Homily for Tuesday, 15 April 2014‒ Tuesday of Holy Week

Readings of the day: Isaiah 49:1-6; Psalm 71:1-2, 3-4a, 5ab-6ab, 16-18, 15, 17; John 13:21-33, 36-38

 

When we hear the word “night,” what descriptions might we associate with night? We might associate with night the mysterious; the hidden.

John sets the scene of the Last Supper that Jesus has with his disciples with a simple description that we hear in our Gospel reading today: “And it was night.”

Judas Iscariot goes out into this night “at once” from this scene of the Last Supper. We know how this event unfolds: Judas is about to betray Jesus, but why? What are his motives? We can know nothing from John’s Gospel except that “Satan entered” Judas, and so he left the Last Supper hurriedly. “And it was night.”

Here, night carries the sense of the mysterious; the hidden. But in John’s Gospel, night does not so much hide in mystery as reveal the truth about who we as Jesus’ disciples really are. And so our question becomes, as Pope Francis asked in his homily on Palm Sunday, “Who are we?”

“And it was night.” Other than Jesus, there are three main characters in this scene on the night of the Last Supper. There is the unnamed disciple “whom Jesus loved” who asks who Jesus’ betrayer will be: “Who is it?” There is Simon Peter, who vows that he “will lay down [his] life for” Jesus, only to have Jesus predict that Peter will deny him three times during this same night. And then there is Judas, who says nothing but exits quickly into the night…

On this night of the Last Supper; in our celebration of Holy Week; in our celebration of this Eucharist in which we remember the Last Supper, who are we?

Are we, at least usually, most like the disciple “whom Jesus loved”; the disciple closest to the heart of Jesus, who cannot imagine how anyone would betray or deny even knowing the Christ; the disciple who, if we continue hearing John’s Gospel, will be at the foot of the cross as Jesus dies, when most of the other disciples flee?

Are we sometimes most like Simon Peter, vowing to keep our faith in Christ in the most difficult of times, only to find out how frail and in need of God’s grace we really are?

Have we ever been like Judas who, perhaps because of pressure or insecurity, succumbs to temptation to sin with eerie silence?

Perhaps we have experienced as disciples of Jesus times when we have been most like any one of these three apostles…

The night reveals who we really are as Jesus’ disciples, and so we might ask: Who are we as we gather to celebrate our Holy Week; our Eucharist? Who are we as we remember the first Eucharist, the Last Supper, when “it was night”?