Chapter XIII: Part 13

Caiaphas, who that year was High Priest, settled their doubts with the maxim which has always justified in the eyes of the world the immolation of the innocent. “Ye know nothing at all nor consider that it is expedient that one man should die for the people and that the whole nation perish not.” This maxim in Caiaphas’ mouth, and on this occasion, and for what it meant, was infamous, and hypocritical like all the speeches made by the Sanhedrin. But transposed into a higher meaning and transferred into the Absolute, changing nation into humanity, the President of the circumcised patriciate was expounding a principle which Jesus Himself had accepted and which has become under another form the crucial mystery of Christianity. Caiaphas did not know—he who had to enter alone into the Holy of Holies to offer up to Jehovah the sins of the people—how much his words, coarse in expression and cynical in sentiment as they were, were in accord with his victim’s thought.

The thought that only the righteous can pay for injustice, that only the perfect can discount the crimes of the brute, that only the pure can cancel the debts of the ignoble, that only God in His infinite magnificence can expiate the sins which man has committed against Him; this thought, which seems to man the height of madness exactly because it is the height of divine wisdom, certainly did not flash out in the corrupt soul of the Sadducee when he threw to his sixty accomplices the sophism destined to silence their last remorse. Caiaphas, who together with the crown of thorns and the sponge of vinegar was to be one of the instruments of the Passion, did not imagine in that moment that he was bearing witness solemnly, though involuntarily, to the divine tragedy about to begin.

And yet the principle that the innocent can pay for the guilty, that the death of one man can be salvation for all, was not foreign to the consciousness of ancient peoples. The heroic myths of the pagans recognize and celebrate voluntary sacrifices of the innocent. They record the example of Pilades, who offered himself to be punished in place of the guilty Orestes; Macaria of the blood of Heracles, who saved her brother’s life with her own; Alcestis, who died that she might avert from her Admetus the vengeance of Artemis; the daughters of Erechtheus, who sacrificed themselves that their father might escape Neptune’s blows. The old King Codrus, who threw himself into the Ilissus, in order that his Athenians might be victorious; and Decius Mus and his sons, who consecrated themselves to the Manes that the Romans might triumph over the Samnites; and Curtius, who, fully armed, cast himself into the gulf for the salvation of his country; and Iphigenia, who offered her throat to the knife that Agamemnon’s fleet might sail safely towards Troy. At Athens during the Thargelian feast two men were killed to save the city from divine wrath; Epimenides the Wise, to purify Athens, profaned by the assassination of the followers of Cylon, had recourse to human sacrifice over the tombs; at Curium, in Cyprus, at Terracina, at Marseilles, every year a man threw himself into the sea as payment for the crimes of the community, a man regarded as the Saviour of the people.

But these sacrifices, when they were spontaneous, were for the salvation of one being alone, or of a restricted group of men; when they were enforced they added a new crime to those they were intended to expiate; they were examples of individual affection or of superstitious crimes.

No man had yet appeared who would take upon his head all the sins of men, a God who would imprison Himself in the abject wretchedness of flesh to save all the human race and to give it the power to ascend from bestiality to sanctity, from earthly humiliation to the Kingdom of Heaven. The perfect man, who takes upon himself all imperfections, the pure man who burdens himself with all infamies, the righteous man who shoulders the unrighteousness of all men, had appeared under the aspect of a poor fugitive from justice in the day of Caiaphas. He who was to die for all, the Galilean working-man who was disquieting the rich and the priests of Jerusalem, was there on the Mount of Olives only a short distance from the Sanhedrin. The Seventy, who knew not what they did, who did not know that they were obeying the will of the very man they were persecuting, decided to have Him captured before the Passover; but because they were cowardly, like all men of possessions, one thing restrained them, the fear of the people who loved Jesus. They consulted that they might take Jesus by subtlety and kill Him. But they said, “Not on the feast day lest there be an uproar among the people.” To solve their difficulty, by good fortune, there came to them the day after one of the Twelve, he who held the purse, Judas Iscariot.

THE MYSTERY OF JUDAS

Only two creatures in the world knew the secret of Judas: Christ and the traitor.

