John 13:21–30
After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit, and testified, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.’
The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he spoke. One of his disciples, whom Jesus loved, was reclining at table close to Jesus, so Simon Peter motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking.
So that disciple, leaning back against Jesus, said to him, ‘Lord, who is it?’
Jesus answered, ‘It is he to whom I will give this morsel of bread when I have dipped it.’ So when he had dipped the morsel, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. Then after he had taken the morsel, Satan entered into him.
Jesus said to him, ‘What you are going to do, do quickly.’ Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the money bag, Jesus was telling him, ‘Buy what we need for the feast,’ or that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the morsel of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.[p 115]
A hard lesson
The original setting of the course of lessons in the Upper Room was poignant indeed. For three years Christ had lived, worked and travelled with the twelve men who were his apostles; and they all (except one) had loved him, served him, and sacrificed home comforts and worldly wealth in order to follow him. It is that one exception whom we will now consider.
The opposite of holiness
The first major lesson in Christ’s school of holiness began with the powerfully symbolic object lesson of Christ washing his disciples’ feet. The second major lesson consists of another momentous symbolic gesture: Christ giving the morsel of bread to Judas. The giving of that bread did two things: first, it unmistakably identified the traitor; and secondly, it vividly exposed the nature of his sin.
John’s first reason for recording this event is, doubtless, that it actually happened. But the event is more than history: it carries a universal lesson that we need to learn. Its relevance is this: our Lord’s washing of his disciples’ feet teaches us that true believers are expected to ‘cleanse [themselves] from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God’ (2 Cor 7:1). Granted, then, that we should aim at becoming ever more holy, how shall we do that unless we have a clear idea of what holiness is? And not merely what particular attitudes and acts are holy, but what the essence and heart of holiness is.
Now, one way of learning what a thing is, is to be shown its opposite. We learn, for instance, to appreciate beauty all the more by being shown ugliness. We become acutely aware of what it means to be healthy, when we lose our health and become sick. What, then is the opposite of holiness?
‘Sin, of course!’ says someone; and that is correct as far as it goes. But sin expresses itself in many ways. As the opposite of righteousness, for instance, sin is lawlessness, says the Bible (1 John 3:4). It is living in total disregard of God’s law, as if God’s law did not exist. But what is sin as the opposite of holiness?[p 116]
It is this that the Lord Jesus is about to teach us. In identifying the traitor, Judas, and in vividly exposing the nature of his sin, he will show us what the very essence of unholiness is. We shall then perceive all the more clearly what its opposite, true holiness, is and what the secret is of attaining holiness.
The essence of unholiness
We have already heard Christ describing Judas’s sin (without naming him) in the words, ‘He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me’ (John 13:18). Now our Lord adds the even darker phrase: ‘One of you will betray me’ (v. 21). We know from the other Gospels that Judas betrayed the Lord for money: he sold him for thirty pieces of silver (see Matt 26:15). We must put all these elements together to get a comprehensive view of Judas’s sin.
Let’s go back, then, to the phrase, ‘He who ate my bread ’. It was not a question of thirteen men sharing a meal together in a restaurant, with each man paying his own share of the cost of the meal. On this occasion, as on many occasions in the past, Jesus was the host who, in his loving generosity, had invited Judas as his personal guest to come and share his table. In addition to the food on his table, the Lord Jesus had bestowed on Judas several high privileges and gifts. He had appointed him as an apostle, and commissioned him to go out as his envoy along with the other apostles to preach the gospel of the kingdom of God. It may even be that Judas was empowered like the other apostles to do miracles, for, though Judas was never anything else than an unbeliever (and our Lord knew that, according to John 6:70–71), it is possible for people who are not believers to do miracles in the name of Jesus (see Matt 7:22–23). In addition, Judas was trusted with the position of treasurer of the apostolic group: he held the purse which contained all the money that Jesus owned (from which purse, incidentally, Judas often misappropriated the funds, John 12:6).
But far beyond these high privileges, gifts and honoured duties, Christ had offered Judas his personal friendship. Christ could have treated Judas as a non-commissioned officer in an army who, important though his rank might be, would never be invited to dine with the supreme commander of the army, let alone with the president of the country. But no! Jesus had habitually invited Judas to his table, offering him not only his food but his personal friendship.[p 117]
And Judas’s sin? He had taken all Christ’s gifts, accepted all the privileges, eaten the very food off Christ’s table—and had no time, love or loyalty for Christ personally. Yes, he had pretended to be Christ’s friend and loyal servant. But he had never loved Christ. And as for loyalty, when the opportunity came, he would not only steal Christ’s money from the bag; he would sell Christ’s friendship, and Christ himself into the bargain.
