John 13:18-30 "Falls the Eventide" Scott Hoezee

We've all had the unhappy opportunity this past month to see some terrible photos. Among the most horrific are those pictures of people leaping from the twin towers, their ties and skirts flying upward as their bodies descend with sickening speed. But although it is not shocking the way those photos are, one of the most chilling pictures I've seen from September 11 is that image snapped by a security camera at the Portland, Maine, airport. Maybe you've seen it, too: on the picture is terrorist leader Mohammed Atta. You can see that he is nicely dressed as he rounds the corner by the luggage x-ray machine. He has casually just re-slung his carry-on bag onto his shoulder and is headed for his gate, the exact same way any number of us have done at airports who knows how many times. It is a marrow-chilling image because although this man looks so utterly ordinary, his heart even then seethed with hatred, evil, and a dreadful plan.

Since then, we've heard interviews with any number of people who had seen Atta that day or in the previous weeks, months, and years during which he lived among us. Over and again what you hear people saying is how unglued they feel because of the retrospective knowledge they now have that they rubbed shoulders with and lived next door to a man who became one of the most bloody murderers in all history. People simply cannot believe that such rank wickedness could be in their own backyard without their noticing it.

Particularly when evil assumes titanic proportions, we tend to think there could never be any missing it. Shouldn't such things be written all over people's faces? The answer is clearly "No." But that's too eerie to deal with for many. It unsettles our sensibilities, makes us feel unsafe, off-balance, maybe even a bit confused. This is something I suspect the disciples could also understand and relate to.

As reported in John 13, it took a while for anyone to believe that there was a traitor in their midst. After all, these twelve disciples in Jesus' inner circle were a tight group. They'd been through thick and thin together in recent years but were united in their devotion to the master. True, they were known to bicker some among themselves and had made more than their share of dumb mistakes. Nevertheless, they were a unit, a team. They were friends, for goodness sake, and so had come to understand each other pretty well.

So when Jesus suddenly interrupts what had so far been a nice Passover meal to announce that one of them was a rat, the disciples were dumbfounded. They just stared blankly at each other, verse 22 says. Finally, Peter catches John's eye and silently mouths the words, "Ask him who he means." So John then leans in closer and whispers, "Pssst, Jesus! Who are you talking about?" Jesus then whispers back something about the one to whom he gives a piece of bread, which Jesus then does to Judas. But even so the disciples are incredulous. They hear Jesus tell Judas, "Take care of this thing quickly." So Judas flees the room, leaving the remaining disciples scratching their heads in befuddlement. Most of them assumed that Judas, being the group's treasurer, was going to pay the bill for the rental on the upper room or maybe he was fetching more wine since they were running low (and the night was young).

What they could not or would not grasp was that there was evil in their midst. It shook them deeply once it had sunk in. And probably it should have a similar effect on us, though it usually doesn't, of course. Many of us cannot remember a time when we didn't already know about Judas' treachery. We read the entire gospel story through the lens of that knowledge. So, for instance, we read of the time Jesus first called Judas to be a disciple, and our eyes immediately narrow a little even as we quietly think, "Big mistake calling him, Lord!" We read about Judas saying this or doing that in the course of Jesus' ministry, and we shake our heads because we know what's coming eventually.

So we find it difficult to imagine what the disciples felt like that night. But I want to suggest that we recover some of their shock because in so doing, we may be able better to appreciate what the Lord's Supper means in the context of life in the real world.

Basically what I think we can learn from this passage is the perilously snarled nature of sin and evil. Once you come to see how complex and intertwined sin is with life in this world, you may begin to understand more clearly why even the very Son of God had to go to the radical lengths he did to root that evil out. Salvation was no cinch, not even for God! We have noted together before something I first heard Neal Plantinga mention in a seminary class: namely, the startling fact that biblically God's overcoming sheer nothingness in the creation of the universe appears to have been much more straightforward than God's later overcoming evil in the salvation of creation.

Two weeks ago we looked at Genesis 1 and we noted the majestic, yet simple, way God spoke the creation into being. We even noted that the predictable, storybook-like structure of the Genesis 1 text assures readers as they go along that God's word will always produce the desired results. But salvation is more complicated somehow. It is not predictable. Even the people throughout history who had been the most vigilant in watching for the arrival of God's Messiah could never have dreamed he'd arrive as some simple carpenter's son whose career path would careen straight into a cross. In creation, God spoke in his supreme majesty, and it was. In redemption, Jesus screamed in his desperate dereliction, and only then was it finished.

There's just something about evil that prevents it from being dealt with through a wave of God's hand and a few good words majestically spoken. Even in John 13 something of this becomes poignantly evident. In verses 18-19 Jesus throws out that loaded phrase "I Am," just as he does so often in this gospel. Through this he puts himself on a par with Yahweh, the Great I Am of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob of old. In the NIV verse 19 concludes with Jesus' saying, "you will believe I am He." In the original Greek, however, there is no word there for "he" (much less spelled with a capital "H," as the NIV translators chose to do). Instead in Greek Jesus simply says, "so that you may believe that I am." But suppose later on tonight I said to you something like, "Well, this evening I am." Your response would likely be, "You are what?" Typically no one says, "I am" without completing the thought by saying what it is you are. But here Jesus ends his sentence with the emphatic, yet seemingly incomplete, "I am." But far from being some naked phrase in need of rounding out, this "I Am" stands as a clear reference to the very God Yahweh with whom Jesus was identifying himself.

