Staying at the supper

Acts 11.1-18 God shows no partiality

Revelation 21.1-6 A vision of the heavenly Jerusalem, the bride of the Lamb

John 13.31-35 in the Son of Man, God has been glorified

 

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Our gospel reading opened with some strange words, ‘during the supper, when Judas had gone out…’ (John 13.31).

 

They sound almost incidental, but they are deeply significant.

 

Just before this verse Judas is unmasked as the one who will betray Jesus. St John, the author, notes, ‘And it was night’ (John 13.30b).

 

Judas steps away from the intimacy of the supper because he has chosen his own path, which does not involve Jesus and does not involve his companion disciples.

 

Judas has chosen to cut himself off.

 

And as he walks out into the darkness of the night he is choosing to walk from life to death and to walk away from God’s abundance into the scarcity of shut down horizons, narrowness and betrayal of a friend.

 

When we make the ‘Judas move’ we are placing ourselves at the heart of our own drama – as one theologian calls it, our ‘ego-drama’.

 

In the ego-drama we are building all our sense of reality around our own imaginations, everything is on our own terms and not about God or neighbour. All becomes self-defeating and spirals downwards into pointlessness, where faith, hope and love is scarce to the point of non-existent.

 

When we make the ‘Jesus move’ we place ourselves in what the same theologian calls the Theo-drama, in other words, the God drama, where our point of reference is the way of faith and hope and love, of abundant life lived in all its fullness.

 

When we make the ‘Jesus move’ we step out into the light disentangled from the power games and manipulations of the world. In the light we can see more clearly.

 

The remarkable thing is that we are free to make the move we desire.

 

Such is God’s abundant love that he risks even our move into the night, as with Judas, the path trodden by Adam and all humanity.

 

But such is God’s love that the glorification of human flesh and wills is possible through a Saviour.

 

We are not locked into Adam’s refusal of God, but invited into Jesus’ total acceptance of God, and, in that move, we share in the glorification of the Son of Man.

 

Light or darkness, life or death, abundance or scarcity? We are given that choice.

 

There are seductive easy choices, following the whispers of the world: ‘you can have your cake and eat it’; ‘don’t commit, keep your options open: a better offer may come along’. That is so destructive in our relationships with other people and with God.

 

After all, Judas wanted what Jesus offered, but only on his own terms.

 

So often we say, ‘I will do what my heart dictates’ or we’re told ‘follow your heart’. A wonderful German Abbess I read recently debunks that ‘do it your way’ mentality.

 

Mother Christiana [Reemts, abbess of Mariendonk] says, ‘I hold it to be quite false’.

 

She explained what she meant by pointing out what we know from experience and what Jeremiah pointed out almost cruelly: ‘The human heart is deceitful above all things’ (Jeremiah 17.9).

 

Our heart is not an infallible compass; it is subject to many temptations, tensions, and trends. Before it can guide us reliably, it must be oriented and, when necessary, healed. The great Christian task is ‘to let the heart be transformed by God’s Word — then to listen to this transformed heart’. (my italics).

 

Judas sadly followed his unhealed, untransformed heart. It was a wayward compass into his ego-drama and away from the intimacy of the supper with Christ.

 

The supper is the place of the Theo-drama, the God-drama, where Christ shares with us his life (in broken bread) and death (in poured out wine), so that we share in his life, death and resurrection. Only in the intimacy of the mystical supper do we hear the ‘new commandment’, to love as he first loved us.

 

The gospel today invites us to stay at the supper, to be present with Jesus and with his disciples.

 

The mystical supper is an eternal reality perpetuated in the Eucharist.

 

This is where we come, in the company of one another, to have the compass of our hearts set aright in the Theo-drama, the outworking of God’s light and life and love in the world.

 

As St Paul says, ‘for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness’ (1 Thessalonians 5.5)

 

Jesus said, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life’. To say ‘I did it my way’, or to build a ‘truth’ of my own imagining, or to seek life amputated from Christ and his Church, is the way of the ego-drama, making myself the centre of my own reality and not of God’s.

 

To be a saint, to be a child of the light and of the day, is to sing ‘I did it Christ’s way’

 

May we never prefer the isolation, darkness and chill of sin but always prefer the festivity, intimacy and warmth of the sacred meal where we receive the life of Christ and where we are formed as disciples marked out by love for one another.