In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Tomorrow is, of course, Maundy Thursday – the night on which we remember the Last Supper. Matthew devotes 14 verses to it, Mark 15, and Luke 33, but John spends 155 verses over 5 chapters recounting that final meal and first Eucharist. The passage that we heard from John this evening isn’t one that finds its way into any of our Eucharistic prayers. Sure, we all remember that it was Judas who betrayed Jesus, but the details are often overlooked. But this key passage in the Last Supper discourse tells us something about both our humanity and the grace of God that we see in Jesus.
Notice that Judas doesn’t betray Jesus because he disagrees with Jesus on matters of politics or theology. Nor is he sabotaging Jesus because of jealousy. Other gospel accounts note that Judas did it for money, but John makes no such mention of a bribe. According to John, Judas hands Jesus over because Satan had entered into him.
Now what exactly that means, I don’t know. But it tells me that a person can be overcome with evil. It doesn’t mean that Judas is innocent of the crime. What John means isn’t that some foreign source took over Judas’ muscles and brain, making decisions for him and controlling his will. Rather, Judas got swept up by a current stronger than he could contend agaist. Perhaps he had some doubt about whether or not Jesus was the Messiah, maybe there was some fear about what would happen when the authorities got tired of Jesus and his band of troublemakers, it could be that Judas was frustrated that Jesus’ ministry wasn’t unfolding in the way he thought it should. Whatever went into the decision making cocktail, John says it was Satan that drove the betrayal.
Satan is bigger than you, bigger than me. Satan is something like racism or sexism. Nearly everyone agrees that women should receive equal pay for equal work; and yet, they don’t. That’s the work of Satan. Our collective evil is greater than the sum of our individual evils. The battle line of salvation goes right through us. The forces of Satan are on one side and the forces of God are on the other. It’s not that we have to choose which side we are on, but we are the battlefield itself. So we all know what it is to have Satan in us because our lives are the place of God’s salvation. The story of sin and grace is played out in human existence and in our lives.
This is actually a liberating message because it means that you don’t need to be able to withstand the attacks of Satan, you don’t need to muster up the courage to resist evil, you don’t have to choose which side you are on. Christ does that work for us. We say it when the Eucharistic bread is broken, just as it was broken by Jesus when he handed a piece to Judas – Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Notice that we call Christ our Passover. It’s not that Eucharist is like the Passover meal, it’s that Christ himself is the meal. He is the feast of our salvation, his Body which we receive in the bread is the victory celebration over Satan and evil.
But as John notes when Judas went out, “it was night.” The Passover was not only a celebratory meal of salvation, it was also a meal of sacrifice. The lambs at Passover were slaughtered in the place of the first-born who were stricken down throughout Egypt. Christ becomes this sense of the Passover as well. He is not only the victory, but the lamb.
As soon as Judas leaves and the wheels of Jesus’ execution are in motion, Jesus says “Now the Son of Man has been glorified.” It’s an odd time to think about glory. Though the remaining eleven are ignorant of what is going on, Jesus is not. He knows what Judas has gone to do. But Jesus also knows that Judas is just a pawn. Jesus knows that the Cross cannot be avoided. Good Friday is coming whether or not Judas betrays Jesus.
Jesus is the embodiment of the words that we heard from Isaiah, that “I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting. The Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced.” Jesus has an abiding trust in God, which serves as his well of strength in these dark times. The glory of God is seen here, in a betrayal, when a force that is bigger than us, called Satan, turns a student against his teacher, when a righteous man becomes a scapegoat.
In becoming our Passover, Christ puts an end to our ways of thinking about what glory is. Glory isn’t about strength, it isn’t about winning, it isn’t about being popular, it isn’t about stepping on the throats of our enemies. Rather, the glory of Christ is seen in that Jesus never waivers from resolute love. The glory of Christ is that nothing can make him doubt his reconciling mission. The glory of Christ is seen in that he fights our battle for us by laying down his life.
Yes, people today still are entered into by Satan; it happens to you, to me, to all of us. But what this Holy Week shows us is that through the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the gravitational pull of grace is stronger than the call of evil. Sorrow may come, but joy always remains within reach. Rejection happens, but God’s love never fails. Darkness may surround us, but dawn is on the horizon. Christ our Passover has been sacrificed, therefore we are able to keep the feast. Amen.