The seriousness of Judas's sin
Now there are some things in life so sacred that one could not put a monetary value on them, and anyone who was prepared to sell these things for money would be heartily despised by all right thinking people. Friendship is one of these. Loyalty is another. A man who spies on a foreign country may well be admired by his fellow-citizens for his courage and skill. But a man who is prepared to sell his own country, so long as the price is high enough, is regarded by his fellowcountrymen with loathing and disgust, as guilty of the most appalling perversion of true values. If detected and caught he will normally be imprisoned for life or even executed. And what would we say of a man who would sell his mother into slavery for a handsome fee?
So for Judas to take all Christ’s gifts and then to steal his money from the common purse was certainly a mean and despicable trick. But in the end, what would the loss of a few coins mean to Christ? For Judas to take all Christ’s gifts, to sit as his guest, pretend friendship, eat the very food off his table, and then sell both Christ himself and his friendship for money—that was to strike a dagger personally into Christ’s very heart. Christ was no unfeeling stoic. Years later, as John recalled the scene and recorded it for us, he still could picture in his mind the distress Jesus showed as he made the announcement: ‘[he] was troubled in his spirit, and testified, “Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me”’ (13:21).
But more, if Jesus had been simply an ordinary man, or even a uniquely brilliant theologian and teacher, Judas’s treachery would still have been infamous. Jesus was no ordinary man; he was the Son of God. To take Jesus’ gifts and food, and then reject him, was the same as taking God’s gifts and then rejecting God. To sell Jesus and his friendship was to sell God and his friendship. The dagger Judas thrust into the heart of Jesus penetrated the very heart of God.[p 118]
Judas's heart: a microcosm of humankind
Judas’s behaviour may seem to us extreme; but his attitude of heart is more common than you might think. Judas took Christ’s gifts, but he had no time, love or loyalty for Christ personally. And multitudes take and enjoy God’s gifts, but have no time, love or loyalty for God either. They treat God the creator as Judas treated Christ. All around us spread out for our enjoyment are the good and often delightful gifts of nature, our daily bread included. But there is more to life than the impersonal forces of nature. Behind nature there beats the throbbing heart of a personal creator; and nature’s gifts are his loving invitations to us to seek him and his personal friendship. Multitudes take and enjoy the gifts but have no interest in the divine giver. They own no debt of gratitude to him, no love for him, no loyalty to him, no desire for his friendship. They ignore him. Worse still, to get more money, better positions in society, more acceptance with the world, many are prepared to sell God’s Son and to barter faith in God for worldly success. This is the very heart and essence of unholiness. To be unholy you don’t have to murder anyone, raid a bank, commit adultery, or torture little children. All you have to do is to take God’s gifts and have no love or time for God himself. By that process you wound the very heart of God and desacralize everything in life as well.
An ancient sin
This false, unholy attitude of heart is the sin into which Satan originally lured Adam and Eve. Genesis 3 describes how he pointed to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and made Eve aware that it was good for food, that is, for physical satisfaction; that it was good to look at, that is, for aesthetic satisfaction; and desirable to make one wise, that is, intellectual satisfaction. Then he put to Eve the lie that it is possible to enjoy these lovely things—in a word, to enjoy life to the full independently of God and without regard either for him or for his word. Adam and Eve believed the lie and inevitably it reorientated humankind’s attitude to life, to its resources and relationships. Life’s benefits ceased to be regarded as gifts from the gracious hand of God to be enjoyed in fellowship with God, drawing their hearts into ever closer friendship with him, so that, when life on earth ceased and life’s temporary gifts were gone, the friendship would continue eternally in God’s heaven. Now life’s benefits became[p 119] an end in themselves, drawing their hearts away from God instead of to him. Moreover, their alienation from God made them afraid of him. He was someone to hide from, no longer a source of their enjoyment of life but a threat to it. And the poison of this false attitude to God has infiltrated the veins of every human being.
It is the world’s typical sin; so much so that the Bible often uses the word ‘world’ in a bad sense to refer to human society, organized and living on the basis of this false heart-attitude to God. We find many examples of this later on in Christ’s course on holiness.
