Just before preparations are to be made for Passover, a woman anoints Jesus with precious ointment. The disciples object vehemently to this waste, but Jesus defends the woman, saying that she has prepared him for burial. Since the disciples have resisted all three of Jesus' predictions that he would be handed over to the authorities and put to death, it seems likely that the disciples are more disturbed at the prophesy of their master's death than they are over the way this woman spends her money. Luke differs from Mark and Matthew by not including this story in the passion narrative but rather telling a similar story earlier in the Gospel where, again, the host is a man named Simon. (Lk. 7:36-50) If one reconnects this incident to the meal Jesus had with his disciples the night he was betrayed, it is suggestive that this woman shamelessly washes Jesus' feet with her tears. Either the disciples were not present at Simon's table or they kept their mouths shut for once. It may be, however, that the disciples' hostility is transferred to Simon, who thinks that Jesus should have known that the woman was a sinner and therefore unworthy of offering such an extravagant gift. Mark and Matthew portray the disciples as forming a united group in objecting to the woman's prodigality. (Mark softens it a bit to "some of the disciples" but there is no dissenting voice among them to take the part of the woman.) In their versions, nobody is named as a prime objector. It is quite possible, however, that for Judas Iscariot, Jesus' defense of the woman was the last straw. In both Gospels, Judas' fateful interview with the chief priests follows immediately.

John has a similar, but different account of the anointing (Jn. 12:1-8). The woman is named as Mary of Bethany and, far from being an intruder into somebody else's house, she is herself the hostess along with her sister Martha. As in the Lukan story, Mary wipes Jesus' feet with her hair. This time the gesture is all the more suggestive of things to come as John places the incident just before the Last Supper and, more important, it is John who tells of Jesus' act of washing the feet of his disciples. John also breaks the solidarity of Judas with the other disciples in this matter by having Judas speak alone to object to the waste. John goes on to say that Judas was upset, not because he cared for the poor, but because he wanted more money in the common treasury for him to steal. Given the evidence in the other Gospels for the disciples being unanimous in their condemnation of the woman's action, John's isolation of Judas begins to look like a bit of scapegoating of one wayward disciple. If the disciples unanimously censured the woman as they unanimously opposed Jesus' predictions of his death, was Judas really the only betrayer?

The meal Jesus had with his disciples just before his arrest and execution is traditionally called the Last Supper. That designation is correct in the sense that it was, indeed, the last known meal Jesus had during his life on earth. However, I will argue that Jesus hardly used this meal as a conclusion. Rather, this meal was a new beginning. Whether one accepts the highly unlikely designation of the Last Supper as a Passover meal (Jesus died on the day before the Passover!) or accept John's chronology which does not make this a Passover meal, the proximity to the feast is palpable, especially in John.

Death is an ingredient of the Passover feast in that it commemorates the night in which the first-born sons of Egypt were slain. The deaths of these sons leads directly to the expulsion of the Israelites who are blamed for this calamity. The narration in Exodus sheds no tears for these sons. The Egyptians brought it on themselves by oppressing the Israelites. Moreover, they could have controlled their losses by letting the Israelites go instead of pursuing them and losing the whole army in the sea of violence which has overwhelmed the Egyptians.

The sacrifice of first-born sons is not unknown to the Hebrew Bible. Exodus 22:29 commands the sacrifice of every first-born son. Although Exodus 34:20 allows the substitution of an animal, as in the near-sacrifice of Isaac, this provision does not question the legitimacy of the earlier commandment. It is left for prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah to denounce this sacrifice both in practice and in principle. Meanwhile, if the God of Israel claims the first-born sons of the people God delivers from Egypt, surely God has a claim on the first-born sons of the oppressive Egyptians. Moreover, there is evidence even in the Hebrew Bible for the human tendency to sacrifice the first-born son during a time of crisis, of which the King of Moab's sacrifice of his first-born son at the height of a battle with Israel is one example. (2 Kings 3:27) That Egypt, in their time of crisis should do the same would be no surprise. James Williams points out that

it does not matter how the sacrifice of the firstborn and the interpretation of the exodus came to be connected in the tradition; the primary thing is....that the tellers of Israel's story understood the connection between the creation of a new people, the slaying of victims, and the sacrificial rite that was probably more important than any other, for the offering of the firstborn son stood in principle for all other forms of sacrifice. (Williams, James: The Bible, Violence & the Sacred. San Francisco: Harper: 1991, p.119)

