Mark 14:11 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Mark 14:11

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‘Promised’ is perhaps a little misleading; ‘undertook to give him money’ would be better, because the words used, both in Matthew's Gospel and in Mark’s Gospel could imply that they weighed it out to him there are and then. That is very likely.‘And he sought how he might conveniently betray him.’ ‘Conveniently’ means that Judas began to consider when the opportunity would come when he could give the signal and the information to the chief priests, and they could successfully take Christ secretly without the crowds knowing. Judas was on their side and thinking as they were thinking in order to strike this treacherous bargain with them. They wanted to know where he might be found, out of hours as it were, in some private place where they could come with a militia and take him by surprise. But of course Christ knew the time. He knew exactly what would happen, and he was ready to be taken. Now that the time had come, he was willing to be arrested. But Judas sought how he might conveniently betray him. They were to take that supper that night – it’s the Thursday night of the last week of the earthly life of our Lord – and on that day when they prepared the feast and took that supper with him, there was a betrayer in the midst: Judas was there. Certainly he was there for the Passover Supper, if not for the Lord's Supper. But it is really very unlikely that he was there for the crucial parts of the first Lord's Supper. He later went to betray the Lord, but he had previously reclined at that table for the Passover feast with the Lord, probably with the thirty pieces of silver, equal to ninety days pay, in his pocket.Now the other Gospels say or imply that they gave him the money, and the accounts are easily reconciled by the fact that there was more on the way or that there was more than one meeting. But they promised to give him money, and Matthew says they gave it to him.

Application

Again, hypocrisy is so dangerous. You come to pray in the service and speak to others as a Christian man or woman and hopefully you are, and yet you go home during the week – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday – and you don’t pray, don’t have your devotions, don’t have any communion with the Lord. You have just uttered, perhaps, a few superficial sentences of prayer. You are playing the hypocrite; you are pretending to live a life you are not living. Don’t imagine you can snap out of that easily at the end of the week and straighten yourself out. The more we act the hypocrite, the easier it is to do, and it deepens and extends to all sorts of other things. In Judas you see the power of pretence, the power of hypocrisy, a lack of sincerity and genuineness. We see a man who started with Christ, possibly just mistaken and deluded with regard to who he was and what his mission was. But the three years of pretence turn him into an utter traitor, a man of hardness and pride and great treachery. So we must all fear hypocrisy. If you find yourself playing the hypocrite and the pretender, it is the most urgent thing to snap out of it and to cry out in repentance and to pray for a genuine heart.

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Mark 14:11 Commentary and Bible Study