Scripture reading: John 18:1-24.

Sermon text: John 18:25-40.

The last day of their lives began in ordinary ways: breakfast with spouses, commutes to workplaces, plans for dinner that night. None of the innocent office workers, firefighters, police, or airline passengers who died on September 11, 2001, had any idea that Muslim terrorists would take their lives in a brutal attack on our nation that day. September 11 ended with a nation in shock, families in mourning, and most of us in a deep feeling of betrayal as we wondered how anyone could hate us so viscerally they would hijack 4 planes and use them as weapons against symbols of the United States. Almost none of us had ever thought that a mujahideen fighter we supported against the Russians in the 1980s would later recruit other Arab terrorists to attack our nation.

Most likely, the disciples who accompanied Jesus across the Kidron Valley to the Garden of Gethsemane never gave any thought that one of their own would turn Jesus over to the Jewish authorities who sought to arrest Him. Some of the disciples probably wondered where Judas Iscariot had gone, but they never suspected he had taken a walk of only a few minutes to the high priest’s home to gather the Temple police and lead them to Jesus’ favorite place to pray in the Garden. When Judas arrived, the crowd accompanying him transformed the disciples’ puzzlement into cold fear that engulfed them, leading most of them to flee the Garden in sheer panic.

The other Gospels tell us Jesus entered the Garden of Gethsemane and fell almost immediately into prayer. If you go to Jerusalem, you can enter the Church of All Nations and view the place where tradition says Jesus lay on the ground, desperately praying for another way to fulfill God’s plan for the salvation of humanity. Jesus had spent time here before; apparently, Jesus “often met there with his disciples.” Judas knew exactly where to look for Jesus.

The Synoptic Gospels tell us other details about events prior to Judas’ arrival, details that enhance our understanding of the importance of Jesus’ betrayal. St. Matthew recorded that Peter, James, and John accompanied Jesus deeper into the Garden of Gethsemane, but He left them at one point to go even deeper into the Garden to pray. St. Matthew also recorded that Peter, James, and John fell asleep while Jesus prayed. Both St. Matthew and St. Mark recorded that Jesus prayed for another way, for a rescue from the Crucifixion He faced. St. Luke, the physician, recorded other important details: That an angel “comforted” Jesus, and (in a detail important to a doctor) that Jesus prayed until “his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44). This symptom of extreme stress, known as “hematohidrosis,” often appears in people facing terrible events such as battle or certain death.

All these details give us a full picture of Jesus’ final moments before His arrest. We know that, in some way, Jesus apparently lost His certainty that He would face crucifixion; He would not have prayed for deliverance without its possibility. We know the uncertainty, coupled with the mere possibility He would face torture and death by crucifixion, drove Jesus to physical duress most of us will never experience. We know the disciples failed to keep watch as Jesus asked them to do, meaning Judas and his band of soldiers penetrated the Garden of Gethsemane all the way to the place where Jesus had left the 3 disciples on whom He relied the most.

We also know that Jesus eventually received the clear knowledge He would die within only a few hours, even likely within the next 15 to 20 hours. This knowledge would have driven most people to despair beyond description. Perhaps St. Luke’s account of the comforting angel explains how Jesus faced His arrest as calmly as St. John recorded in today’s sermon passage.

Although Judas led a group of armed men into the Garden, he lacked any control over the situation. We often forget that Our Lord remains in control of every situation in our lives, as He controlled the events of His arrest. St. John left no doubts about Jesus’ control: “Jesus, knowing all that would happen to him, came forward and said to them, ‘Whom do you seek?’”

Notice how Judas and his accomplices reacted to Jesus’ question: “They answered him, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Jesus said to them, ‘I am he.’ Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them. When Jesus said to them, ‘I am he,’ they drew back and fell to the ground.” The words of the Son of God, their Creator, threw Judas and his cohort to the ground. God had created man from the dust of the earth; now, those men who intended to arrest Him found themselves lying on the dust of the earth.

Even as He faced certain death, Jesus protected His disciples. “I told you that I am he. So, if you seek me, let these men go.” Jesus’ attempt to protect His disciples grew immensely more complicated when Peter’s impetuosity nearly resulted in disaster. “Then Simon Peter, having a sword, drew it and struck the high priest’s servant and cut off his right ear. (The servant’s name was Malchus.) So Jesus said to Peter, ‘Put your sword into its sheath; shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?’” It’s a wonder that someone didn’t die in this near-catastrophe. Only the fact that Peter attacked an unarmed man (Malchus was a slave and therefore prohibited from owning weapons) saved his life. Again, St. Luke the Physician recorded a medical detail: “But Jesus said, ‘No more of this!’ And he touched his ear and healed him” (Luke 22:51). Most likely, Jesus’ miracle saved Peter’s life that night, as we shall see.