God's deliverance of the Israelites from slavery goes a long way towards revealing the God who takes the side of the victim as victim. The slaying of the first-born sons of the Egyptians, however richly deserved, has the unfortunate disadvantage of being a wish-fulfillment of the resentful oppressed. The Passover itself, however, was oriented towards the future and away from the past oppression experienced in Egypt. This was not the time to dwell on the deaths of the first-born. The Israelites were being called out of Egypt and into a new life prepared by God. Resentment could only hold the people back, which it did in the rebellions against Moses in the desert and the institutionalizing of sacrifice and war during the monarchical period.

Given its highly-charged meanings, The Passover was a highly volatile time during the Roman period, necessitating the garrisoning of extra troops. That is not surprising since the this feast had the potential to revive the old resentment against the Egyptians and redirect that resentment against their contemporary Roman oppressors. It is likely this same resentment on the part of the disciples was a factor in their resistance to Jesus' death. Jesus knew, however, that even a successful revolt, such as that of the Maccabees, did not fundamentally change the world. In fact, the long-term result of the Maccabeean revolt was Jews' oppression under client kings of the Roman Empire such as Herod. As Passover time drew near, Jesus was to show that he had a radically different sort of deliverance in mind. Rather than God taking the sons of the designated oppressors, Jesus was about to offer his own life.

A common meal is perhaps the oldest and deepest image of human fellowship. Common meals have the potential to unite all participants in the desire for all to be nourished. In most tribal cultures, for example, it was unthinkable that anybody be left unfed when food was available. At the same time, meals are very fragile times if there are any tensions among those who have gathered as anybody knows from family experiences. Disputes could easily break out at meals over issues such as who had earned the best piece of meat in the hunt. Sometimes such a dispute could escalate into violence throughout the tribe. Girard's theory of sacred violence argues that the common meal is not, as a matter of historical fact, the fundamental basis of social harmony. Rather, social harmony is achieved through scapegoating violence. Statements such as Jesus' appeal to Adam and Eve over/against the divorce laws that favor men over women suggest that Jesus intended to undo the effects of humanity's fall into sin. Just as he wanted to restore marriage to its original place in creation, he wanted to restore the meal in the same way. Hence the importance of his often scandalous habits of table fellowship, not least his reaction to the woman with the ointment. The feeding of the four thousand and five thousand in the wilderness was a dramatic witness to Jesus' desire to restore the common meal to the social bond it was intended to be. The "eucharistic" reflections recorded by John in connection with that story forge a clear link to the meal in the Upper Room, which also was meant to restore God's intentions for the common meal at the dawn of creation.

As such a restoration, this meal in the Upper Room was unpromising even before it started. Jesus came to it, troubled by what had just happened at a meal he attended quite recently, perhaps even the day before. That is where his disciples gained up on the woman who anointed him for burial. This unanimity against a woman was not life-threatening as was the unanimity of the elders against the woman caught in the act of adultery. It was, however, a manifestation of the same social process, the very process Jesus was hoping to reverse. Jesus' promise that the woman would be remembered throughout the world for what she had done clearly demonstrates Jesus' intent to reverse the mimetic opprobrium directed against the woman and redirect it into universal praise for her. As Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza famously pointed out at the beginning of In Memory of Her, not even Jesus was fully successful in this matter. Although the action itself was recorded, the woman's name was not given in the synoptic Gospels while the name of the host who earned Jesus' censure for belittling the woman was given. The behavior of the disciples could easily have caused Jesus to suspect that one (or more) of them would betray him. After all, if it is Jesus who has just turned the disciples away from scapegoating the woman, Jesus himself would become a likely person to take her place.

