It’s Not Me!
You have been invited to spend the evening with twelve good friends. People that you love deeply and trust implicitly. As the evening goes on, it is decided to have pizza delivered. Everyone will chip in a few bucks. As you go around collecting money from each person, someone’s wallet is missing. There have been no comings or goings since everyone arrived, so someone in the room must be the thief. How do you feel at that moment, wondering which person you can no longer trust? The joy and intimacy previously felt quickly turns to feelings of shock, surprise, sadness, anger. How can this be? You have walked over mountains and through valleys with each other. There isn’t a group of people you trust more. Until now.
We are in what Christians call Holy Week. It is the time between Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and His resurrection on Easter Sunday. Today is called Maundy (Latin: mandatum, which means command. See John 13:34.) Thursday, the day that Jesus sits down with His guys for one final meal together, the Last Supper, at which He introduces a new covenant, a new commandment, and also shows great humility by washing the feet of his disciples. That was the topic of yesterday’s writing.
The gospels tell us that Jesus wanted to find a place away from the hustle and bustle of busy Jerusalem, full of people for the Passover, to have dinner with His twelve, soon to be eleven, closest buddies. According to Luke 22:11 (also Mark 14:14), the location of this meal was in the upper room of a guest house (Greek: kataluma). This word kataluma is only found in one other place in the scriptures; Luke’s version of the birth story (2:7). I believe this word has tremendous significance. I wrote about it during Advent. Click here to read that blog post.
At this Passover meal, Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper (often now called communion or eucharist, depending upon your faith tradition). After offering the cup, Jesus drops this bomb. Luke’s version puts it this way – “But behold, the hand of him who betrays me is with me at this table” (22:21). Imagine the shock and horror in the room. Luke tells us this – “And they began to question one another, which of them it could be who was going to do this” (22:23). Unbeknownst to the other eleven, Judas had already been scheming to sell Jesus to the chief priests for thirty pieces of silver.
Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” depicts just that; consternation among the twelve disciples when Jesus announces that one of them would betray Him. Due to the medium the mural was painted on, environmental factors and intentional damage, the original painting is quite worn. But just envision yourself in that room, about now, two thousand years ago.
The meal would not have been at a banquet table; rather, sitting on the floor or on cushions. But da Vinci gets his point across, everyone is saying “Hmm, who is it? It’s not me!” When in fact, we all betray Jesus at times.
Postscript: All four gospels have accounts of this Passover/betrayal narrative. I encourage you to take a few minutes to read each one – Matthew 26:14-57; Mark 14:10-53; Luke 22:1-54; John 13:1-38, 18:1-14. Each is slightly different, not to contradict one another, but instead, each gospel writer wrote from a different perspective to a different audience. Assuming we remain factual, you and I likely would tell something we witnessed in a slightly different fashion than would someone else. Neither wrong. Neither better. Just different.
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