Oh my-- man,
you guys need to not sleep through Sunday School.
... well, except maybe
@Kari Kamiya. And
@AnOminous.
Consensus within Christian theology is that while Jesus, as God assuming human nature,
had to die a human death to accomplish the salvation of man (His divinity raising our humanity from death, expiation-- or propitiation, if you're a Calvinist or something, etc., etc., this is a rather large topic seeing as its the crux of a faith thousands of years old), could have as well done so by means as simple as dying in his old age in his sleep, but chooses to die on a "tree" after being battered, and after being betrayed as (among many, many things) a demonstration of sin and human depravity juxtaposed against the transcendent love of God.
He didn't tell Judas to betray Him as much as it was that Judas betrayed Him because he liked money and he wasn't really as down with the cause as all the other disciples... in the plain read of the narrative. In the thematics, again, juxtaposition of sin and human depravity and the transcendent love of God despite this.
The reason why Judas, or Samson, get a bum rap compared to, say, David, is that while David does some
egregious things like knowingly send a devoted general to his death so he can steal his wife, David also consistently repents of his sins at worst when he's confronted with them. Judas
kills himself, and Samson had been tip-toing the line of the vow he was entered into (and was the source of his strength) while allowing himself to get seduced and sheared by a mad hoe who delivered him to the Philistines, at which point he just asked God to let him kill all of them at the temple he was chained to at the cost of his own life.
(A light palate cleanser: strangely enough, in the Coptic tradition, Judas is in fact considered a saint because of his role in the divine economy.)