Basic to René Girard 's theory of collective violence is the contention that this violence is a means of solving interpersonal tensions that threaten to get of control. The synoptic Gospels show that the disciples are very much in this situation. The further they are "on the way" to Jerusalem and to Jesus' death, the more they fight among themselves as to who is the greatest. Perhaps, if Jesus had let them berate the woman who anointed him with impunity, they would have stopped squabbling, but instead, Jesus cut them short. This gave them an opportunity to take a baby step toward the Kingdom of God which Jesus was proclaiming. That they let the opportunity pass by becomes apparent in Luke's Gospel. Right at the table, right after Jesus has passed the bread and the wine, the disciples have another dispute as to who is the greatest. Deprived of their scapegoat by Jesus, the disciples revert to wrangling with each other.

It is into this highly-charged situation that Jesus drops the bombshell: One of you is going to betray me. The singling out of Judas Iscariot as the traitor causes us to take the reaction of the disciples to these words as expressions of innocence. They are not. Matthew and Mark report that all of the disciples ask: "Is it I?" Matthew then has Judas ask individually, which seems to set him apart, but it is the identical question asked by all the disciples. In Luke and John, the disciples question one another as to who would do such a thing. This sounds suspiciously like a flurry of accusations bandied back and forth. In John, it is precisely here that the competitive relationship between Peter and the "disciple whom Jesus loved" makes its first appearance in the Gospel. Peter, wanting the privilege of inside information, has to signal to the Beloved Disciple, who obviously is occupying a more honored position at the table. Whether or not the Beloved Disciple ever relays the answer is a detail that John does not give us. In any case, there are many signs of many guilty consciences at this table!

In Mark, Jesus specifies that the betrayer is "one of the twelve," which narrows it down to the followers in the most prestigious positions. This designation also suggests that other followers of Jesus were at this meal, maybe even the woman who was supposed to be remembered throughout the world for what she had done. In Luke, Jesus announces the betrayal at a most chilling time: right after he has distributed both the bread and wine. The betrayer is "one who is at table with him," which is to say, it could be anyone. In Mark and Matthew, the betrayer is one "who is dipping bread in the same dish with me." Here, the indication is that the betrayer is occupying a privileged position at the meal. This privileged position is intensified in John. Here, Jesus dips a morsel of bread in the dish and gives it to Judas. Taking the four accounts together, it becomes an open question as to whether Judas took the morsel or if he passively received it, as John suggests. The other accounts put the activity on Judas' part, although the texts make the gesture sound innocuous unless one thinks about it. Even in John, there is the possibility, admittedly speculative, that Jesus responded to the question of the Beloved Disciple by holding out the morsel for whoever would grab it. If a disciple claimed the privilege of this morsel, he would likely be inclined to betray Jesus' intentions towards humanity. Interestingly, the Eastern iconographical tradition takes this latter position. In the icons of this meal, Judas is positioned just far enough from Jesus that he has to go out of his way to lean over awkwardly in order to reach the dish closest Jesus. Perhaps Judas' betrayal has to do with his part in the disputes over pre-eminence among the disciples.

John says that it is precisely at this point that Satan entered him. (Jn. 13:27) René Girard puts much emphasis on the importance of this term. The word "Satan" means a stumbling block, a scandal. When two or more people engage in mimetic conflict to the extent that they become mirror images of each other, they become stumbling blocks, one to another. This is precisely what the disciples have become to each other. That Satan should enter Judas at the very moment when he is receiving a gesture of honor (or, possibly, taking it) is no accident. Although much mystery remains as to what all was going on during that fateful moment, it is clear enough that Judas' betrayal is deeply connected with the conflict between all of the disciples. Moreover, John reminds the reader at this point of Judas' relationship with money as the treasurer. Again, the need of the poor is contrasted with Judas' greed. The avarice for pre-eminence and the avarice for money coalesce. There remains, however, a burning question: Has Judas been made a scapegoat on whom the rivalry among the disciples was projected?

