesn't say it'd be better if you never existed. Because uh we say this even about Satan, right? That he's good in so far as he exists, because existence itself is a good that comes from God, right? And God doesn't annihilate us. Um even if he even if we sin, we rebel against God, and our judgment is to to go into uh you know eternal damnation, God could annihilate us, but he doesn't. He keeps us in existence, and that's not to be cruel, it's because even that is a good, yeah, right? And so that we would in some way share in the goodness of God even uh the souls in hell, even Satan and his minions, um have some small share have right the the the good of being uh of existing, right? That God willed them into existence, right? And and they that they are uh you know they exist because of that. That's better than never to have existed, right? That's what philosophy teaches us. Being is better than non-being.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

Yeah, well, and it's so and it's so and I think this is what you were getting at too, with why it's so hopeful. You know, we see what millions of babies aborted every year. So like if we just if we didn't have that, what is millions of babies, you know, like what's going on with them.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

But you you made the point of like, no, this is how how many and the you know, this is uh, you know, God knows God knows from the moment of that uh well from all eternity, you know. But he also knows that some people, right, their best chance of eternal salvation is is not to be born.

SPEAKER_02 8:37

Yeah, interesting.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

Because they, you know, if he knows the path they would go down, and so there's some salvation, you know. St. Therese talks about does God love you more if uh because there's some uh somebody had said she had never committed a mortal sin. Right. And uh and and they were somebody's telling her, well, you don't excuse me, you don't know God's mercy and forgiveness as much as somebody who sinned. They said, wait a minute, if you have a father and he sees that there's a mud puddle there and he puts a plank across it so that you don't fall into the mud uh and you walk across it, does the father who dug you out of the mud pit and cleaned you off love you more than the one who prevented you from falling in? Right. No, right? And so we think about our uh in some ways, our our lady like this, right? She was prevented right uh from experiencing sin of any kind. Yeah, right. She was saved in a way that pre she was saved by Jesus Christ, right? But he he's foreseeing this, right? Uh and so she was created without original sin.

St Therese, Mary, And Trust

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Yeah uh and so uh God preserved her from that. He saved her more than he saved us. People are like, oh, you think Mary didn't need a savior? Like, no, he was He stood on his head to preserve his mother. Preemptively saved her. He saved his mother in a in a uh wildly greater fashion than he saved us uh, you know, uh us sinners. So this is true, I believe, um, that God's mercy is being extended right to some souls who, for his own reasons that I can't begin to comprehend, knows that they would be better off not being born because it would preserve them from sin. They wouldn't fall into this terrible calamity that Judas fall into.

SPEAKER_02 10:29

Yeah, or even if it's even if it's not preserving from sin, maybe it's also bringing others to heaven, right? So I think the Saint Therese of Lesou also said God never allows anything unnecessary.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 10:43

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

And he can account for the suffering they go through, the things that they're God's never taken by surprise by any of these things, right? And you know, uh there's the notion too that God gives you the best chance. Uh scripture says as much. Like uh the reason that uh, for example, sometimes God allows sin to go on in the world is because he's giving people a chance to repent, right? Right, not because he wants to uh encourage them to keep sinning, but he wants to he wants to give them the opportunity to repent, and to trust in him, to like really come close to him, right? And so my idea about this being hopeful is that it shows God's providence in an unbelievable way, but also that he knows you and I before he formed us in the womb, he knew us, right? And he knows what was best. But in the case of Judas, right, God allowed that to play out in a way that it did. He Judas made his own choices, right? Um, but God foresaw that that particular uh, you know, uh that particular action would lead to all the things that triggered Christ's crucifixion, death for the w sake of the world, all of that, right? That betrayal was in and foreseen in God's plan. Right. Um, so it shows us that you know God is so great, his knowledge is so deep and wide, and uh, and his mercy is so great that even right the you can't hide from him, and he knows your your whole situation, he's gonna give you the best opportunity for salvation uh that he can.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

So just stop being stubborn and start trusting in God your father. That's right. No, that's great, Father. Thank you. That is a very hopeful passage.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

But also, we should give so much thanks for being born, right? Yeah, that that's a tremendous gift.

SPEAKER_02 12:30

Well, and don't take it, don't take it for granted.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

For being uh brought into life, right? Even being conceived is an unbelievable gift to us. Uh an action of God.

Closing And Where To Find Us

SPEAKER_02 12:40

Yeah, that's great. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 12:42

Thank you so much, Bob Thank you for watching this episode of Christerocast. For more information on the Christeros or to join the movement, check out our website at theCristeros.org. That's theChristeros with an S.org. There you could find our daily reflection series as well as many of our publications and articles. Thank you for watching, and viva Christore.