Moreover, unregenerate people are not the only ones to be marked by this sin. Genuine believers are still drawn to it, and need to be exhorted in the words of the Apostle John, ‘Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world’ (see 1 John 2:15–16). It is not that the beautiful things in life, or even the desire for them, are wrong in themselves. The Bible says that God has given us all things richly to enjoy (1 Tim 6:17). The damage is done when the lovely things of life (or anything else, for that matter) are allowed to steal our hearts away from God. That is worldliness and the very essence of unholiness.
Let’s suppose a wealthy man decided to mark his son’s eighteenth birthday by giving him a private aeroplane. And suppose the son took the gift without thanking his father, climbed into the cockpit, flew off and never returned to visit his father again throughout the rest of his life. What would we think of the son? And how would the father feel?
The essence of holiness
If this, then, is the basic principle of unholiness, we may at once deduce that the essential nature of holiness is its exact opposite. It is not so much the keeping of a list of rules, although Christ later on reminds us that if we love him, we shall keep his commandments. At heart, true holiness is unswerving love and devotion to the divine persons.
Failure to grasp this has sometimes led people to the observance of all kinds of legalistic practices which have an outward show of holiness, but lack its basic principle. There are some Christians, for instance, who still wear mediaeval clothes, in the belief that to wear modern dress would be unholy. It is not for us, of course, to judge the[p 120] inner state of their hearts; but we can be sure of this, that it is possible to wear antiquated clothes and to keep all kinds of rigid codes of conduct, and yet at heart have little or no love for the Saviour, or active devotion to him personally. Even preachers and theologians are not immune to this danger. It is possible to study holy Scripture as a mere profession or hobby, and to preach the Bible for the sheer joy of the sense of power it gives the preacher over large congregations, and yet at heart to be distant from the Lord, and lacking in personal love for him. And it is also possible for preachers—let Judas warn us—for the sake of position, career or gain, to be disloyal to Christ morally, spiritually and theologically.
If we are going to be progressively more holy, we must become ever more devoted to the Lord, love him more dearly and serve him more loyally. But if that is so, the most fervent believers will be the first to admit that their love for Christ is not as warm and constant as it should be. The pressures of life, its joys, sorrows and struggles, exhaust the heart’s energies, distract its loyalties and cool its affections towards Christ. What can unfreeze them and renew their devotion? And how will Christ, who sees and knows the fickleness of our hearts and their disloyalties to him, react towards us? Will he denounce and reject us?
That very question drives us back to the Upper Room to watch Christ’s reaction to Judas and to observe how he identified the traitor and by what means he exposed his treachery.
The exposure of humanity's treachery
By the time that the Lord Jesus announced, ‘One of you will betray me’, Judas must finally have realized that Jesus knew what he was scheming to do. But as yet none of the others in the Upper Room knew who the traitor was; and they stared at one another at a loss to know which of them Jesus was referring to. One of them, the apostle whom Jesus loved, was reclining next to Jesus. Peter therefore motioned to this disciple to get him to ask Jesus which one of them he meant. So, leaning back against Jesus, this disciple asked him directly, ‘Lord, who is it?’
Now came the dramatic moment when Jesus must expose the traitor. How would he do it? He could have done it by silently pointing[p 121] an accusing finger at him, while Judas squirmed in his seat. But he did not choose to do it that way. He could have done it by naming Judas in the course of a withering denunciation of his treachery. That would have been terrifying.
Perhaps we can recall some of the other occasions when our Lord was obliged to expose the sin of evil men. How awesome, for instance, must have been the sight of his flashing eyes and uplifted whip, as he drove the money-changers out of the temple (John 2:14–17). How withering must have been his denunciation of certain teachers of the law and certain Pharisees: ‘You brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?’ (Matt 23:33). But the sins that moved our Lord on those occasions to such trenchant public rebuke were the desecration of God’s house, the misrepresentation of God’s character, the persecution of God’s prophets, and the oppression of the poor under the guise of religion. Christ would not stand by and see other people being spiritually damaged through the religious perversities of hypocritical men.
But now in the Upper Room it was not other people who were about to be damaged. Judas’s sin was hurting Christ personally, thrusting a poisoned arrow at Christ’s own heart. How, then, and in what terms, and in what tone of voice, and by what action would he expose this viper’s treachery against his own person? In answer to John’s question as to who the traitor was, he said, ‘It is the one to whom I will give this piece of bread, when I have dipped it in the dish.’ Then, dipping the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon.
