“And It Was Night”

Today we remember the moment that is, for John’s gospel, the deepest pit, the darkest dark. This is the instant when sin ruptures friendship, wrecks God’s family, and threatens to destroy the Father’s only Son, sent to save the beloved world.

It is a cosmic catastrophe, like the crucifixion is in the rest of the gospel tradition, when at noon, darkness covers the whole land, returning creation to primal darkness, unmaking it.  A total eclipse of the sun. This is the malevolent night. Full of darkness that people loved rather than light.

It happens at the family meal when Jesus has washed the feet of his friends and given them the new commandment. This final supper mirrors the anointing – it expands the table around which Mary, Martha, Lazarus, Judas, Jesus dined amid the encompassing fragrance of the pure ointment of nard. Here at the last supper is the larger family of spiritual sisters and brothers that is the Johanine community.

Among the gathering of friends is the disciple we know as Simon Peter, and also another, who we see for the first time here.

This one is at the supper “lying on the breast of Jesus.” Or lying on his bosom. He is as close as he can physically be, as close as the Son is to the Father. As close as siblings who share a bed, or as a child cradled with his mother.

We do not know his name, only that he is the one “whom Jesus loved.” Like Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Like his own who were in the world whom he loved to the end.

He is never called the one Jesus loved better than the others or the one whom he loved the best. He is however, the most physically close to Jesus’ body here, and later when Jesus’ body is taken down from the cross, he witnesses visionary details of the body of one whom they had pierced.

When dinner is almost done, after Jesus washes their feet – Jesus tells his friends, “one of you will betray me.” The one whom Jesus loved asks, on behalf of the others, “Who is it?”

Like the wicked fairy at the christening party, the bad apple in the barrel, the one who plans to ruin this party, Judas is there, the spoiler, as he was at the supper in Bethany.

Judas has haunted the action in this gospel from the beginning even as early as the feeding of the five thousand at the sea of Tiberias. By now we all know that it is Judas.

That Jesus is betrayed by one of his own is a stubborn stain in the story of Jesus.  His enemies could have taken him with overwhelming force, but instead there was an insider who ratted. It is an embarrassing fact, that casts shame on Jesus and his followers.

Judas is “the intimate enemy,” the one who uses his privileged position to do harm, takes trust and throws it away, who humiliates his host.

Of all the afflictions portrayed in the psalms, sickness, injury, despair, death, the perishing of your name, it is the mockery of enemies that is most terrible. And worst of all is when a friend turns against you.  If you have ever been in this situation, you know this to be true.

It could have been a routine reorganization or a planned retirement, but it is a coworker, in whom you confided, who knows your weakness, who reports you.

You believed her to be a confidante, but she kept from you one key fact.

It keeps you up at night, obsessing over the hurt of it.

From the Psalms, Jesus’ Book of Common Prayer: “Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me.”

John’s gospel is most uncompromising in its condemnation of Judas. The author tells no mitigating backstory, provides no excuses, reports no future regret.

Judas personifies the power of evil, the refusal of the world to welcome its creator. The embodies the perverse ignorance we have seen throughout the gospel from those who encounter Jesus, who fear, instead of welcome him.

Like sin in John’s gospel, you never know why or how sin happened, but you know its power.

Darkness threatens to overwhelm the light.

As the night closes in, we who read and who watch this event unfold, are filled with horror.

Our response to Judas may be fear… what wickedness is capable of. It may be hate, as burning and merciless as his own. It may be relief, that it is not us. And pity.

As readers of John, we know who is it who will betray Jesus. And Jesus knows also. He has spoken of scripture: ‘The one who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me.’

To answer the beloved disciple’s question, Jesus says:

“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 the morsel, Satan entered into him.

Jesus said to him, “Do quickly what you are going to do.”

And it was night.

In the middle of this dark night we watch evil unfold – a righteous person is betrayed by a treasonous friend. It’s utterly awful.

And as with all this remembering during this long goodbye in John, dim light glimmers in the details that the evangelist has hidden in plain sight. Jesus’ giving of the morsel of food to Judas recalls the picnic at the sea of Tiberias, when Jesus fed the people in the great sign of the loaves and the fishes and when he spoke of himself as the prophet who conjured bread in the wilderness, and of himself as the Bread of Life, who came down from heaven. And the sermon unwraps itself and it reveals and proclaims that it will be Jesus’ flesh that will give life to the world, through eating his flesh, and drinking his blood.

So here Jesus offers the bread to Judas – we are not told whether he put it into his mouth or spat it out or tossed it on the floor but whatever he did Judas participates, even without intending to, in the fractured eucharist, the messed up holy communion, the sacrament of life that is made possible by the death that Judas instigates in this betrayal.  Jesus is eating at the table spread in the presence of his enemies, and Judas is the enemy eating at the table spread by the host who loves his own to the end.

Here is the hope, glimmering, as darkness surrounds the shining light. Her is the foretaste of the table where Jesus’ friends, generations and generations later, will know his presence and abide in him and he in them. Here is hope in the disciple whom Jesus loves, who stands for us, faithful friend of Jesus, who plays his role, asking on behalf of the others, all the time close on Jesus’ bosom.

Even this deepest, darkest night is held in God’s love, in the light of Christ, in the divine desire, that will unfold in the days to come.

And it was night, deep dark.

“The light shines in the darkness, and darkness has not overcome it.”

Amen.