By the time this meal took place, not only had Jesus drawn the social tensions in Jerusalem to himself to the extent that all parties were agreed that he must be put to death, but he was also drawing the tensions among his disciples against himself as well. In their current collective frame of mind and heart, there was a real possibility that all of them would either join the crowd in crying for crucifixion, or they would band together after his death as a tightknit group united by resentment over the death of their leader. In this case, the resentment against the Egyptians celebrated at Passover would be small potatoes compared to the resentment against the Jewish and Roman authorities for the execution of Jesus. In this scenario, the disciple who gained pre-eminence after Jesus' death would gain much charismatic power and crowd-raising potential through this resentment over the corpse. The rest of this band would then unite through this resentment that would be eager for the sacrifice of the perpetrators. The hoped-for revolution against the Roman oppressors might happen after all. Either way, the Kingdom of God that Jesus came to proclaim and embody in his person would be suffocated. In this tight situation, Jesus had one last chance to do something that would keep his true life alive for his disciples. Jesus did two things.

First, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Peter's vehement reaction to this gesture shows how startling Jesus' action was. Even if he was the only one who spoke out (and Peter was always quick with his mouth!) he was likely speaking for his fellow disciples, just as he did on many other occasions. First, Jesus tells Peter that he may not understand the gesture at this time, but in the future he will. Not satisfied with this vague promise, Peter intensifies his refusal to have his feet washed. Only by telling Peter that he will have no part in him if he refuses to have his feet washed, does Jesus get him, not only to submit, but to go overboard (again, as usual!) and ask to have his hands and head washed as well. Jesus goes on to speak of his disciples being clean, but not all of them, "for he knew who was to betray him." (Jn. 13:11) Peter's attempted refusal of Jesus' ministry is brought directly in line with Judas' betrayal. Or so it seems. On a closer look, however, this verse need not refer to Judas, or exclusively to him. This particular verse does not specify that there is one and only one traitor.

The meaning of Jesus' action is crystal clear. Jesus has set an example for all his followers. Just as he washed their feet, they should wash each others' feet. The disciples are to be servants to one another rather than lord it over each other as "the kings of the Gentiles do." (Lk. 22:25) That this particular action is not normally practiced in modern times in Western cultures does not invalidate the teaching. It is quite clear that we are enjoined to do any act of humble service that needs to be done for the sake of others. In Luke, Jesus goes on to say that the "greatest must be as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves." That it was so easy to slide from John to these words from Luke suggests that it is likely that Luke also knew of the tradition of Jesus' footwashing and the teaching that went with it. The teaching may have been startling, but it was intelligible. One could hardly miss the point. The implications for whichever disciple took a pre-eminent position were especially daunting. If Judas was being honored at this meal by a simple gesture of privilege when he was given the morsel dipped in Jesus' dish, might this implication, yet another vindication of the intruding woman of the day before, be the scandal that led Judas to go out and do quickly what he was resolved to do?

And yet, simple as the action and its teaching are, Jesus said that it was not possible for the disciples to understand his gesture at the time he was doing it but later, they would understand it. If the meaning of the footwashing is so transparent, what makes it incomprehensible? The hardness of heart that causes Peter and the other disciples to fight over who is the greatest prevents them from enthusiastically embracing the idea of what today we call servant leadership. This hardness of heart did not, however, make the concept unintelligible. Peter understood it well enough to protest against it. Unfortunately, Judas also seems to have understood it all too well. The persistent refusal on the part of the disciples to accept what Jesus kept telling them about his death is closer to the mark. The servant who washes the feet of those subordinate to him is hardly the kind of person who will destroy the Romans the way God had destroyed the Egyptians at the time of the first Passover. Indeed, this servant who washes his disciples' feet looks incredibly vulnerable. If this is the image that he will leave behind after dying the shameful death he was predicting, how could they rally the needed hatred and resentment in his name to avenge his death?

