Betrayal.

John 13:21-38 (November 1, 2015)

I.

After washing the feet of his disciples as an example of both loving service and priestly commissioning, Jesus sits back down, and they all go back to eating.  But the Lord becomes very distraught.  He knows that one of his disciples, one of the ones whose feet he has just washed, is about to go out and rat on him, informing the police where he is, so that he can be arrested.  And he knows which one will do this.

“I assure you, one of you will betray me,” he says.  The word used in the gospel which is translated as “betray” simply means “to give or hand over” something or someone.  Jesus is telling his disciples that one of them will hand him over, one of them will give him up to the authorities.  They have had to meet in secret, trusting each other to keep this in confidence; now Jesus said one will break this trust and reveal their secret, and turn him over to the police.   

Betrayal is one of the most destructive things we can experience.  In the Inferno, Dante puts traitors at the lowest level of Hell.  Treason, betrayal, is deserving of more severe punishment than just about any other crime.  Betrayal shatters our trust in each other. 

The other day I heard of a young woman whose “friends” bullied her by text-message after she and a boy-friend broke up.  She ended up killing herself.  Betrayal makes us feel like we can’t even trust anyone or the world itself.  It makes us feel like we can be turned against at any time.  Breaking a relationship by betraying a trust is one of the worst things a person can go through.

Jesus is basically saying that there is a mole among them, and that whatever plans they might have had for the future of this ministry were going to be wrecked.  Because for Jesus to be turned over to the police would almost certainly mean his death.  So his words generate confusion around the table as the disciples try to figure out who he is talking about.

The unnamed disciples who is closest to Jesus, both emotionally and at the table, leans over and asks Jesus who it is.  Jesus answers that it is the one to whom he is about to give a piece of bread, after dipping it in the bowl.  Then he dips the bread in the bowl, which probably contained olive oil and thyme, and reaches over to give it to… Judas.

It is almost as if Jesus has selected Judas for this task of betrayal.  We know that the devil was already working on Judas.  We already know as the disciples do not that Judas is the traitor.  But it is not until Jesus gives him this piece of bread that we are told that “Satan entered into him.”

How can Jesus be feeding Satan to anyone?  How can receiving something from Jesus, especially bread, after all we heard in chapter 6 about the bread of life, result in Judas’ being given up to Satan?

II.

The devil, or Satan, does not get much attention in this gospel.  This is the only place the word Satan is used; he is only called “the devil” three other times.  In one of these Jesus tells us that the devil “was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.  When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”  

So the devil — Satan — represents the opposite of the truth.  He is about lies, falsehood, illusion, emptiness, unreality, untruth.  The devil is the master of the unreal world that humans in our sinfulness have invented and projected and prosecuted upon each other, the world of violence, injustice, ignorance, hatred, shame, and darkness.  In other words, the world we grow up to imagine is the only one, the superstructure of lies that we have built and laid over the real world of God’s good and blessed creation, the world we know, that’s the world Satan is master of.

I am reminded of that scene in The Matrix where one of the crew becomes a traitor, he sells out Morpheus and his friends.  What he gets in return is to be inserted back into the matrix with no knowledge of what he has done or that he is living an illusion at all.  He doesn’t want to know the truth.  He will gladly sign his friends’ death warrants if he can be left in blissful ignorance.  The traitor wistfully wonders “why or why did I take the red pill?”  Taking the red pill in the film is what enables one to see the truth.

Judas has made the same decision.  Confronted with the truth which he sees in Jesus, he prefers to go back to living in the lies and falsehood of normal existence.  Lies are easier.  They are more convenient.  They are more profitable.  They are more popular.  They make more sense.  In a strange and paradoxical way, lies are more tangible than truth.  Lies are like money: they are mere pieces of paper that we have all agreed to believe are really worth something.  As long as we all continue to believe this, they are worth something.  But, like a placebo, once someone points out that it is only a piece of paper, the danger is that the whole illusory system will come crashing down.

Judas has seen the truth… and he doesn’t want to know about it.  Maybe he figured that this Jesus movement would have more conventional, tangible, realizable goals.  You know, overthrowing Rome, setting up a new government, redistributing wealth, reforming the priesthood, getting rid of the troublemakers… who knows?  

But Judas couldn’t handle the truth, to quote from another movie.  Almost overtime Judas’ name is mentioned in this gospel the sentence also includes the word “betray.”  It is like he reflexively had to hand Jesus over; something about who Jesus was didn’t stick to him, like the way our bodies reject some kind of invader.  He was too comfortable, too accustomed, too privileged, too accommodated to the world of lies.  Truth was too much for him to stomach.  He refused to see it.  

III.

Judas did not see Jesus as the profound truth of the unity of true humanity and God; he did not see Jesus as the Word of God; he did not see Jesus as the great I Am, or the Good Shepherd, or the Gate, or the Lamb of God, or any of these titles.  