This eloquent action was more than a convenient way of indicating who the traitor was. Judas, we remember, had for the last three years been taking Christ’s bread, pretending to be his friend. Now, by betraying Christ, he was about to fling the bread of Christ’s friendship back into his face. How would Christ react to that? By offering him once more that self-same bread! There was no burning indignation, no bitter rebuke. Only the offer of that piece of bread, which said with unspoken eloquence: ‘Judas, you have taken the bread of my friendship, and, in spite of it, you have treacherously lifted up your heel to kick me. Now you are about to betray me. I know all about it. But, even so, before you do it, Judas, I offer you once more the bread of my friendship. Will you not accept it?’[p 122]
The gesture was neither cynical nor sarcastic. Nor was it a bribe to curry favour with Judas. It was a genuine, last minute attempt to save him from his self-chosen hell. According to the unwritten laws of ancient Middle Eastern hospitality, if a host took a piece of bread, dipped it in the dish and personally handed it to one of his guests, it did not only mean that he was honouring the guest by offering him an especially tasteful morsel of food from the banquet: it meant in addition that he was pledging himself to that guest to be his loyal friend. And we may be sure that, even at this dark and dramatic moment in Judas’s pathway to hell, our Lord’s offering to him of the bread was a genuine gesture, late as the time was, to urge upon Judas his friendship and love and with them the forgiveness, the pardon and the eventual glory that they implied.
Judas's reaction
We are not told how Judas felt at that moment. Poor Judas! Why did he not cry out in the wretchedness of his heart, ‘Lord, I didn’t know you knew; but now I see that you have found me out. I am consumed with this dastardly, despicable lust for money and for power that drives me to sell and betray you. But if, knowing all about it, you can still offer me the bread of your loyal friendship, then I need it above everything else. The devil himself seems to have got hold of me and is dragging me down to hell. Save me from myself! Save me from my appalling perversion.’ We may be sure that if Judas had so cried out, he would have found that Christ’s gesture in offering him the bread was genuine indeed. Christ would have saved him and remained loyal to him for ever. As it was, Judas took it; but once more it was a hypocritical action.
He took the piece of bread he was given but, utterly unrepentant, he continued with his schemes to betray the giver. He had made his final decision. ‘Then,’ says John, ‘Satan entered into him . . . So, after receiving the morsel of bread, he immediately went out’ (John 13:27, 30).
What would Christ’s reaction be to this further and final rejection of his friendship and salvation? There came no violent thunderbolt of denunciation. All Christ said was, as Judas passed through the door, ‘What you are about to do, do quickly.’ At the time no one at the table understood what this meant. They thought, says John, that since Judas had charge of the money, Christ was telling him to buy[p 123] what was needed for the feast, or to give something to the poor. Just imagine, if you can, in what tone of voice and accompanied by what looks and body gestures Jesus would normally have told his disciples to give something to the poor. It was in that tone of voice that our Lord made his final comment to Judas.
Even so, John’s recording of the disciples’ misreading of Christ’s words to Judas is poignant in the extreme. It recalls the incident that John has recorded a few verses earlier (12:1–8). We recall how on that occasion Mary, the sister of Lazarus, had expressed her gratitude, love and devotion to the Lord Jesus by anointing his feet with a flask full of expensive ointment worth at least a whole year’s wages. To Judas such extreme devotion to Christ seemed absurdly excessive, and he voiced his criticism: ‘Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?’ John adds that Judas did not really care for the poor. He was a thief; and since he held the common purse, if the ointment had been sold and the proceeds had been temporarily put into the purse, he might well have helped himself to some of it. But away and beyond that, what actually annoyed him was that anybody should think Jesus worthy of such extremely expensive devotion, and should love him enough to spend so much on him. He himself had served Jesus while it suited him, for the position, power and money he got out of it. But love Jesus personally? Why would anyone love Jesus like that? He certainly didn’t; and he could not understand why anyone else should.
And now he never would understand. Had he accepted not only the morsel of bread, but what it stood for, he would have gone on to discover with ever increasing wonder what the friendship of Christ means for those who accept it. But having taken the bread, he now barricaded his heart for the last time against Christ’s love and friendship. Immediately he went out, ‘And’, says John, ‘it was night’ (13:30). It was, of course, literally night-time. But the phrase points beyond mere timetable. At that moment Satan, whose suggestions Judas had earlier welcomed as allies in his struggle to maintain his independence of Jesus (13:2), did not go away and leave Judas to his hoped-for freedom. He entered into Judas, overpowered him and made him his minion (13:27). With that, Judas went out into a night of unrelieved moral and spiritual darkness that will never know a dawn. He is but an extreme example of what the Bible warns us will happen to those who finally reject God and his Son.[p 124] ‘But that’s terrible’, says someone. ‘Are you really saying that God would let people go to hell, or even send them there, just for refusing to believe in and accept Jesus Christ? If so, who could respect or believe in a God like that? Is he not supposed to be a God of love?’ But this very objection leads us on to consider what Jesus said next when Judas had gone out.
