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In the Night in Which He Was... - April 13, 2006

In the Night in Which He Was...

Maundy Thursday

April 13, 2006

Rev. Dave R. Garwick

Tonight, the night of Maundy Thursday, is of course the night that Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper, often called The Last Supper because this is the last time He ate with His apostles before His death. That is why we began this service with the Lord’s Supper. And THAT Supper always begins with the words, “In the night that He was BETRAYED ….”

But this is the very first Maundy Thursday in over seventeen hundred years that Christians are hearing the lie that Judas did NOT really betray Jesus – the lie that he was simply doing what Jesus asked him to do. Beginning a week from Sunday, our Adult Education hour will dig into this thing and then we will get into the so-called DaVinci Code so that you are ready for the big movie that’s right around the corner.

This lie is called the Gospel of Judas which was purchased for a cool million by The National Geographic Society a few years ago from one of Europe’s most infamous black market antiquity thieves. After the Society got all their production and marketing in place, they decided to reveal this discovery four nights ago on Palm Sunday and they are rebroadcasting it tonight in thirty minutes …. Just in time to ride the coat tails of the big hit novel which claims that Jesus had babies with Mary Magdalene, and another book which just came out claiming that Jesus never really died on the Cross but just passed out and tricked all the Roman soldier executioners, and now a brand new piece of so-called research which claims that Jesus was only able to walk on water because the lake had frozen over (which must have meant that the apostles’ boat was an ice breaker!).

All of these ideas come from a couple hundred so-called “Gnostic Gospels” that were produced by a really bizarre New Age type cult that sprang up to attack Christianity around 150 AD. No ancient copies of this Gospel of Judas had been discovered for the last seventeen hundred years. But the Church has been intimately familiar with it since two hundred years before THIS particular copy was made.

This Gnostic cult, just like New Age cults today, say that only a few really enlightened people ever can get it together with God. As opposed to Christianity which says that God created humans in His image and came in bodily form to save us because we cannot save ourselves, this cult which is a couple hundred years younger than Christianity, says that this world’s Creator was an evil God whose most evil thing was to create a world where our bodies are evil and anything associated with our bodies is evil.

This cult believed that Jesus was a heavenly being who whispers secrets only to specially enlightened people such as when it claims that Jesus tells Judas Iscariot, “Come, that I may teach you about secrets no person has ever seen.” So, according to this Gospel of Judas, Jesus asked Judas to turn Him in so that He could get killed and thereby freed of that evil body of His. And THAT supposedly is why Judas could not have betrayed Jesus.

You’ve probably heard about “suicide by cop” where a desperate person sets up the police to shoot him? So now we’ve got suicide by apostle!

Why is it so important that Jesus WAS betrayed? First of all, because this fulfilled an ancient prophecy hundreds of years earlier from the 41st Psalm which said, “Even my close friend, whom I trusted, he who shared my bread, has lifted up his heel against me.” The fact that Jesus was BETRAYED is one of the fingerprints which identifies Him as the Messiah, far more than some flakey self-absorbed puzzle master made in the image of Hollywood stars.

Secondly, in the Resurrection, Jesus would overcome not only death, but the very, very worst that people do to one another. Ask any one who has been stabbed in the back by a close friend, ask anyone who has been cheated on by a spouse and you will find out that betrayal by your closest friend is one of the very worst hurts that nothing else short of the grace of God can overcome. The Resurrection overcame even that.

 And finally, it was the betrayal which showed the limitlessness of Jesus’ sacrifice. It was AFTER Jesus revealed that He knew about Judas’ betrayal that Jesus offered him the bread and the wine. There is no limit to whom Jesus will offer Himself as a sacrifice – even to the one whom He KNEW would betray Him. Only hours later, one of the last things Jesus ever cried out to the Father was to beg for the forgiveness of the very ones who were torturing Him to death. THAT is the hope of every sinner: no matter what you have done, nothing disqualifies you from Jesus offering himself as a sacrifice to pay for your sins. And when we are tempted to condemn those who commit what we think are the worst offenses, we must recall Jesus offering His body and His blood even to Judas.

What Judas then did with that gift was something else again – when he took that gift and sinned again and then refused thereafter to accept the sacrifice of Jesus as payment for his sin which he must have believed was bigger than Jesus.

For these reasons alone, it makes all the difference in the world that on this very night, Jesus gave His body and blood for the forgiveness of sins in the night in which He WAS betrayed.