Sixty generations of Christians have racked their brains over it, but the man of Iscariot, although he has drawn after him crowds of disciples, remains stubbornly incomprehensible. His is the only human mystery that we encounter in the Gospels. We can understand without difficulty the depravity of Herod, the rancor of the Pharisees, the revengeful anger of Annas and Caiaphas, the cowardly laxity of Pilate. But we have no evidence to enable us to understand the abomination of Judas. The Four Gospels tell us too little of him and of the reasons which induced him to sell his King.

“Then entered Satan into Judas.” But these words are only the definition of his crime. Evil took possession of his heart, therefore it came suddenly. Before that day, perhaps during the dinner at Bethany, Judas was not in the power of the Adversary. But why suddenly did he throw himself into that power? Why did Satan enter into him and not into one of the others?

Thirty pieces of silver are a very small sum, especially for an avaricious man. In modern coinage it would amount to about twenty dollars, and, granting that its effective value or as the economists say its buying power were in those days ten times greater, two hundred dollars seem hardly a sufficient price to induce a man whom his companions describe as grasping to commit the basest perfidy recorded by history. It has been said the thirty pieces of silver was the price of a slave. But the text of Exodus states on the contrary that thirty shekels was the compensation to be paid by the owner of an ox which had injured a slave. The cases are too far apart for the doctors of the Sanhedrin to have had this early precedent in mind.

The most significant indication is the office which Judas held among the Twelve. Among them was Matthew, a former tax-collector, and it would have seemed almost his right to handle the small amount of money necessary for the expenses of the brotherhood. In place of Matthew, we see the man of Iscariot as the depository of the offerings. Money is insidious and saturated with danger. The mere handling of money, even if it belongs to others, is poisonous. It is not surprising that John said of Judas the thief, that he, “having the bag, took away what was put therein.” And yet it is not probable that a man greedy for money would have stayed a long time with a group of such poor men. If he had wished to steal, he would have sought out a more promising position. And if he had needed those miserable thirty pieces of silver, could he not have procured them in another way, by running away with the purse, without needing to propose the betrayal of Jesus to the High Priests?

These common-sense reflections about a crime so extraordinary have induced many to seek other motives for the infamous transaction. A sect of heretics, the Cainites, had a legend that Judas sorrowfully accepted eternal infamy, knowing that Jesus through His will and the will of the Father was to be betrayed to His death, that no suffering might be lacking in the great expiation. A necessary and voluntary instrument of the Redemption, Judas was according to them a hero and a martyr to be revered and not reviled.

According to others, Iscariot, loving his people and hoping for their deliverance, perhaps sharing the sentiments of the Zealots, had joined with Jesus, hoping that he was the Messiah such as the common people then imagined Him: the King of the revenge and restoration of Israel. When little by little, in spite of his slowness of comprehension, it dawned on him from the words of Jesus that he had fallen in with a Messiah of quite another kind, he delivered Him over to His enemies to make up for the bitterness of his disappointment. But this fancy to which no text either canonical or apocryphal gives any support is not enough to explain Christ’s betrayer: he could have deserted the Twelve and gone in search of other company more to his taste, which certainly, as we have seen, was not lacking at that time.

Others have said that the reason is to be sought in his loss of faith. Judas had believed firmly in Jesus, and then could believe no longer. What Jesus said about His end close at hand, the threatening hostility of the metropolis, the delay of his victorious manifestation, had ended by causing Judas to lose all faith in Him whom he had followed up till then. He did not see the Kingdom approaching and he did see death approaching. Mingling with the people to find out the temper of the day, he had perhaps heard a rumor as to the decisions of the meeting of the Elders and feared that the Sanhedrin would not be satisfied with one victim alone, but would condemn all those who had long followed Jesus. Overcome by fear—the form which Satan took to enter into him—he thought he could ward off the danger and save his life by treachery; unbelief and cowardice being thus the ignominious motives of his ignominy.

