When Illusions Die
Disillusionment, violence, and the Kingdom not of this world
I’ve been so drawn to the story of Jesus lately. As I’ve shared in previous essays, this draw has been especially strong as I’ve been navigating a period of ostracization within a section of the Ecstatic Dance community I was part of. Among the many stories of ascended humans, the story of Jesus really captures very modern-day human experiences like betrayal, torture, and ostracization. I don’t think I’ve encountered another story that captures these experiences so well.
The figure of Judas is such an interesting, important character in the story of Jesus. He plays a crucial role. If you were to take an Existential Kink-like perspective toward it, you might even say that he sacrifices a lot by choosing to take on the sin of treachery so that Jesus would fulfill his destiny of being crucified and rising again from the dead. I’ve been very curious about what motivated Judas to betray Jesus. I was watching a video exploring this question, and what a grateful time to be alive that conversations between committed, devoted individuals exploring these mysteries are so readily available.
In this conversation—a podcast interview on YouTube—a theologian presented a perspective I found fascinating. Everyone thought Jesus was the promised Messiah, but in a more physical sense: they expected him to be the promised king of the Jews, a king who would wage war against the Romans and deliver the Jewish people from oppression. In Jesus’s own relationship with his apostles, it seems he had promised each of them a tribe of Israel.
Matthew 19:28 says, “Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”
If you look at the earlier king of the Jews, David, who actually became king, it would be reasonable to imagine that an oppressed people like the Jews during Roman times would hope for a warrior-king. Instead, they got the Lamb of God, who sauntered into Jerusalem riding a donkey.
It makes me wonder if Jesus himself thought, at some point, that he would be a king in the normal sense of the word, before realizing that God had something very different in store for him. Maybe in Jesus’s own journey of surrendering to the will of God, there was a moment when the associations he had with the word “king” were stripped away, and he had to face that his path was not the one he—or others—had imagined.
This particular theory goes that after Judas saw Jesus start talking about his impending death, it might have been a massive shock. Imagine that: following someone you believe is going to be king, and that you are going to be a feudal lord under that king–only to realize they are now speaking openly about their death. What a moment of disillusionment that’d be!
It reminds me of the story of Nathuram Godse, the man who planned the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in India. Apparently, Godse was quite the follower of Gandhi. After Gandhi staged a fast in post-independence India in support of pressuring the Indian government to release funds to Pakistan, Godse became deeply disillusioned and decided to kill Gandhi.
It’s an interesting thing to sit with—the pathway from disillusionment to violence. It’s like an untethering happens in a space of disillusionment, and possibilities that once seemed unthinkable suddenly become likely.
I’ve experienced something similar. Before May 2022, the possibility of killing another human being was never even in the realm of what I could imagine myself doing. And since then, I’ve spent a lot of energy considering that killing one of my perpetrators could be a choice I might make. That possibility arose from a similar place—a disillusionment. When my repressed memories of sexual abuse emerged, I noticed that I had created a life that was filled with illusions built on top of the core illusion “I was never raped”. And as that core illusion drifted away, the ones layered on top of it withered away with the winds.
I think that’s what happened with Judas. He had an illusion that Jesus becoming king meant something specific. And when that illusion fell apart, violence became a possibility. The same with Godse, who had an illusion about Gandhi always acting for the good of India. Gandhi wasn’t beholden to being Indian—he had his own broader moral framework—and when he acted outside Godse’s subconscious belief, the illusion shattered, and violence followed.
I imagine there’s something akin to this that happens with people who encounter me through my trauma healing content and then later encounter my political views. If someone sees me as someone devoted to helping others heal childhood sexual trauma, it might create an illusion that I would be oriented a certain way politically. And when they encounter my content in support of President Trump, that illusion shatters. I’ve received the violent fruits of that through words.
It’s really something to sit with—the disillusionment of Judas leading to violence.
It’s also interesting to sit with what the Jews were expecting in a prophet. It seems they were expecting a warrior-king type of prophet, but instead they got the Lamb of God. They were desperate for deliverance from Roman oppression. But instead of that deliverance, they were offered deliverance from all misery. And in their desperation for the former, they perhaps couldn’t see the much larger freedom that was being offered to them.
And interestingly, a few hundred years after Jesus, a prophet did come who embodied much more of the warrior-king energy that the Jews might have been longing for. Muhammad, the founder of Islam, united the tribes of Arabia — a land full of independent, often warring clans — into a single religious and political movement. He was not just a spiritual teacher, but also a lawgiver, a military leader, and a head of state – much like King David.
In some ways, Muhammad fulfilled the archetype of the warrior-prophet that many had expected from the Messiah.
There are even places in earlier scriptures that Muslims believe foretold his coming. For example, in Deuteronomy 18:18, God promises to raise up a prophet like Moses, and Muslims interpret this as referring to Muhammad: a prophet who, like Moses, would bring law, lead a nation, and transform a people. They also interpret the “Comforter” promised by Jesus in the Gospel of John as pointing to Muhammad. And Isaiah 42’s mention of the people of Kedar (descendants of Ishmael) singing a new song is seen by some as a foreshadowing of Muhammad’s arrival.
Of course, Christians interpret these passages differently, seeing them as pointing to Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit. But sitting with this perspective — that the Jews’ expectations for a warrior-king were not entirely wrong, just mistimed or misapplied — opens up a fascinating window.
Maybe they were sensing something real: a deep, collective hunger for deliverance through strong leadership. And in their desperation, they could not yet recognize the different, vaster deliverance that Jesus was offering them — a deliverance not from Roman oppression, but from all forms of bondage, internal and external.
Sitting with all of this — the story of Judas, the story of disillusionment, the hunger for a king, the arrival of a different kind of kingdom — I can feel how much tenderness there is in the human heart when illusions fall away. And how much violence can arise when we cling to them. Maybe part of the invitation of Jesus’s story is learning to stay open in those moments, to let the illusions die without needing to kill along with them. To recognize deliverance when it comes, even if it doesn’t look like we imagined it would.