Instead, “the band of soldiers and their captain and the officers of the Jews arrested Jesus and bound him.” After they arrested Him, the officers took Jesus to Annas, the father-in-law of the “high priest that year.” The Romans followed Herod’s practice of changing high priests at a whim, but the Jews still recognized Annas’ authority as high priest from his tenure in the office (A.D. 7-14). Annas questioned Jesus, but he was unprepared for Jesus’ response: “I have spoken openly to the world. I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all Jews come together. I have said nothing in secret. Why do you ask me? Ask those who have heard me what I said to them; they know what I said.” This response led one of the officers to strike Jesus for impertinence, the first blow in what would become a night of torture for Our Lord.

Meanwhile, a prophecy of Jesus began unfolding. Jesus had told His disciples, “Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me, and just as I said to the Jews, so now I also say to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot come’” (John 13:33). Peter had responded by saying, “I will lay down my life for you.” Jesus’ answer probably stunned Simon Peter: “Will you lay down your life for me? Truly, truly, I say to you, the rooster will not crow till you have denied me three times” (John 13:37-38).

Following Jesus’ arrest, Peter and John followed Him to Annas’ home and later to Caiaphas’ home. St. John recorded that, somehow, he “was known to the high priest.” John followed Jesus into the home and spoke with the servant girl to get Peter into the home. Watch what happened:

The servant girl at the door said to Peter, “You also are not one of this man’s disciples, are you?” He said, “I am not.” Now the servants and officers had made a charcoal fire, because it was cold, and they were standing and warming themselves. Peter also was with them, standing and warming himself…. So they said to him, “You also are not one of his disciples, are you?” He denied it and said, “I am not.” One of the servants of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, asked, “Did I not see you in the garden with him?” Peter again denied it, and at once a rooster crowed.

Did you notice the identity of Peter’s final accuser? This man was Malchus’ kinsman! Word traveled fast around the high priest’s home about Peter’s attack and Malchus’ healing. This person had no doubts as to Peter’s identity.

Now, the disciple who had declared his undying loyalty to Jesus faced the truth: He had denied his Lord and Master 3 times, just as Jesus had prophesied. Again, the Synoptic Gospels give us more details. Both St. Matthew and St. Mark recorded St. Peter “wept” (Matthew 26:75; Mark 14:72). St. Luke recorded a detail that stabs us in the heart: “And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the saying of the Lord, how he had said to him, ‘Before the rooster crows today, you will deny me three times.’ And he went out and wept bitterly.” (Luke 22:61-62).

Jesus’ trial at Caiaphas’ home, as much as a show trial as the one at Annas’ home, resulted in a predictable verdict: Death. However, the Jews lacked the authority to execute a criminal, so Caiaphas and his henchmen hauled Jesus to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.

Pilate had no desire to involve himself in an inter-Jewish squabble. Pilate had already proved a poor fit for Judea. Rome expected Pilate to keep things quiet, and now he found himself facing a potential explosion in a packed Jerusalem, full of Jews for Passover. Pilate hated the Jewish leadership as much as they hated him.

Jesus, already betrayed by His disciples and His national leaders, now faced Roman justice. Pilate had little desire to please Caiaphas and his cohort, but Pilate wanted a quiet Passover more than he desired justice. Given a choice between releasing an innocent man or keeping the peace with Caiaphas, Pilate would toy with Jesus before finally releasing Barabbas, a common thief and quite possibly a murderer.

Betrayal. We’ve all experienced it in some way, although none of us with the depth Jesus experienced on that day in Nisan, A.D. 33. The men He had chosen as His disciples betrayed Him, first Judas, then Peter, then all those who fled. The people He had chosen as a kingdom of priests and a holy nation betrayed Him to the Romans.

In some way, we’ve also faced what some of us consider betrayal. Like Jesus, we’ve prayed desperately for the answer to a prayer, only to hear God’s denial of our request — or, even worse, only profound, agonizing silence. Even as we know in our heads that God never forsakes His people, we feel betrayed by God Himself. The prayer for healing; the request for God to save our job, our marriage, or anything else that sends us spiraling down to the foot of the cross where we found salvation in Jesus’ death and resurrection. We asked God for redemption, and He granted it; now, we expect God to give us anything we desire. After all, if He will grant us forgiveness of our sins and eternal life to remove the curse of our sins, He will surely grant us anything else for which we ask. Then, we take His refusal to obey us as a betrayal, forgetting that God knows far more than we do and will never grant any prayer that will go against His perfect plan for humanity’s redemption and the creation of a new heaven and a new earth.