An Englishman celebrated as an opium-eater, has thought out a new apology for the traitor which is the opposite of this theory. His idea is that Judas believed: he even believed too absolutely. He was so persuaded that Jesus was really the Christ that he wished by giving Him up to the Tribunal to force Him finally to show Himself as the legitimate Messiah. So strong was his hope that he could not believe that Jesus would be killed. Or if He really were to die, he knew with entire certainty that He would rise again at once to sit on the right hand of the Father as King of Israel and of the world. To hasten the great day, in which the Disciples were at last to have the reward for their faithfulness, Judas, secure in the intangibility of his Divine Friend, wished to force His hand and, putting Him face to face with those whom He was to cast out, to compel Him to show Himself as the true Son of God. According to this theory the action of Judas was not a betrayal but a mistake due to his misunderstanding of the real meaning of his Master’s teaching. He did not betray therefore through avarice or revengefulness or cowardice, but through stupidity.

On the other hand others give revenge as the reason. No man betrays another without hating him. Why did Judas hate Jesus? They remember the dinner in the house of Simon and the nard of the weeping woman. The reproof for his stinginess and hypocrisy must have exasperated the disciple who perhaps had been reproved for these faults on other occasions. To the rancor of this rebuff was added envy which always flourishes in vulgar souls. And as soon as he could revenge himself without danger, he went to the palace of Caiaphas.

But did he really think that his denunciation would bring Jesus to His death or did he rather suppose that they would content themselves with flogging Him and forbidding Him to speak to the people? The rest of the story seems to show that the condemnation of Jesus unnerved him as a terrible and unexpected result of his kiss. Matthew describes his despair in a way to show that he was sincerely horrified by what had happened through his fault. The money which he had pocketed became like fire to him: and when the priests refused to take it back he threw it down in the Temple. Even after this restitution he had no peace and hastened to kill himself. He died on the same day as his victim. Luke in the Acts sets down in another way the evil end of Judas, but the Christian tradition prefers the story of his remorse and suicide.

In spite of all the unraveling of unsatisfied minds, mysteries are still tangled about the mystery of Judas. But we have not yet invoked the testimony of Him who knew better than all men, even better than Judas, the true secret of the betrayal. Jesus alone could give us the key to the mystery; Jesus who saw into the heart of Judas as into the hearts of all men, and who knew what Judas was to do before he had done it.

Jesus chose Judas to be one of the Twelve and to carry the gospel to the world along with the others. Would He have chosen him, kept him with Him, beside Him, at His table, for so long a time if He had believed him to be an incurable criminal? Would He have confided to him what was dearest in the world to Him, the most precious thing in the world—the prophecy of the Kingdom of God?

Up to the last days, up to that last evening, Jesus treated Judas exactly like the others. To him, as to all others, He gave His body, symbolized by bread, His soul, symbolized by wine. He washed and wiped, with His own hands, the feet of Judas, those feet which had carried him to the house of Caiaphas—with those hands which, through Judas’ fault, were to be nailed to the cross on the following day. And when, in the red light of the flickering lanterns and the flashing of swords, Judas, under the dark shadow of the olive trees, came and kissed that face still wet with bloody sweat, Jesus did not repel him, but said, “Friend, wherefore art thou come?”

_Friend!_ It was the last time that Jesus spoke to Judas, and even in that moment He would use none other than that wonted word. Judas was not for Him the man of darkness who came in the darkness to turn Him over to the guards, but the friend, the same who a few hours before had been sitting with Him before the dish of lamb and herbs, and had set his lips to His cup: the same who, so many times in hours of rest in leafy shade, or in the shadow of walls, had listened with the others like a disciple, like a companion, like a friend, like a brother, to the great words of the Promise. Jesus had said at the Last Supper, “Woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.” But now that the traitor was before Him, that the treachery was complete, now that Judas had added to that betrayal the outrage of the kiss laid on the lips of Him who has commanded love for our enemies, He answered him with the sweet and divine words of their habitual intercourse, “Friend, wherefore art thou come?”

