The light dims slowly.
One candle at a time.
We sit in the hush, wrapped in scripture and silence, as the room folds inward. The Psalms echo. Shadows lengthen. Every extinguished flame draws the story closer to its end.
But this time, the story I’m following is not Jesus.
It’s Judas.
Holy Week has always turned its gaze toward the cross. Toward the agony of Christ, the cries of Mary, the trembling earth. But tonight, I find myself watching someone else slip into the darkness—a man whose name became a warning, a curse, a byword for treachery.
And yet…
He was at the table.
He had his feet washed too.
Judas and Peter.
Both chosen.
Both loved.
Both failed.
One denied. The other betrayed.
And I wonder, in the flickering candlelight—what’s the difference?
Peter swore loyalty with trembling bravado. Then, in the chill of night, he collapsed. “I do not know him,” he said. Once. Twice. Three times.
And the rooster crowed.
Judas, too, had once followed. Believed. Dreamed, maybe, of a kingdom of justice. A revolution against Rome. But Jesus kept talking about death. About servanthood. About sacrifice. And somewhere in that growing gap between promise and reality, Judas gave up.
Both men ran from the truth in the moment it mattered most.
The difference was not in their failure.
The difference was what they believed about forgiveness.
Peter wept—and waited.
Judas wept—and wandered.
Peter's tears became a return.
Judas’ tears led him to a field. A rope.
What do you do when you’ve crossed a line you cannot uncross?
When your name feels ruined, not just to others, but to yourself?
I have known what it is to be cast as the villain. To be told I’ve walked too far, said too much, questioned too deeply. I’ve felt the chill of doors closed gently but firmly, the spiritual silence of those who once called me brother. And in that cold, I have looked at Judas—not with condemnation, but with kinship.
Because the truth is, despair doesn’t come all at once.
It comes like this service.
One candle at a time.
One moment of misunderstanding.
One act of fear.
One night where you thought you were doing the right thing—or the only thing—and woke up unable to look yourself in the mirror.
Ilya Repin’s Judas captures that moment.
No kiss. No bag of coins. No rope.
Just a man, alone in the dark, hand to his mouth, eyes wide, as though he’s trying to swallow the grief before it devours him.
He looks not monstrous—but human.
Frighteningly so.
Carl Jung once wrote, “The acceptance of the shadow is the beginning of redemption.” Judas never got there. He could not bear his own shadow. And so he slipped away, not damned by Christ, but by himself.
In some Orthodox icons, there is an unpainted space where Judas would have stood—an intentional emptiness. A silence where a redemption could have been. I find that more haunting than any hellfire.
What if he had waited?
What if he had lingered three more days?
What if, like Peter, he had heard his name spoken on the shore, by the one he had betrayed?
We will never know.
And so, as the final candle flickers, I imagine not the cross but a rope swaying in a lonely field.
The hush of a soul who could not believe he was still welcome.
The quiet of a death that did not have to be.
And I whisper, not as priest, not as saint, but as one who has also wept in the dark:
Judas… I understand.
Judas… I wish you had stayed.
The candle goes out.
We sit in the dark, waiting for light.