27th March 2024 at 7.30pm – Quiet devotional Eucharist
Gospel Reading: John 13:21-32
Jesus was troubled in spirit, and declared, ‘Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.’ The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he was speaking. One of his disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining next to him; Simon Peter therefore motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking.
So while reclining next to Jesus, he asked him, ‘Lord, who is it?’ Jesus answered, ‘It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.’ So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas son of Simon Iscariot. After he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, ‘Do quickly what you are going to do.’
Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the common purse, Jesus was telling him, ‘Buy what we need for the festival’; or, that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.
When he had gone out, Jesus said, ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.
Sermon
If all we had to go on about the Last Supper was the account in St John’s gospel, perhaps some of Christian history might be different. All the other gospels have Jesus breaking bread and sharing wine with his disciples, telling them that the bread is his body which is given for them and that they should eat it in remembrance of him, and the wine is the wine of the new covenant, the new settlement between God and mankind.
Now none of that is in St John’s account, and we might, if all we knew was what is in Saint John’s account, not have had all the arguments about exactly what was going on in Holy Communion. As you know, our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters believe that, at the moment of communion, the bread and the wine are ‘transubstantiated’, they change their physical nature and actually become the body and blood of Jesus. Saint John, on the other hand, was concentrating on the nature of the betrayal by Judas that Jesus was going to suffer.
Jesus was troubled – and that is the third time in St John’s gospel that Jesus is troubled in spirit – and he quoted a text,“He who has taken bread with me has turned against me”, which is from Psalm 41. Whereas in the other gospels Jesus just says that the person who is going to betray him is just one of the disciples who has dipped his bread into the common bowl, without going any further than that, in Saint John’s account Jesus points out Judas by handing him a piece of bread after he has had a private conversation with the disciple whom he loved, at the prompting of Simon Peter.
It builds the dramatic tension by making it more mysterious and also, perhaps, there is a dramatic juxtaposition of the ‘disciple whom he loved’ with Judas Iscariot into whom the devil, Satan, has entered. In John’s Gospel Satan gets into Judas at the moment where Jesus hands him a piece of bread, whereas in the other gospels Satan has entered the heart of Judas earlier on, before they sit down to supper.
Nothing in Saint John’s Gospel is there by accident, so we have to think about why John made it more complicated. I wonder whether John’s way of describing the Last Supper actually takes some of the blame away from Judas. Judas did something evil at the prompting of the devil, and it wasn’t until the devil had come to him, at the moment when Jesus handed him the piece of bread, that he decided to betray Jesus.
Or perhaps more precisely, Satan entered him, so perhaps it wasn’t up to him at all. In yesterday’s reading Jesus speaks of a time of ‘crisis’ or judgement: ‘Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out’ (12:31). Our understanding is that Satan and the ruler of this world, the ‘prince of darkness’, are the same thing. I don’t think you have to believe literally in the devil in order to understand the point of this.
When Jesus was in the wilderness at the beginning and was being tempted, he was tempted by a person, a tempter, a devil; the idea is that this devil, this Satan, is not just bad but he is in charge, he is a ruler. We might think that it would therefore be pretty difficult for Judas to have resisted him. So the die is cast. Off goes Judas, into the night.
Then Jesus goes back to the idea of ‘glory’ that we were talking about last night. In the garden, the last time that his heart was troubled, he wonders what to say to his heavenly father and, according to St John, instead of crying out to God to let him off – ‘take this cup away from me’ – instead he says, ‘Father, glorify your name’.
And here, after Judas has left, Jesus again talks about glorification. ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.’
I find this rather mysterious. The king is glorious. How can he glorify himself when he is already glorious? I feel that this pair of verses must mean more. I think that there is a very good translation in Eugene Peterson’s one-man ‘translation of the Bible in contemporary language’, which is called The Message, which is a mighty feat of scholarship. He puts it like this.
‘When he had left,’ when Judas had left, ‘Jesus said, “Now the son of man is seen for who he is, and God is seen for who he is in him. The moment God is seen in him, God’s glory will be on display. In glorifying him, he himself is glorified – glory all around!”’
I think that makes it a bit clearer, although it’s still a mystery to me why Jesus should refer to this particular moment as being glorious – when after all he has just been betrayed. Surely, far from it being a glorious moment it is an ignominious one.
Perhaps again this is Jesus being contrary. ‘The first shall be last and the last shall be first.’ It could be an example of euphemism, describing something in glowing terms when actually it is exactly the opposite. For instance the prince of darkness, Satan, is called Lucifer, which means the bearer of light.
‘O worship the king, all glorious above’ – we can do no other, as Martin Luther said.
hughdbryant 