Isaiah 49.1-6; Psalm 70; John 13.21-33, 36-38
One of you will betray me. Long earlier, in a cryptic aside, Jesus had told his disciples that he knew one of them was ‘a devil’ and his betrayer. [John 6.70-71] No one, apparently, took much notice of the remark; remarkably, though, Jesus didn’t separate himself from Judas Iscariot, as any of us would have done.
Some have concluded, in ancient as well as modern times, that Jesus and Judas were in some kind of collusion; or that Judas ‘forced Jesus’s hand,’ demanded that Jesus be heroic, wield his sword to cleanse the holy lands of the taint of sacrilegious colonisers.
Jesus, though, was sent to be a different sort of Servant of God. His life, his death, his triumph over death would fulfil prophecy to make him ‘the light of the nations’.
Night had fallen when Judas departed from the presence of the Lord, the longest night imaginable, ‘darkness’s hour and its reign.’ [Luke 22.53] When light again dawned for the disciples, with it came both pardon and vocation: a call to follow Jesus’s own path of servanthood, so that salvation, not condemnation, would reach the ends of the earth.