That is quite a breathtaking claim, of course. What is truly outrageous, however, is what happens next. No sooner does Jesus say this, and verse 21 informs us that Jesus became "deeply troubled in spirit." I don't know about you, but when I read that, I do not picture Jesus getting some distant or distracted look in his eyes nor as shifting his weight uncomfortably from side to side the way you might do if you got a leg cramp or a gas pang. I think that what this means in verse 21 is that he started to cry, to choke up. Because what Jesus must say next cut him to the quick: with a tremor in his voice and a quiver in his chin, Jesus says, "One of you is going to betray me."

When you combine that troubled image of verse 21 with the powerful "I Am" in verse 19, what you come up with is the paradoxical picture of God in tears. Once again more recent images pop into our heads: all those video clips and photos of people in New York, hands over their mouths, eyes streaming with tears, as they watch the first tower collapse in a way no one thought was even possible. So also here: Jesus has his hand over his mouth even as his shine with salty tears. He may be the same almighty Yahweh who spoke the universe into being and he may well be the Yahweh who parted the Red Sea, but in the face of the evil in his own midst, he just couldn't believe it. And so God weeps.

It is amazing how well evil worms its way around in life. Indeed, yet another cause for you to clap your hand over your mouth in disbelief comes in verse 27. Jesus hands Judas a piece of bread. Judas eats it, and Satan leaps down Judas' gullet along with the bread. The sacrament we will celebrate in a few moments is often called "communion." We commune with Jesus, we thicken our union with him by eating the bread and sipping the wine. But in John 13 we witness what could be called the Unlord's Supper. How can it be that something Jesus gives to Judas becomes something Satan exploits? How can the morsel that should give life (and tonight does give us life) become like poison in Judas' soul? It wasn't some craven and crabbed devil's claw that skewered that bread and handed it to Judas but the tender (and soon-to-be-pierced) hand of our Lord. And yet Satan was so close that he slipped right under Jesus' own hand. If you have never before marveled over that mixing of the holy with the evil in John 13, see it now and let it stun your senses for a moment.

All of this is a real kidney punch for Jesus. In fact, in verse 18 when Jesus quotes Psalm 41's line about someone "raising up his heel," commentators think that the image there is of the way a horse or donkey lifts one of its hind hooves just before it delivers one of those sharp kicks that can knock a person flat. When I was growing up, my Dad boarded horses for people and so I was around horses quite a bit when feeding them and cleaning out their stalls. So I learned soon enough that if you saw a back hoof going up, it was time to move! Indeed, a classmate of mine at Ada Christian School nearly died when we were in 4^th Grade after he did not get out of the way one day in his father's barn and a horse quite neatly kicked in the side of his skull.

What Judas did to Jesus that night was a sharp kick in the head. But like the other grim events soon to happen, Jesus would not and did not get out of the way. He had to take it, but it hurt. Small wonder that the last line--so skillfully inserted there by John--is that after Judas went out, "It was night." Night had fallen in more than one sense. All along in this gospel John has been playing with the imagery of light and dark. Judas had now separated himself from Jesus, the Light of the world, and so Judas entered the darkness.

Yet John told us something else right off the bat in this book: the light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not overcome that light. And it never will. It keeps trying, however. As with that morsel of bread that Jesus handed to Judas, so today: it seems there is nothing so good but that evil cannot pervert it, corrupt it, twist it. I'm sorry to keep returning to recent events, but yet another example of sin's perverse power to distort has been seen yet again in the way the terrorists use the promise of paradise as a tool by which to make people willing to die. This has led folks like the British science writer Richard Dawkins to claim that the real enemy of humanity right now is not any form of fundamentalism but religion in general. Any faith that holds out for an afterlife with God in heaven is to be condemned, Dawkins recently claimed.

Once again we have cause to clap a hand over our mouths and simply gasp at how even as dear a vision as life in heaven gets turned into a decanter of death. Night has fallen on this world, and sometimes it seems like it keeps deepening in darkness. But still we come to this table. Still we keep reaching for the bread Jesus has to give us. And still we keep believing that though personally wounded, shocked, and even reduced to tears, Jesus is stronger than evil, and the salvation he accomplished has shined a light into the universe that has ever since been dispelling the shadows of sin's night.

In fact, the grace that streams from this table cuts through the inky blackness like a holy laser beam, sometimes piercing even the darkest of hearts. As Christians, we should hope that just this happened ultimately even for Judas. Like Peter and the others who will betray and deny Jesus in their own ways, so also Judas finally reacted to his sin with remorse. He had fled into the night. In the darkness of that same night Judas will later single Jesus out with that famous kiss of death.

But as Frederick Buechner once imagined it, maybe somewhere beyond the grave Judas met Jesus again. The two old friends perhaps approached each other, both a little worse for the wear after all they'd gone through. But perhaps this time it was Jesus who initiated a kiss, only this was a holy kiss of life. We don't know whether or not any such thing has happened or ever will. But we should hope it would.

At the very least the witness of this table tonight should make us believe that it most certainly can happen. Sin and evil are shocking, snarled, and terribly sad. But our Lord Jesus is the Great I Am who is also the light of the world. In the mystery of salvation Jesus somehow overcame the darkness by giving himself over to it. He let the night fall. But in God's wisdom, maybe Jesus knew that passing through the night was the only way to arrive on the other side of that night at a bright new day whose dawning has a name--a name as dear and as precious as any word we know: Easter.

On this Lord's day evening the sun is setting and the eventide is coming. But no matter, because I now invite you to come to this table where the sun of righteousness is rising once again. Come to this table and hear the Light of the world say to you, "Good morning!" Indeed, the light still shines. Amen.