John 13:21-30

04/18/10
John 13:21-30
Hudson UMC

I love how human Jesus is in the Gospel of John. It is possible to make two very serious mistakes in our consideration of Jesus, and people have made both of them throughout the years. The first is to forget that Jesus is really, really, God. If we do that, we can make all kinds of statements about Jesus and Christian faith, but at some point, we have to ask, “Why Jesus.” If Jesus is not really God, we can finally have no compelling reason why we emphasize Jesus and not some other leader.

The other major mistake we can make is to forget that Jesus is really, really, human. Jesus can be a revelation of the divine, but if He is not also fully human, if He has not taken our humanity upon Himself and brought God’s action right into the heart of what makes us who we are, then God always remains at arm’s length. When we see that Jesus is a man, we see that not even the weakness that we see in ourselves can stop God from working in our lives and in the lives of others.

Jesus has just washed the feet of His disciples and Judas is about to leave to betray Him to death. The connection between these two scenes is John telling us that “Jesus was troubled in spirit and declared, ‘Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.’” Here is the God of the universe, clothed in our flesh and living among us, with a troubled spirit. Have you ever been troubled in spirit? I’ll bet you have. Between all the stresses that we have in our world today, with work, family, health issues, death of ourselves or our loved ones, even the stresses of high school, we all know what it means to have our spirit troubled in one way or another.

The question we have when we hear texts like this is, “What would trouble Jesus’ spirit?” It is one thing for people like you and me to have a troubled spirit; it seems like something else altogether for the Son of God to have a troubled Spirit. If we look at it from one point of view, Jesus having a troubled spirit can be depressing. If we wanted to, we could look at this as being evidence that the trials of life are just too much for human beings to deal with. If even God in flesh could not live His life without being troubled in spirit, what hope is there for us? We could look at it this way, but I think we had better consider some other options before we decide that this is the way to look at it.

I can think of three major things that might cause Jesus’ heart to be troubled. The first is that the time was coming when His betrayer was going to be revealed. Now, it isn’t like Jesus didn’t know who was going to betray Him. He knew since the very beginning that Judas was going to turn Him over to the authorities for a paltry thirty pieces of silver. The issue is not that Jesus was going to find out who the betrayer is because He already knew. The issue is that everyone else was going to find out who the betrayer was.

We might think that this is something odd, that Jesus would be troubled because other people would find out who was going to betray Him. If you or I were being betrayed, we might want everyone else to know who would do it. If other people knew what was going on, they might be able to stop it. If the betrayer knew that a bunch of people knew what he was planning to do, he very well might not do it. Those sound like just the kind of thing we would like to have happen, but Jesus has good reason to not want those things to happen.

First, Jesus knows that, if He does not go to the cross, if He does not expose human sinfulness in all of its depths by provoking the mob to cry out “Crucify Him” and murdering the Son of God, He could not truly overturn our sin. Even if He could, we would never know the depths of God’s love like we do. If Jesus had not provoked humanity to its highest pitch of sin, evil and rebellion, we would always have been in doubt as to whether or not we could out-sin God’s grace. By doing what He did, we can trust that, even when we are at our worst, we have not sinned more than God can forgive.

The other major reason that Jesus might be troubled that Judas would be exposed as His betrayer is because Jesus would no longer be able to cover up his treachery. That might sound odd to us, too, especially as people who live in a society that wants to prosecute people who commit crimes in secret. We want people to be exposed because, until they are exposed, they can continue to commit those crimes. But we need to always remember that this Jesus is the same Jesus who cries out on the cross, after He has been condemned to death by the political and religious leaders of Jerusalem, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” This is a Jesus who has come to pour out grace and forgiveness to the whole world. He desperately wants to deliver Judas from his sin, but He knows all the same that, in spite of the good news He has proclaimed to His disciples, Judas would do the most irrational thing imaginable: refuse it. Until Judas is exposed, only Jesus knew the depths of his evil. Soon, everyone will know how bad he is and be shamed for the rest of time as the betrayer of Christ.

A second reason that Jesus might have had a troubled spirit is, quite simply, because He did not want to die. I think that sometimes we get the idea that Jesus, convinced of His mission would just march, glassy-eyed and unfeeling, to the cross, as if knowing the purpose it would serve would somehow make such a painful death easier to bear. Remember what I said earlier about it being a major mistake to forget that Jesus was really human. We have evidence from the New Testament that, while Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane, which is so beautifully depicted in our new stained glass window, He actually prayed that He would not have to be crucified. Luke’s Gospel tells us, Jesus went off to pray and said, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.” Now, He continues and says, “yet not my will, but yours be done,” but we are also told that, “being in agony He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.” He never wavered from His faithfulness, but He was in agony over His death, and no wonder, crucifixion is one of the most painful ways to die that humanity has ever devised.

Another way we can think about Jesus being troubled in spirit is to think about it according to what we know He did in living and dying for us. Jesus took our weakness from us to overcome it. He took our limitations and worshipped God in spite of those limitations. He endured the temptations that you and I succumb to and met them with the very power of God, enduring them from within our humanity. We see in the Gospels that Jesus took everything that is ours and made it His own and took everything that was His own and gave it to us. Jesus having a troubled spirit because He is about to die is just one more example of this amazing exchange. He has taken even our fear of death and taken it upon Himself in order to confront it in our weakness with the very power of God and overcome it. Jesus does not entirely eliminate the feeling of fear when we face death, but He does assure us, first that He understands exactly what it feels like, because He has endured it Himself. He also assures us that, if that is what we are facing, if we are staring death in the face, that we are not alone, that our elder brother has gone even through that trial for us, on our behalf and in our place and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, will unite you to His triumph over death and, eventually, that you will join in His resurrection.