Here is the point. The gesture of washing the disciples' feet, however transparent its meaning, is a profound mystery that opens up the abyss of divine love. Jesus' teachings on the Kingdom of God stressed non-violence to an extreme degree. These teachings had not yet caught on and there was no more time to get them across. Nobody was turning the other cheek or walking the extra mile. Nobody was planning on doing that in response to Jesus' death. Although Jesus was to tell Peter later that evening at Gethsemane that those who live by the sword will die by the sword, there was no way that Jesus could tell his disciples to eschew violence at the time of his death and expect that his admonition would be followed any more than his teachings on the mountain had been followed up to that time. Something other than words were needed. When Jesus washed the feet of the disciples, he gave them a concrete image of his teaching. More important, the gesture is so simple that anybody can do it. Even a child. It is not a matter of talent; it is a matter of will. Jesus is not telling the disciples what not to do, he is showing them what they should do. Even after Jesus has been executed, there is something they are commanded to do: they are to wash each others' feet. If they follow this simple command, they will not have time to harbor resentment over their master's death and plot vengeance for the deed. If they do nothing, resentment will fester within them. If they do a simple act that embodies love and concern for others, then love and concern will grow within their hearts. If love and concern grow, then resentment will decrease. If more and more people imitate each other in imitating Jesus in this action, then the entire social order of the day will crumble around the communal life that emerges through this simple action. Even children can do it. Servants do it all the time.

The second set of actions on Jesus' part was to break bread and to pass the cup of blessing. In The Shape of the Liturgy Gregory Dix points out that Jesus' command to "do this" would have been superfluous as far as the actions themselves are concerned. Jews always broke bread at the beginning of meal, whether alone or with companions. (Paul did it even at the height of a storm at sea!) At a common meal, the cup of blessing, the Chaburah, always concluded the meal. However, by using the words "do this in memory of me" Jesus connected the breaking of bread to the passing of the cup so that his followers would gather as a group (as required for the Chaburah) in order to perform both of these actions. The words over the bread: "This is my Body" and the words over the wine: "This is my blood" would have been more than revolutionary. They would not have been intelligible at the time. (How could a Jewish master ask his disciples to drink his blood when the proscription against drinking the blood of any animal was a fundamental commandment of the Torah?!) The phrase "in memory of me" would have been loaded with meaning, especially with Passover just a night away. For Jews, the word memory means "to make present." At Passover, the Jews were not just recalling the Exodus from Egypt; this act of God was actually made present yet again in their midst. In breaking bread and blessing the cup, Jesus was promising to be present to the disciples every time they followed this commandment. But what did it mean that Jesus, even after he was put to death, would continue to be present just as much as God's saving activity was present at the celebration of Passover?

The disciples did not know the answer to that question at the time. They could not have known it. Perhaps if they had understood Jesus' teaching a little bit, they would have had some idea. But they had understood nothing and they had no idea. Not even the Resurrection, in itself, caused the disciples to understand. Otherwise they would not have asked Jesus, just before his Ascension: "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom of Israel?" (Acts 1:6) Gregory Dix argues that it was the Eucharist and not appearances of the Risen Lord that caused the disciples to understand what they had failed to understand before:

Without opening the general question of our Lord's foreknowledge, on which pre-suppositions vary, we may say that it is not a question of whether our Lord could be legislating for a vast future religious society, but of whether He could and did intend to initiate that present religious society...into his own understanding of His own office, and especially of His own death which explained the rest. The whole record of His ministry is there to prove that He did so intend. They had not grasped it, but He could and did provide that they should do so in the future. The Messianic, redeeming, sacrificial significance which the whole primitive Jewish church unhesitatingly saw, first in His death, and then in His Person and whole action towards God, is the proof that this meaning was grasped by the church primarily through the Eucharist, which arose directly out of what He had said and done at the last supper. There, and there alone, He had explicitly attached that particular meaning to His own death and office. (Dix, Gregory: The Shape of the Liturgy. London: Adams & Charles Black: 1945, p. 77)

