Biblion Bible Commentary
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Judas, Do You Betray With a Kiss?
Luke 22:47-53
47 While he was still speaking, a crowd appeared. He who was called Judas, one of the twelve, was leading them. He came near to Jesus to kiss him. · WEB
A sword is drawn, an ear comes off, and he puts it back.
While he was still speaking, a crowd appeared. He who was called Judas, one of the twelve, was leading them Luke 22:47.
The arrest is told in the earlier accounts Mark 14:43–72 Matthew 26:47–56. One of the twelve is repeated here as it is there, and it is the horror of the sentence.
"Judas, do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?" Luke 22:48.
This account has him name the man and the act in a single question, and it is asked rather than pronounced. The sign chosen was a disciple's ordinary greeting to his teacher, and the question puts the contradiction to him while there is still time to answer it.
"Lord, shall we strike with the sword?" Luke 22:49. They ask first — and do not wait. A certain one of them struck the servant of the high priest, and cut off his right ear Luke 22:50. Right is this writer's detail, as it was with the withered hand Luke 6:6; he was swinging at a head in the dark and the man moved.
The two swords they had produced an hour earlier Luke 22:38 have now been used exactly once, on a servant, to no purpose.
"Let me at least do this" — and he touched his ear and healed him Luke 22:51.
Only this Gospel records the repair, and it is the last healing in the book. It is done for a man who came to arrest him, on behalf of the high priest, in the middle of his own arrest — and it undoes the one act of violence his followers ever committed for him.
There is also a practical mercy in it. A disciple who had just maimed a member of the arresting party was liable to be taken with him; the evidence is removed.
"Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs? When I was with you in the temple daily, you didn't stretch out your hands against me" Luke 22:52–53. The armed party is exposed as theater. He was in the temple courts every day that week, in public, and they came at night.
"But this is your hour, and the power of darkness."
The last clause is this account's own and it is the sentence the whole chapter has been moving toward. Satan entered Judas at the start of it Luke 22:3; here the arrest is named as belonging to that power, and it is given an hour — a period with a boundary. The darkness is real, it is permitted, and it is on a clock.
settled What this mark means