James Alison / John 13:21-32

- Jesus at the last supper, from The Passion of the Christ

I was reading a past sermon by Fr. James Alison on the subject of today's readings - the last supper and Judas. It's the last of three sermons for Holy Week, from 200g - Three Holy Week Sermons - and I thought I'd post that one here .....

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Wednesday

Isaiah 50:4-9a Hebrews 12:1-3 John 13:21-32

Weirder and weirder. We get two 'boo' words in today's gospel which tend to throw us off kilter, because they have resonances for us that are too strong to enable us to hear what's going on.

One 'boo' word is 'Satan'.

And Satan went into him. (John 13:27)

It's the only use of the word 'Satan' in John's gospel.

And the other, the other 'boo' word is, of course, 'Judas', which has become for us a symbol of something, and just in this last week a sort of cause célèbre in a certain press. (Lost Gnostic Gospel of Judas revealed, National Geographic story 6/4/06)

What I want to do with you today is to ask you to separate, as we have been doing, the three levels of sound which are coming through this passage. Remember we've talked about those three levels before. The first level is the level of the crowd, of the lynch mob. That voice is here today simply as a person. That's all that Satan means. The second voice is the voice of the disciples, the ones who half know that something is happening, and half don't know and don't get it. And the third voice, working at an entirely different level, is the work, the voice, of Jesus, doing something and explaining something, peacefully. So let's try and explore that voice, to see if it can quieten the way in which we hear the 'boo' words, so as to give them their proper banality. Because that's what's difficult for us, to hear the banality of what is going on here. 'Boo' words hide banality.

A couple of key words in today's reading. Two key words for the whole of the gospel, particularly at this passion time. 'Handed over'. To 'hand over'. In the reading, as we heard it, it was translated 'betray'. The reading as we heard it said:

I say to you, one of you will betray me. (13:21)

All it says is: "One of you will hand me over". And remember that 'handing over' has different senses. It is a positive thing. What Jesus is doing is handing himself over. Earlier in the chapter, which we don't get to read today, we get to read tomorrow, the foot washing chapter, early in that chapter we get:

God has put all things into his hands. (13:3)

In other words God has handed over everything to Jesus. And Jesus is now handing himself over. He is transmitting himself. He is literally going to transmit himself, giving his body and blood to people. What they do with it is up to them, that's part of the vulnerability of handing over. It's the risk of putting yourself in someone's hands. But remember that betraying is simply a sub-section of handing over. The verb is actually the same verb in Greek. To transmit; to hand over; to betray; the same word.

And then the other word with two meanings is the word 'eat'. We have this strange moment of Jesus dipping a morsel into some liquid and handing it over to Judas to eat. Because the same word can mean to enjoy and to destroy, not only in English, but more to our purposes in Hebrew and Aramaic, a word with the same root. I suppose we would have something the same with our word backbiter, a backbiter - someone who eats their neighbours. That's the same set of resonances that we have here. One of the words in ancient Syriac for a calumniator, a slanderer, was a pieces-eater, someone who eats the flesh of their neighbour. So what we have here is a handing over and an eating. Exactly the same act. It can be a betrayal and a destroying. Exactly the same act. But what Jesus is doing he's doing very calmly and gently. Remember that the disciples don't get what's going on at all. The beloved disciple asks Jesus who it is. And Jesus says, presumably sotto voce, so that only this disciple could hear – it's the one to whom I am going to give the morsel. But that message doesn't get back to Simon Peter in time, and none of the others know what's happened, because after Judas takes his bite he gets up and goes, and Jesus says:

What you are going to do, do quickly. (13:27)

And that's the only thing they hear, "What you are going to do, do quickly", an entirely ambivalent remark which they are able to interpret in a variety of different ways. And one of the reasons of course which John knows, and which we all know, is that Judas wasn't the only person given a morsel by Jesus that evening. Everyone is given a morsel. The handing over, and the how the handing over is lived out, is universally available, the possibility of betrayal is universally available. So what happens here? Judas does something terribly banal. A reward notice has gone out into the local Post Offices. It says that at the end of Chapter 11 – not the bit about Post Offices, I'm making that bit up – but the ruling authorities had let it be known that anyone who provided them with information as to where this person might be found would be rewarded. The notice had gone up. And Judas thought "Hmm. I might take advantage of that". And then he does. That's all. We know nothing about Judas's motivation. There are hints that it might have been for the money. It might have been, because he thought that he could provoke Jesus into doing something grandiloquent by handing him over, that it would produce the final clash of powers, in which the Holy One would be vindicated. We don't know anything about Judas's motives. And guess what? In the real gospels, as opposed to the Gnostic gospels, it doesn't matter, because what Judas did is utterly banal. All he has done, in fact, is give someone away, give a friend away. The last time we see Judas in John's gospel he's standing with a group of soldiers in the garden of Gethsemane, that's all. It says very clearly:

And Judas was standing there with them. (John 18:5)

And that's very significant because that's what's specifically forbidden in Leviticus:

You shall not go up and down as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand forth against the blood of your neighbour. (Lev 19:16)

All that Judas has managed to do is the utterly banal thing of breaking a commandment. That's all he's managed to do, to achieve nothing at all. We don't even hear the end of the story. There is no story of Judas, because all that has happened to Judas is that the prince of this world, the principle by which social order is maintained, the self-defeating social principle has taken advantage of him, to try to create spurious meaning, to try and produce something exciting, meaningful, advantageous. And guess what? Nothing is going to happen. Jesus is not going to rise to the bait. He's going to go quietly, having handed himself over to occupy the space of the one whom the lynch mob get. And by doing that, actually he's going to undo the mechanism of the lynch from within. And it says:

When Judas goes out it was night. (John 13:30)

At the moment, if you like, it's the moment when the power that thinks it can create meaning by lynching is inexorably set in motion. From that moment on, what Jesus is doing is going to be invisible, and Jesus immediately says:

Now is the Son of Man glorified (13:31)

It's at the moment when he does not resist that he goes into occupying the space of the one who is betrayed, occupying the space of the killed one, the necessary victim, the one who it's convenient for you that we kill someone so that the nation not perish. It's when he occupies that space peacefully that the whole panoply of fake meaning is undone, is revealed to have no meaning at all. That is when God is glorified, when the self-giving victim shows that he's been able to undo all the power of darkness and death to give fake meaning.

It's one of the reasons why it's so important that we don't get carried away by Judas. Anyone who tries to make a story out of Judas doesn't get it. They are trying to create meaning where there is only banality, just as anyone who tries to make Satan apocalyptic doesn't get it. All there is is the ordinary social structuring of this world, the ruler of this world, the principle by which we create our unity, our meaning, our togetherness, and which is fake. The handing over, the gentle handing over, the quiet handing over, of himself, to occupy that space, not even provoking it or tempting it, but deliberately moving into that space was described by the patristic authors almost as if it were Jesus giving the devil a bait to grasp, as though Jesus was a particular sort of bait on a fishhook, and once the fish got it, it was in fact hooked. That's how the patristic fathers described this handing over, the Greek fathers. They saw it as though Satan thought he had sprung a trap for Jesus, but Jesus was in fact undoing the trap from within. The quiet handing over which cannot be heard, the one who occupies the space, who does not allow themselves to be given identity by the crowd, by the pressure ("give us meaning", "give us signs", "give us wisdom"). The one who occupies that space gently is the one who will explode the whole system of meaning from within, which is the promise of glorification. And it can only be done as the trap tries to close down and finds that it's been stuck half open. Because if someone occupies that space voluntarily, and shows what it's about, it doesn't work any longer. It depends on people not knowing what they doing in order to work. It depends on people being able to pass the buck in order to work. Whereas, what Jesus is doing is showing that from the perspective of the innocent one "they hated me without cause". There was no real reason behind it, there's no real meaning to it. Meaning is created slowly and gently by the creator who brings things into being in the midst of our learning how to undo our sacred forms of handing over.

See the irony of the two words in John, the 'handing over' and the 'eating'. How easy it is to receive something from someone and use it to destroy them. How difficult it is to receive something from someone and realise that you have been challenged to transmit something. Someone has given themselves to you and is saying "You're going to be me. Where will you take it? Where will you take it?" That's the risk of creation. The other way is the trap of false meaning. And it's the very, very, very, delicate interface of those two which John shows us in today's gospel.

I want to bring out finally once again the banality. We're so used to reading this as a ritual with the grand words that we forget how different the voices are: the voice of the crowd; the unknowing of the disciples; and the quietness of Jesus. In the face of the quietness of Jesus what we typically dress up as a particular form of wickedness is banal, it's meaningless, it goes nowhere. We need to let that music out of our ears if we are to hear the deeper, slower, quieter, music carrying us towards Good Friday.

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