Although it did not suffice for the disciples to see the Risen Lord and talk to him to understand even then what he wanted them to learn, it is because Jesus is risen and fully alive that he is present at the Eucharist. As Jesus said: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is a God, not of the dead, but of the living. It takes a living God to be a God of the living. It is, then, the Resurrected Lord, the sender of the Paraclete (i.e. the Advocate) who guides us every time that we break bread together and pass the cup. So it was when Jesus explained the scriptures on the Road to Emmaus and then broke bread that evening.

When Jesus said that the bread was his body and that the wine was his blood, he was telling his disciples that he was giving them himself, not figuratively but literally. This depth of self-giving could not possibly have been comprehended at the time. In this matter, it is not question of hardness of heart. Jesus was not just telling the disciples that he was about to die for them. That would be comprehensible, if unsettling. Rather, Jesus was telling them that his very life was being given to them, not as a death but as life. Jesus was not giving himself as a corpse in the hope that the world might become a better place if enough people feel bad about killing him. Jesus was giving himself as a living being. Even if the disciples had understood Jesus' teachings of the Kingdom of God as love that returns good for evil (and they hadn't) it still would not have been possible to understand the life that he was giving them so that it would live on in his disciples. Only when they broke bread and passed the cup of wine in memory of Jesus would they begin to realize that the living God was giving them his life, life that he possessed in abundance in spite of the fact that he had been nailed to a cross and left to hang there until dead.

Raymund Schwager stresses the identification of Jesus himself with the Kingdom of God. "The Kingdom of God was now to be understood entirely from the perspective of his person and his fate and no longer, as before, the other way around. (Schwager, Raymund: Jesus in the Drama of Salvation. New York: Crossroad: 1999, p. 113; italics in text) A criminal's death would not be valid as a judgment on Jesus. Rather, Jesus himself is the judge as to whether or not a criminal's death is part and parcel of the Kingdom of God. Moreover, Jesus identifies the gifts of the meal with his own person:

Jesus gave himself to his disciples through identification with bread and wine, so that he would be one with them-as food which is consumed becomes one with the eater. The kingdom of God was consequently from this moment on no longer present merely in the form of outward sayings or symbolic actions, but it assumed a form in which it could enter into people themselves and thus infiltrate their defensive wills. (Schwager, p.113)

Schwager goes on to remind us that Jesus' self-identification with the gifts of bread and wine become possible only in connection with "Jesus' nonviolent offering up of his own life in the confrontation with the enemies of God's kingdom." The life that Jesus was giving his disciples in the bread and wine was the life that fed on the love of enemies, the love which "answered the violent rejection with a still greater offering up." (Schwager, p.113) Here, Jesus' descent is far deeper than the position of a servant who washes the feet of others. Now Jesus descends to the level of the vegetable kingdom and gives his life in the grain of the fields and the grapes of the vine. Once the life with this depth of self-giving love is received in the Eucharist, there can be no room for resentment against those who put Jesus to death.