In his work Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, C.S. Lewis wrote about Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane:

1. It is clear from many of His sayings that Our Lord had long foreseen His death. He knew what conduct such as His, in a world such as we have made of this, must inevitably lead to. But it is clear that this knowledge must somehow have been withdrawn from Him before He prayed in Gethsemane. He could not, with whatever reservation about the Father’s will, have prayed that the cup might pass and simultaneously known that it would not. That is both a logical and a psychological impossibility. You see what this involves? Lest any trial incident to humanity should be lacking, the torments of hope — of suspense, anxiety — were at the last moment loosed upon Him — the supposed possibility that, after all, He might, He just conceivably might, be spared the supreme horror. There was precedent. Isaac had been spared: he too at the last moment, he also against all apparent probability. It was not quite impossible… and doubtless He had seen other men crucified… a sight very unlike most of our religious pictures and images.
   

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3. But for this last (and erroneous) hope against hope, and the consequent tumult of the soul, the sweat of blood, perhaps He would not have been very Man. To live in a fully predictable world is not to be a man.
   

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5. At the end, I know, we are told that an angel appeared “comforting” Him. But neither comforting in sixteenth-century English nor enischyoœn (“e˙niscu/wn”) in Greek means “consoling.” “Strengthening” is more the word. May not the strengthening have consisted in the renewed certainty — cold comfort this — that the thing must be endured and therefore could be?
   

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7. We all try to accept with some sort of submission our afflictions when they actually arrive. But the prayer in Gethsemane shows that the preceding anxiety is equally God’s will and equally part of our human destiny. The perfect Man experienced it. And the servant is not greater than the master. We are Christians, not Stoics.
   

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9. Does not every movement in the Passion write large some common element in the sufferings of our race? First, the prayer of anguish; not granted. Then He turns to His friends. They are asleep — as ours, or we, are so often, or busy, or away, or preoccupied. Then He faces the Church; the very Church that He brought into existence. It condemns Him. This also is characteristic. In every Church, in every institution, there is something which sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. But there seems to be another chance. There is the State; in this case, the Roman state. Its pretensions are far lower than those of the Jewish church, but for that very reason it may be free from local fanaticisms. It claims to be just on a rough, worldly level. Yes, but only so far as is consistent with political expediency and raison d’etat. One becomes a counter in a complicated game. But even now all is not lost. There is still an appeal to the People — the poor and simple whom He had blessed, whom He had healed and fed and taught, to whom He Himself belongs. But they have become an overnight (it is nothing unusual) a murderous rabble shouting for His blood. There is, then, nothing left but God. And to God, God’s last words are “Why hast thou forsaken me?”
   

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11. You see how characteristic, how representative, it all is. The human situation writ large. These are among the things it means to be a man. Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed shut as you reach it. To be like the fox at the end of the run; the earths all staked.
    

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13. As for the last dereliction of all, how can we either understand or endure it? Is it that God Himself cannot be Man unless God seems to vanish at His greatest need? And if so, why? I sometimes wonder if we have even begun to understand what is involved in the very concept of creation. If God will create, He will make something to be, and yet to be not Himself. To be created is, in some sense, to be ejected or separated. Can it be that the more perfect the creature is, the further this separation must at some point be pushed? It is saints, not common people, who experience the “dark night.” It is men and angels, not beasts, who rebel. Inanimate matter sleeps in the bosom of the Father. The “hiddenness” of God perhaps presses most painfully on those who are in another way nearest to Him, and therefore God Himself, made man, will of all men be by God most forsaken? One of the seventeenth-century divines says, “By pretending to be visible God could only deceive the world.” Perhaps He does pretend just a little to simple souls who need a full measure of “sensible consolation.” Not deceiving them, but tempering the wind of the shorn lamb…. [P]erhaps there is an anguish, an alienation, a crucifixion involved in the creative act. Yet He who alone can judge judges the far-off consummation to be worth it. — C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, VIII
    

If Jesus faced God’s refusal to remove the pain of crucifixion, why would we think we should enjoy a painless life? Jesus’ life included His betrayal by His closest friends, His nation, and the system. His betrayal became another means by which Jesus endured and overcame every trial we could face in life.

Have you faced betrayal? Have you wondered if God cared what happened to you? Have you ever felt God Himself betrayed you? St. John’s account of Jesus’ betrayal gives us the comfort of knowing we’ve experienced nothing Jesus Himself didn’t endure. Know that God knows your pain; Jesus, His Son, knows. In the eternity to come, on the other side of our sufferings, we will understand our suffering; we will understand God can use every trial we face to prepare us for a glorious eternity.