"Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me."
Jesus knew the one that would betray him and yet he did not single him out explicitly. This may have helped prevent the other disciples from aggressively intervening too early in order to prevent something which Jesus himself had already resolved to allow. Yet it also seems likely that he desired the response from his disciples in which they "looked at one another, at a loss as to whom he meant". He provoked them "to say to him one after another, “Is it I, Lord?”" (see Matthew 26:22). Judas was the one who would betray him, yet they all had a traitor of some sort lurking in their hearts, driven by different motives, yet alike in their potential willingness to prioritize something else over Jesus himself.
"Master, who is it?"
Jesus answered,
"It is the one to whom I hand the morsel after I have dipped it."
So he dipped the morsel and took it and handed it to Judas,
son of Simon the Iscariot.
It was as though their own introspection made them unable to hear the rather obvious way in which Jesus indicated the identity of his betrayer, as though they were still too concerned about their own potential culpability, and perhaps looking all around them, also too suspicious of all the others, to process the answer to the question from the beloved disciple.
Why not simply call out Judas by name? It was as though Jesus did not want to accuse him, did not delight in this foreknowledge. It was as though saying the name would somehow write the condemnation in stone. He did not desire to alienate him nor to separate him from the other eleven. And so he indicated him not by dispassionately naming him but by saying, "It is the one to whom I hand the morsel after I have dipped it", as if to say, "my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread" (see Psalm 41:9). But by indicating the Judas was his friend he was not simply trying to make the rebuke more stinging but to invite Judas to reconsider and to not to abandon that friendship. But it was not to be. It was as though at that moment Judas resolved to go through with his plan about which he might have been until that moment wavering, and "Satan entered him". Perhaps friendship with the Lord seemed too trivial, compared to whatever aspirations drove his greed, and the juxtaposition of the two possible objectives pushed him to chose the later over the former.
Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.
If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself,
and he will glorify him at once.
The coming of Good Friday and the cross is something we still often read more as unintended tragedy than anything else. But it was already upon the cross, and not only at Easter, that this glorification about which Jesus spoke began. It was by being lifted up on the cross that he would draw all men to himself. We witness this in the good thief who recognized Jesus and the centurion who said, "Truly this was the Son of God!" (see Matthew 27:54). It was then that the prophecy was fulfilled that they would look "on him whom they have pierced" (see Zechariah 12:10). They would weep for him as the prophecy said, but they would receive also the attendant "spirit of grace and pleas for mercy". Why do we insist on emphasizing the glory of the cross? Because we are not meant to do our best to ignore it and struggle on to Easter. We are meant to join those who gaze upon the glorious one, the one who even from the cross reigned as the Lord of heaven and earth.
"Where I am going, you cannot follow me now,
though you will follow later."
Perhaps they couldn't follow without first seeing the way opened for them by Jesus himself. They couldn't recognize the path without Jesus himself calmly insisting that his every step was intentional. They couldn't recognize the goodness of the choice until they experienced the way that Jesus first took up his own cross out of love for them. They could, like Peter, boast about what they would like to do. But faced with the reality of it all such boasting was brought to nothing. And yet, in spite of that, they would indeed "follow later". So too are we meant to follow by living lives that are offerings of love. To do so we must recognize the potential traitor that is within each one of us so as to choose instead the friendship of Jesus himself. Having chosen that friendship we must witness the lengths to which our Friend chose to go for us, and by receiving that love, be healed.
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