The display of God's glory
Let’s get this straight to start with: neither Jesus’ choice of Judas to be an apostle, nor his prediction that Judas would betray him, made Judas betray him. Suppose, looking down from a helicopter, you saw two cars approaching each other at high speed round a blind corner, you could predict that they were bound to crash into each other. But your prediction, though true, would not make them crash. The crash would be the drivers’ fault. And so it was with Judas. Jesus knew in advance and predicted that he would betray him; but that did not make Judas betray him or excuse him for doing it. Judas did what he did of his own free will, out of the sinfulness of his own heart.
Nor did Satan have any intention of fulfilling the Old Testament prophecies that the Messiah must die, when he infiltrated into Judas’s mind the idea of betraying Jesus. He too acted out of the scheming of his own mind. To his fallen and devilish way of thinking, the betrayal of Jesus and his death on a cross could only be a disastrous defeat for Jesus. Death by crucifixion was the most opprobrious punishment known to the ancient world. The shame of it would drown the cause of Jesus in an ocean of disgrace. And so he thought it a masterful stroke of strategy when he suborned one of Jesus’ chosen apostles to betray him to that public humiliation.
But how mistaken Satan was! The Son of God had come to our world on purpose to die the death of the cross. Knowing in advance that Judas would betray him to that death, he had deliberately chosen him as an apostle. And when Judas finally left the Upper Room to go out to do his dastardly deed, Christ commanded him, ‘What you are going to do, do quickly’ (John 13:27). So, far from the shame of the cross destroying the reputation of Christ, the suffering of the cross would become the greatest exhibition of the glory of God and of the Son of God that the world has ever seen, or that the universe[p 125] will ever see. Which is why, when Judas had gone out and Christ’s crucifixion was now imminent, Christ declared, ‘Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him’ (13:31).
Even before Satan polluted a human heart with slanderous misrepresentations of God’s character, God had been planning and working towards this moment. In due course God’s own Son set foot on our rebel planet. Then came the climax when the Creator incarnate came face to face in the Upper Room with the creature who was about to betray him to a cross. Now the world would see what God was like! Now Christ’s reaction to this traitor would reveal exactly what was in God’s heart. Deliberately, and in full knowledge of what Judas was about to do, he offered Judas the bread of his friendship.
Magnificent though this gesture was, it formed but the prelude to the even more majestic display of God’s glory at Calvary. For just as Christ’s giving of the morsel of bread to Judas exposed the traitor and his evil treachery, so God’s giving of his Son into the hands of mankind exposed our race’s rebel hatred against God. ‘This is the heir’, they said; ‘Let us kill him, so that the inheritance may be ours’ (Luke 20:14). But even as they nailed his hands and feet to the cross, God was offering Christ to the world as the bread of his friendship, as the pledge of his forgiveness and eternal love to all who would repent and receive him in sincerity and truth. ‘In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them’ (2 Cor 5:19). For ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. . . . For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life’ (Rom 5:8, 10). And right down to us in our century comes God’s call through Christ’s apostles:
We are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor 5:20–21)
If after that, people take all the Creator’s natural gifts but reject the bread of his friendship, they will, like Judas, go out into a night of eternal darkness where the light of God’s friendship never comes and[p 126] the awareness of his holiness burns like an unquenchable fire. But they will have only themselves to blame.
So when Judas had gone out, Jesus said, as we have already noticed, ‘Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.’ But he added, ‘If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him [the Son] in himself, and glorify him at once’ (John 13:32).
Jesus was predicting that his death on the cross would be followed by his resurrection and his elevation by God to the position of supreme power in the universe, and by his appointment as the judge and ruler of all. One day, God will require every knee in heaven, earth and hell to bow, and every tongue to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord—worthy to control and administer the wealth of the universe and to receive the submission and worshipful service of every sentient creature. And when God does so, it will be universally acknowledged that God is no tyrant. His moral right to insist on universal submission and worship will have been established not simply in the name of his almighty power, but in the name of Jesus, who humbled himself to wash his creatures’ feet, offered the bread of his friendship even to Judas and died for all mankind on the cross.
This is how the New Testament sums it up:
Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2:5–11)
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