Now that we can understand Jesus' strategy in presenting this two-fold set of actions, we can understand why this is the First Supper rather than the last. Both of Jesus' actions deflect the disciples from sinking into resentment that could lead to violence and betray the kingdom of God. As far as God's kingdom is concerned, it would make no difference whether the disciples overthrew the Roman Empire or were crushed by it. Either way, the world would be the same old place ruled by retributory violence. The disciples, however, needed to be deflected in two ways. Neither, on its own would have been quite enough. Since Jesus' giving of himself in the bread and wine could not be intelligible at the time--and that not just because the disciples lacked a theological manual to explain the doctrine of the Real Presence--an illustration that even children could understand was required. The footwashing accomplished that. In the light of Jesus' death the next day, it showed graphically that the response to judicial murder was humble loving service to other people. This image, however powerful, would not be enough for the long haul. For that, Jesus needed to give his very life to his disciples so that He could dwell within them. This he did in the breaking of bread and the passing of the wine cup. The life given to God's people in the Eucharist flows, to this day, in the opposite direction from retaliatory violence. Christ himself is the new Passover that leads us to a whole new universe without our needing to take one step away from where we live. The only price exacted of us is to leave behind the resentment that causes us to desire the slaughter of the first-born of those who have wronged us. Not even Jesus can take away the resentment that holds us in death until we let it go by opening our hands to receive the bread and the wine.

These are pretty sublime thoughts to associate with petty squabbling over pre-eminence and downright betrayal. And yet it has always been this way ever since Jesus made arrangements to hold an evening meal in the upper room of somebody's house. The disciples resented the intrusion of a woman with an alabaster jar of ointment while Jesus forgave those who nailed his hands and feet to the cross. For that matter, Jesus forgave the disciples for fleeing at the time of his arrest and he forgave Peter for denying that he even knew him. It follows that Jesus also forgave Judas, whose lack of understanding and hardness of heart were probably little worse than that of the rest of the Twelve. This is not to minimize the treachery which Judas committed. It is only to note that the hazard of isolating one evil-doer out of a crowd is that all other people will think they look pretty decent in comparison with the isolated evil-doer. If one man is the traitor of Jesus, than the rest of us aren't the traitor, which is to say, we aren't traitors at all.

Peter seemed pretty sure that Judas had "gone to his own place." He suggested that Judas' betrayal and punishment was a fulfillment the prophecy from Psalm 109, that most vengeful of psalms. Certainly this "prophecy" shows an attitude towards an enemy diametrically opposed to that of Jesus. Peter's graphic description of Judas' horrible death (in contrast to the relatively sympathetic account in Matthew and Mark where Judas repents but hands himself in despair) hardly does Peter any credit. Especially since he may have only narrowly avoided the fate of Judas. (Acts 1:15-25) (What might Peter have done if Judas had not "done quickly" what he was about to do?) If we take this story as part of a diptych opening Acts, then we might do well to see Peter's speech as representing the same obtuseness as the earlier question to the ascending Lord: "Will you at this time restore the kingdom of Israel?" The two little episodes of this diptych show Peter and the disciples before the descent of the Holy Spirit narrated in chapter two of Acts. Then, Peter would--we can hope!--understand that the Holy Spirit is an Advocate for him and Judas as well. If Judas did indeed go to "his own place," it wasn't because booted him there out of the sentiments expressed in Psalm 109.

Every day, every minute, we also have the opportunity to betray Jesus. This isn't because Jesus has left us alone. Quite the contrary. Jesus persists in sticking around with humans beings like us just as he stuck with Peter and Judas and the other disciples. We do not know for certain if Judas stuck around at supper to receive the bread and wine or not. John makes it clear that Judas was there at least long enough to have his feet washed. What might he have said about having his feet washed if Peter's tongue wasn't quicker than his? Or was Judas too cunning to put his foot in his mouth when he already had a hand in the treasury? If the bread was broken at the beginning of the meal and the cup passed at the end, with the footwashing intervening between the two, then Judas would have received at least the bread, and quite possibly the wine as well. That Jesus washed Judas' feet and gave him bread, knowing that Judas was planning to betray him, demonstrates in no uncertain terms that Jesus persists in offering everybody, at all times and places, the life he poured out for humanity in the bread and wine that night. How do we betray Jesus? Every time that we allow resentment to get a hold of us and hold us back from the life Jesus gives so generously, we betray Jesus, to say nothing of the religiously-inspired violence that we still perpetrate after two thousand years. Betrayal unto death begins with annoyance over a questionable woman who comes along with a jar of ointment. The resurrected life begins when we hear the cock crow.