As true as those two ideas may be, that Jesus’ spirit was troubled because He was grieved that Judas’ sin was going to be exposed and that He did not particularly want to die, and I think they are true, I think there is one more reason, perhaps even stronger than the others, that Jesus has a troubled spirit. Jesus’ spirit was troubled as He faced betrayal and death precisely because the disciples’ spirits were not troubled. Jesus announces that the hour has arrived that He was going to be betrayed, and, as if that weren’t bad enough, the betrayal was going to come at the hands of one of His own disciples, by someone who was gathered together with them at the table.

When the disciples heard Jesus say that, their spirits were troubled. However, they were not troubled because their Lord and Master was going to be betrayed but because they were terrified that it might be them that betray Him. In Matthew’s Gospel, we hear every one of the disciples, including Judas, saying, “Surely not I, Lord?” Even in the text we have before us this morning, we have the disciples, represented by Peter, making gestures to one another trying to find out whom Jesus is talking about. It’s just like human beings, right? We tend all too often to be more concerned as to whose fault something is than the problem at hand and fixing it. We desperately want to place blame somewhere, as if it would be better to keep the problem but know who to blame than work together to fix the problem regardless of who is responsible.

So, the disciples were far more concerned with who would betray Jesus than they were that He was going to be betrayed. To be perfectly fair, the disciples probably didn’t really think that Jesus would really be betrayed and thought even less that, even if He was betrayed, that He would end up actually being killed. But even still, their spirits were troubled because they were afraid that, in the end, it might actually be them who betray Jesus, even if they had not already been plotting to do so. Even though only Judas actually went through with the betrayal, each of the disciples looked deeply into their hearts and souls and saw there a capacity to betray their Lord. They knew that each of them was capable of it, even if they never actually did it.

Even though we can point out the shortcoming of the disciples and see our shortcomings mirrored in theirs, the point that I am trying to make is not to emphasize our weakness, but to emphasize the incredible thing that God has done here in Christ. God knows, just like we do, that our spirits get troubled about all kinds of things that shouldn’t excite us. Even though Jesus tells us not to worry about tomorrow because today’s trouble is enough for today, the concerns of the future continually creep into our lives. So, when everyone around Him is getting agitated about the future, Jesus calmly leads on, following His own teaching and being calm when we can’t. Jesus takes the things that trouble us that shouldn’t and promises us that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we, too, can be joined to that calm and not be moved by the daily troubles that we all face.

Perhaps even more importantly, God knows that there are all kinds of things that should trouble our spirits but don’t. We are told that the single most important thing in our lives is our relationship to God, and yet far too often, even for pastors, we allow it to slip by the wayside and worry about everything but our relationship with God. We know that how we treat the least of society is incredibly important, but we let it sink to the back of our mind so it doesn’t trouble us. We could take time and make a good list of things that should trouble our spirits but just don’t. Jesus takes those things and allows them to trouble His spirit, even when they don’t trouble ours. On the one hand, this emphasizes to us that the things we worry about and stress out about are not really worth the time and energy we put into them and that there are things that are worth that time and energy that we ignore. Looking at Jesus, we see how far short we are from where we should be, but that is not all. We also see that, even our worries are so important in the eyes of God that He took them upon Himself and redeemed them.

Brothers and sisters, you and I live in a hectic world that isn’t slowing down a bit. We feel that we are surrendering our lives to our calendars and obligations. We live in a world that wears even retired people to a frazzle and distracts us from the things that really matter. We go along our merry way, with a soul that is troubled or untroubled depending on what is going on in our lives at that particular moment and we wonder if this is how life is supposed to be. We question whether the things we spend our time and energy on are really important or if we could and should be doing something more worthwhile with our lives.

When God poured out the Holy Spirit on the church at Pentecost, we Christians got the single most calming and also troubling gift we have ever received. It is calming because, if we allow the Holy Spirit to live Christ’s life of obedience to the Father through us, we will find that there is a whole multitude of things that we used to give ourselves ulcers over that just aren’t all that important in the grand scheme of things. We can have the freedom to not live our lives worried about every little thing and it can be a wonderfully liberating experience. However, it is also a troubling thing as well. If we are open to the Spirit’s call, we will find that there are things that we never even noticed before that, all of a sudden, become matters of great importance to us. All at once, we find that we are concerned about whether or not we are reading our Bibles, if we are putting ourselves in the position for God to speak to us. We begin to consider whether we are setting time aside for God in order to pray. We begin to look at the community around us and notice that there are people who are needy and we try to figure out ways that we can help them. In short, if we allow God to make us more and more like Christ, we will find a whole world that we never knew before, and that we finally realize is more important and even more real than the world we used to know.

So let your hearts be troubled, but don’t let them be troubled by trivial things. Let your hearts be troubled by things that are worth being troubled over, like your relationship to God, the spreading of the Good News throughout Hudson, and how you are treating your neighbor. But God wants you to be free from the troubles of things that are here today and gone tomorrow, that are passing into nothingness. God has sent His very life into your heart and wants to renew you in joy. He wants so desperately to give you His life that He has gone, even to His death, for you. The God who became flesh died so that you might live. Go live the life that God has given you to live and live it to the fullest. Let us pray.

AMEN