Under God: Religion and American Politics

p. 301

On Jesus and Judas at the Last Supper. “Jesus seems complicitous in Judas’ sin, if not provoking it. Indeed there is an odd intimacy in the exchanges of the two men at the final supper and in the moment before Jesus’ arrest. Only these two know what is really happening. They seem to fence over the heads of the uncomprehending followers. Each knows he is the other’s doom. Both soon will be dead, hanging from a new Tree of Life and Tree of Death. Each wills his own death while causing the other’s. They have the eternal bond of the betrayer and the betrayed.