On the night He was betrayed...

On the night He was betrayed…

Saturday, two days ago, I was sitting at my breakroom at work, eating an overly-hummused sandwich, and talking to this rather flighty coworker about healing from a life of shame, and you know that Jesus’ name came up.

She rolled her eyes and said “Oh, it’s all about the big ‘JC’”.

“Really?” I asked, taken aback by her brash dismissal of Jesus and his followers. I think she misunderstood my question.

“No, I was being sarcastic”, she replied, “but I think it’s lovely that people can find comfort in that thought.”

And so I asked myself, is this all I’m doing, finding ‘comfort’ in the thought of Jesus? Is that all that Jesus is, a pleasant little thought to smooth over the uncomfortable bits and explain rough patches?

The next day, I was sitting in a church pew, smelling strongly of hummus, and wishing that I had eaten something less garlic-y. The sermon was perfect, just what I needed to hear, but it was the Communion that God really used.

I never took Communion that seriously … I mean, I take it respectfully, but I didn’t understand it. But this last Sunday, a big thing changed for me. Perhaps it was truly hearing for the first time, these words:

On the night Jesus was betrayed, He took bread and… broke it saying, ‘This is my Body, broken for you; do this in remembrance of me

(1 Corinthians 11:23,24)

Just soak it in for a moment. Ponder it.

On the night He was betrayed. Jesus knew it was coming. He knew Judas would give that fatal kiss, and that He would be led to His death. He knew of the pain - in a culture under the cruel, iron hand of the pax Romana , he was all too familiar with the gruesome, drawn-out, torturous death of a cross.

But even more than that, Jesus would bear the judgement of the entire world on his bleeding, broken back, to finally be cut off from God. To be split from Him, as the One who was ever before and beside Him, for the One who is Love, to be the object of His Own Father’s wrath, what could be worse? That is a punishment worse, far worse, than death.

What would I do on a night like that? I would run away. As far and as fast as I could, and I wouldn’t look back.

But Jesus sat down in the upper room, with the disciples, and shared himself with them. And he let them know that He loved them. He told them, although few - if any - of them understood at the time, that He was going to death on that cross for them.

And 2,000 years later, a young man sitting in a white church built on a continent entirely unknown to the men in the upper room heard these words and wept because of the all-surpassing, death-overcoming, judgement-bearing love of the Christ who knew what this guy was, and yet still broke His body, spilling His blood for him.

And now we live our lives in remembrance of Him. Every time we sit down to eat, remembering the Love that broke His own body, broke communion from His Father, so that we might be made alive and brought into the family as adopted sons and daughters.

He’s not just a comforting thought, HE IS everything.