Jesus once called Judas “friend” to his face. Hours later He said it would have been better for that same man if he had never been born.
Hold those two lines together and the question almost asks itself: did Jesus hate Judas? It feels like He must have. Judas handed Him over with a kiss, took money for it, and walked away.
If anyone ever earned hatred, surely the man who sold the Son of God did. Yet the answer Scripture gives is no. He did not hate him.
And once you see how He treated him, a harder question takes its place: how did He keep loving a man He knew was going to betray Him?
Did Jesus Hate Judas? The Short, Honest Answer Is No
Nowhere does Scripture show Jesus hating Judas. Every word He spoke to him, every look, every action the Gospels record carries no trace of it. What it shows instead is a love that kept reaching for Judas right up to the night he left to fetch the soldiers.
The confusion comes from collapsing two things that are not the same. Hating the betrayal is not the same as hating the betrayer. Jesus had every reason to grieve what Judas did, and He did grieve it. But grief over a sin and hatred for the person committing it are different things entirely.
You can ache over what someone is doing to themselves and to you, and still want them back. Jesus carried exactly that heart toward Judas. He condemned the sin without flinching and never stopped loving the man.
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How Jesus Treated the Man Who Would Betray Him
Look at what Jesus actually did, and the idea of hatred falls apart.
He chose Judas. Out of the crowds following Him, Jesus named Judas one of the Twelve, the inner circle. He trusted him with the money bag, the group’s common purse (John 13:29).
He sent him out with the others to preach and heal. For three years Judas ate at His table, heard every teaching, watched every miracle up close.
On the last night, knowing exactly what was coming, Jesus knelt and washed Judas’s feet along with the rest. John frames that whole scene with one line: “having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end” (John 13:1). Judas was in that room. Those feet were in that basin.
Then at the meal Jesus handed Judas the dipped morsel, the piece a host gave to an honored guest. He did not expose him in front of the others. In fact He treated Judas so much like everyone else that when He said one of them would betray Him, the disciples had no idea who He meant.
Nobody pointed at Judas. They each asked, “Lord, is it I?” Judas had hidden in plain sight precisely because Jesus never singled him out for cold treatment.
Even at the arrest, when Judas walked up to betray Him with a kiss, Jesus answered, “Friend, wherefore art thou come?” (Matthew 26:50). He called Judas friend and meant it, with no curse and no recoiling. It was one last open door, held out to a man already walking through a different one.
Read also: Parable of the Prodigal Son Meaning
The Hardest Verse: “It Had Been Good for That Man”
Then there is the line that makes people sure they have caught Jesus hating after all. Speaking of His betrayer, He said, “woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born” (Matthew 26:24).
It sounds like a sentence of doom, and in a sense it is. But the words carry grief, not glee. Jesus is lamenting the ruin Judas was bringing on himself by his own hand.
The weight of betraying the Son of God is so crushing that Jesus says the man would have been better off never existing than to carry that guilt. That is the voice of someone who sees the cliff a person is about to walk off and grieves it, not someone gloating over an enemy.
The Gospel writers make the heart behind the words plain. Just before this, John tells us Jesus was “troubled in spirit” as He spoke of the betrayal (John 13:21). The word means stirred up, distressed, grieved.
You do not grieve over someone you hate. Hatred would have been glad to be rid of him. Jesus was heartbroken. The same mouth that pronounced the woe was the mouth that called him friend, and both came from the same grief.
Read also: Am I Beyond Repentance
“A Devil” and “the Son of Perdition”: Diagnosis, Not Contempt
Two more sayings get read as proof of hatred. Earlier Jesus had said of the Twelve, “one of you is a devil” (John 6:70). Later, praying to the Father, He called Judas “the son of perdition” (John 17:12).
The word translated perdition is the Greek apoleia, which simply means ruin or destruction. “Son of perdition” means a man headed for ruin.