Judas took Jesus literally.  That’s why he was so upset about  Mary and the wildly expensive ointment.  He took Jesus as only a man from Nazareth.  It was inappropriate to waste resources on this man from Nazareth; it was inappropriate for Jesus to accept such personal adulation.    

When Jesus hands him a piece of bread it is the last straw.  Judas cannot stomach it.  We’re not sure what he wants, but we know it isn’t Jesus.  Judas took the bread, but it doesn’t say that he ate it.  What entered into him was Satan.  He preferred lies.            

Jesus says, “Look, just go and do what you’re going to do.  Now.”  

Once Judas departs, as the chronically clueless disciples are still trying to figure out what is going on, to the point that they imagine Judas being given some special assignment by Jesus which is why he had to leave, the narrator briefly and flatly states, “It was night.”  

We already know that this is an evening meal.  So the narrator is not just giving us background information about the time of day.  This could have happened at lunchtime and the statement that “it was night” would be just as accurate.  

When the text tells us “it was night” it means that a great darkness, a time of blindness, fear, and evil, has fallen over the disciples, and the world.  It means the Light that was coming into the world is now in his final battle with the encroaching darkness.

“Night” refers to the time of our normal consciousness and our standard perceptions and reactions.  Night is the sleepwalking existence in which we all participate.  Night is the lie we live in when we reject the truth of the light.  Nicodemus came to Jesus at night in chapter 3, symbolizing his own blindness and ignorance.  Jesus has already said that night is a time when no one can work, a time when we are stumbling around in the darkness of uncertainty and despair. 

After Judas departs, amid the disciples’ confusion, Jesus sighs and says: “Now the Human One has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.”

So.  Jesus is glorified by being betrayed.  Jesus is glorified by being handed over.  When Judas went to the police and said, “I know where Jesus is! Follow me and I will lead you right to him!”  That’s when Jesus understands himself to be glorified.  God uses Judas’ evil act and turns it into something else.  God turns it into Jesus’ glory.

IV.

It is his glory because there is a sense in which “handing Jesus over” is the point.  If Jesus doesn’t get handed over, his movement remains a local, 1st century, Jewish thing.  Only PhD’s in Ancient Near Eastern History would know about it.  Judas handed Jesus over for the wrong reasons; just like Caiaphas prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, not knowing what he was really saying.  From the perspective of falsehood, the truth looks bizarre, crazy, disturbing, and threatening.  It must be stamped out, eradicated, killed, in the most gruesome and public way possible.

But the truth by definition cannot be stamped out.  It’s the only thing that’s real.  Attempting to stamp it out only reveals its true nature, and the true nature of the assault against it as pointless and empty.  Reality always wins in the end.  If we try to wipe it out… it is we who are revealed to be insubstantial, powerless, temporary, and empty. 

The truth that Jesus reveals is the unity of the Human One and God, the essential oneness of true humanity and true divinity, the integration of all things in the Word by which all things were created at the beginning.  We are not alone; we are not even separate from everything God has made, or even from God.  I forget who said that the glory of God is a fully realized human being, but that is what Jesus is saying.  It is who Jesus is. 

But now, Jesus has his own unique path to walk on our behalf.  “Little children,” he says, “I’m with you for a little while longer.  You will look for me — but, just as I told the Jews, I also tell you now — Where I’m going, you can't come.”  People still blinded in the ignorance of their normal minds cannot do what Jesus, the truly Human One and Son of God, is about to do.  We follow Jesus.  We take up our cross.  We die with him.  But we cannot decide to give up our lives for the life of the world.  Only he can do that.

What we can do is love each other, and embody with each other the one that God has for the word, and witness to that love, and proclaim it by sharing it with each other, and with the world.  For when we do that, we do become him, more and more.  This is Jesus’ new commandment that he gives to us:  “Love each other, “ he says.  “Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other.  This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other.”

It is through love that we are conformed to the Lord.  It is through love that we realize our own true humanity.  This is not something we do by simply thinking about it or willing it.  God is love.  That is something that the gospel author will write in his first letter.  Love is the key.

V.

Peter thinks he wants to follow Jesus, to which Jesus responds, basically, “Trust me on this: you don’t want to follow me now….  But you will follow me later, I’m afraid.”  Peter is not ready.  He thinks he can die for Jesus… which is the problem.  It’s the other way around.  We don’t die for Jesus; he dies for us.

Jesus tells Peter that “Not only are you not ready to follow where I am going, you’re going to deny me three times before breakfast.”  

Peter’s denials, we will see, are strategies he undertakes to try and save Jesus.  But we don’t save Jesus; he saves us.

None of our ego-centric actions are helpful here.  None of our normal reasoning works.  Jesus is driving down a path now that makes no sense to us.  He is about to be lifted up in death, drawing to himself all people, bearing the brunt of our blind, broken, fearful, violent, and enslaved existence, and revealing the ultimate truth of God’s infinite love for the world.

We cannot help him.  All we can do is follow at a distance, and witness to this love.

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