A lyric found me on the road.
Nipsey Hussle. Bigger Than Life. A man the world tried to box into a single story. Gang member. Statistic. Cautionary tale.
But Nipsey refused the box. He talked about God, gave back to his community, and saw things that comfortable people often miss.
This lyric stopped me: “The world would not know Jesus Christ if there were no Judas.”
Sit with that. Not as a theological argument. As a haunting.
We are in Lent. The season when the Church slows down long enough to feel the weight of what is coming. The betrayal is not behind us yet. We are walking toward it.
And Nipsey Hussle, of all voices, cracked something open on a drive down the road.
That is how God works sometimes.
We live in an either/or world. Good or evil. Us or them. Light or darkness. The cultural reflex is to split everything in two and then eliminate the side we don’t want.
But the universe does not operate that way.
You cannot have light without darkness. Sound without silence. You cannot understand the depth of love without the wound of betrayal.
These are not opposites to be destroyed. They are two sides of the same coin, inseparable.
And you cannot spend half a coin.
The either/or mind wants to sanitize reality into something manageable. But Christ did not come to manage reality.
He came to redeem it. All of it.
Even Judas.
When I sit with Judas, I do not feel contempt. I feel grief.
Here is a man who walked with Jesus in the flesh. Who heard the Sermon on the Mount with his own ears. Who watched the dead raised, the blind given sight, the outcast welcomed to the table.
He had proximity to the Son of God that most of us spend our whole lives aching for.
And he traded it.
Thirty pieces of silver. The price of a slave under Mosaic law. Not even a significant sum by the standards of the day.
That is not the story of a monster. That is the story of a man so captured by the temporal that the eternal became invisible to him.
Tunnel vision toward a reward that turned to ash in his hands. He threw the silver back. He knew what he had done.
But the trade had already been made.
I mourn Judas because I recognize the mechanism. Not a dramatic, singular betrayal. But the slow accumulation of small trades.
Silver by silver.
The gradual exchange of what is eternal for what is immediate. Comfort over conviction. Approval over truth. Security over surrender.
How many of us are Judas in slow motion?
This is the Lenten question underneath all the other questions.
What do we hold sacred? Not what do we say we hold sacred. Not what we post or profess or perform. But what do we actually protect when the pressure comes?
What are we unwilling to trade?
Is it something tangible, a reputation, a political tribe, a way of life we have grown comfortable with, a bag of silver with a different name on it?
Or is it centered in the heart of Jesus?
Because here is the weight of the coin. Judas’s betrayal did not catch Christ off guard. Jesus knew. He washed Judas’s feet anyway. He broke bread with him anyway. He called him friend at the moment of the kiss in the garden.
There is no doubt in my mind that Jesus still loves Judas.
That love was not cancelled by the betrayal. It was revealed by it.
The cross absorbed what the silver purchased.
That is not a comfortable thought. It is meant to undo us a little. Because if Christ loved Judas through betrayal, He is not finished with the places in us where we have made our own trades.
But we have to be willing to see them.
And so we pray.
Lord Jesus,
You knew what Judas would do and you washed his feet anyway. You know what we have traded and you are not finished with us.
In this season of Lent, expose the silver in our hands. The comforts we have clung to. The allegiances that have crowded You out. The slow trades we have made without noticing.
Give us the grace to grieve what we have exchanged for lesser things. And give us the courage to open our hands. Not because we are strong enough to let go, but because You are faithful enough to receive us when we do.
We walk toward the cross not as spectators, but as those who contributed to its necessity. And yet, You walk toward it anyway.
For us.
Amen.
Editor’s Note: Previously published on Way of Realignment Substack on March 4, 2026.
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