Both of these are Jesus naming, honestly, what was true and where Judas was heading. A doctor who tells you the tumor is malignant does not hate you. He is telling you the truth so you might still act on it.
Jesus saw clearly what was growing in Judas and where it would end, and He said so. Calling the danger by its real name can be exactly what love sounds like when the truth is hard.
Foreknown, but Never Forced
People sometimes picture Judas as a puppet, scripted by God to play the villain and then blamed for it. If that were true, Jesus hating him would be cruel on top of unfair. But that is not what Scripture lays out.
Yes, the betrayal was foreknown. Peter later said Jesus was “delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23), and Jesus Himself pointed to Scripture being fulfilled. God knew it would happen and worked even this into His plan to save the world.
But knowing is not forcing. The Gospels are just as clear that Judas acted of his own will. Luke says Satan entered into him, and right after, Judas himself went to the chief priests to arrange the handover (Luke 22:3-4).
Matthew says that from then on Judas “sought opportunity to betray him” (Matthew 26:16). He looked for the chance.
The greed, the bargaining, the kiss, all of it was Judas. The best way to read these accounts together is that God foreknew and used the betrayal, while Judas freely chose it. Jesus did not hand Judas a villain’s role and then resent him for playing it. He held the door open the whole time, and Judas walked past it.
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What Judas Proves About Standing Close to Jesus
Judas should sober every one of us. He had everything. He was as close to Jesus as a person could physically be.
He heard the teaching, saw the miracles, had his feet washed by the Lord’s own hands, took the bread from His fingers. And he still betrayed Him.
Nearness to Jesus is not the same as surrender to Him. You can sit under the truth for years, serve in His name, look like one of the inner circle, and have a heart that has never actually bowed. That is the warning Judas leaves behind, and it is not a comfortable one.
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What about forgiveness? The cross Jesus went to was enough to cover Judas’s sin too. The love was never withdrawn. But Scripture does not record Judas ever turning back to Christ to receive it.
When his guilt caught up with him, he went to the priests and then to a rope, not to Jesus (Matthew 27:3-5). His sorrow drove him to despair instead of repentance. Scripture stops short of pronouncing on his eternal state, and so should we.
The good news buried in this hard story is for you. The love that reached for Judas reaches for failures and betrayers still.
No sin you have committed puts a repentant heart beyond it. The lesson of Judas is that nearness to Jesus saves no one; only actually coming to Him does.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Did Jesus love Judas?
Yes. Jesus treated Judas with the same love and care He gave the other eleven, so completely that none of them suspected him. He chose him, trusted him, washed his feet, and called him friend even at the betrayal. His love for Judas never depended on what Judas would do.
Did Jesus forgive Judas?
Jesus’s death was enough to cover Judas’s sin, and His heart toward Judas stayed open to the end. But Scripture never records Judas turning back to Christ to receive that forgiveness. His sorrow led him to the priests and to suicide rather than to repentance, so the Bible leaves his final state unstated.
Why did Jesus call Judas “friend” when he betrayed him?
When Judas arrived to betray Him with a kiss, Jesus said, “Friend, wherefore art thou come?” He meant it sincerely, not as sarcasm. It was a final open door, a last appeal to a man in the act of betrayal, showing that Jesus was Judas’s friend even when Judas had stopped being His.
Related Articles to Read Next
- Parable of the Prodigal Son Meaning: the Father who runs to meet the child who walked away.
- Parable of the Unforgiving Servant Meaning: what Jesus taught about forgiving the people who wrong us.
- Importance of Repentance in the Bible: the turn Judas never made, and why it changes everything.
- 4 Essential Christian Maturity Lessons from the Life of Jesus: growing in the love Jesus showed even to His betrayer.
Judas did not betray a Master who hated him. He betrayed the one friend who refused to stop loving him, right down to the kiss. That is the tragedy of Judas, and it is also the invitation underneath it. The same love is still held out. The only question Judas could not answer, and the one left for you, is whether you will finally turn and take it.
