“Surely it is not I, Rabbi?” (Matthew 26:25). It’s such a simple question, yet it strikes me as one of the most heartbreaking lines of the gospels. What is both fascinating and perplexing about the Judas plot against Jesus is how relatively little information the evangelists offer as to Judas’s motivations. Was money all the motive needed to bargain away a best friend’s life, sealing Jesus’s murder with thirty pieces of silver? Or was greed just a superficial excuse, an easy explanation for a more complicated feeling and a misunderstood man left to be judged by history.

In truth, we may find ourselves judging too. As we relive Judas’s ultimate fall from grace throughout Lent and at every celebration of the Eucharist invoked via his treason (“On the night He was betrayed…”), we may look at Judas—this sad, wretched, fallible man—and instinctively turn to Jesus and ask, “Surely it is not I, Lord?” Yet in doing so, we fail too, for Judas himself said the same thing, and so Jesus can only reply to us as he did then: “You have said so.”

Here’s a question for you: Why do we hurt the people we love the most? Judas might seem like a sort of ur-text for this dynamic, but put into conversation with other characters, he suddenly becomes just one of many case studies of humans who hurt those closest to them. Judas makes me think of the simultaneous aversion and desire in Heathcliff’s request in Wuthering Heights “You said I killed you—haunt me then,” or how the most harrowing moment in Macbeth comes not in the act of bloodshed itself but after, when Banquo’s ghost appears and Macbeth is driven mad over the guilt of having killed his best friend. Judas hands over Jesus only to hang himself, and in all these cases we witness the absolute degradation and brokenness of spirit that results from betraying the ones we love, and in so doing, betraying ourselves.

“Surely it is not I, Lord?” We never want to believe it’s us, to look in the mirror and see the face that kissed Christ in treason and feel the weight of blood-bought silver in our pockets. In the song “Wednesday Morning, 3 am” which seems to allude to Judas with a reference to “twenty-five dollars and pieces of silver,” Paul Simon writes, “My life seems unreal, my crime an illusion. A scene badly written in which I must play.” It certainly seems that way sometimes. Waking in the middle of the night, we look upon our past mistakes with horror and distance as though in a dream: Was it really me who did those things? Surely it is not I, Lord?

There is nothing worse than seeing ourselves for the broken beings we are, and at the same time, nothing better and more needed in a world already too full of hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and pointing fingers at anyone but ourselves. In the Shūsaku Endō novel Silence, the Judas character Kichijiro fails Christ over and over again but continues to crawl back towards faith, no matter how far he strays. Perhaps this Lent we ought to stop asking “Surely is it not I, Lord?” and begin recognizing the truth in Jesus’s reply “You have said so” not as a condemnation but as an invitation to grace. What if Judas had accepted this truth, swallowed his pride, and turned out his pockets then and there and let the silver fall to the floor? May we be more like Kichijiro in seeing our brokenness and instead of running from it, embracing it in its potential to draw us closer to a God who sees us in our faults and loves us just the same.