Thus the testimony of Him who was betrayed increases our bewilderment instead of raising the veil of the dreadful secret. He knew that Judas was a thief and He gave him the purse: He knew that Judas was evil and He confided to him a treasure of truth infinitely more precious than all the money in the universe: He knew that Judas was to betray Him and He made him a participant of His divinity, offering him the mouthful of bread and the sip of wine; He saw Judas leading His assailants upon Him and He still addressed him as at first, as He always had, with the holy name of friend.

“It had been good for that man if he had not been born.” These words might have been, rather than a condemnation, an exclamation of pity at the thought of a fate which could not be escaped. If Judas hated Jesus, we see no signs that Jesus was ever repelled by Judas, because Jesus knew that the base bargain was necessary, as the weakness of Pilate was necessary, the rage of Caiaphas, the insults of the soldiery, the timbers and nails of the cross. He knew that Judas must needs do what he did and He did not curse him, as He did not curse the people who wished His death, or the hammer which drove the nails into the cross. One prayer alone broke from him, to beg Judas to shorten the dreadful agony, “That thou doest, do quickly.”

The mystery of Judas is doubly tied to the mystery of the Redemption and we lesser ones shall never solve it.

No analogy can give us light. Joseph also was sold by one of his brothers, who, like Iscariot, was called Judas, and was sold to Ishmaelite merchants for twenty pieces of silver, but Joseph, who prefigured Christ, was not sold to his enemies, was not sold to be put to death: and as a compensation for his betrayal, great good fortune was his and he became so wealthy that he could enrich his father, and so generous that he could pardon even his brothers.

Jesus was not only betrayed, but sold, sold for a price, sold for a small price, bought with coins. He was the object of a bargain, a bargain struck and paid. Judas, the man of the purse, the cashier, did not present himself as an accuser, did not offer himself as a cut-throat, but as a merchant doing business in blood. The Jews, who understood bartering for blood, daily cutting the throats of victims, and quartering them, butchers of the Most High, were the first and last customers of Judas. The sale of Jesus was the first business done by the merchant, just entering business; not very big business, it must be admitted, but a real, true commercial transaction, a valid contract of buying and selling, verbal, but honestly lived up to by the contracting parties. If Jesus had not been sold, something would have been lacking to the perfect ignominy of His expiation: if He had been sold for more money, for three hundred shekels instead of thirty, for gold instead of silver, the ignominy would have been diminished, slightly, but still diminished. It had been destined to all eternity that He should be bought, but bought with a small sum. In order that an infinite, supernatural but communicable value should be made available to men, it was needful to buy it with a small sum, and with a sum of metal, which has no real value. Did Jesus bought by others not do the same, He who wished to redeem with the blood of only one man all the blood shed on the earth from the days of Cain to Caiaphas?

And if He had been sold as a slave, as so many living souls were sold in those days in the public places, if He had been sold as redeemable property, as human capital, as a living tool for work, the ignominy would have been almost nothing, and the Redemption put off. But He was sold as the calf is sold to the butcher, as the innocent animals which the butcher buys to kill, to sell again, to distribute in morsels to flesh-eaters. The sacred butcher, Caiaphas, never in his most successful days had a victim so prodigious. For more than two thousand years Christians have been fed on that victim, and it is still intact, and those who feed are not satiated.

Every one of us has contributed his quota, an infinitesimal quota, to buy that victim from Judas. We have all contributed towards the sum for which the blood of the Redeemer was bought: Caiaphas was only our agent. The field of Aceldama, bought with the price of blood, is our inheritance, our property. And this field has grown mysteriously larger, has spread over half the face of the earth: whole populous cities, paved, lighted, well-ordered cities, of shops and brothels, shine resplendent on it from north to south. And that the mystery should be even greater, Judas’ money, also multiplied by the betrayals of so many centuries, by the accumulation of interest, has become incalculably great. Nothing is so fruitful and fecund as blood. The statisticians, those soothsayers of modern days, can bear witness to the fact that all the courts of the Temple could not contain the money engendered from that day to this by those thirty pieces of silver cast down there in a delirium of remorse, by the man who sold his God.

THE MAN WITH THE PITCHER

The bargain was struck, the price paid, the buyers were impatient to finish the transaction. They had said “before the Feast day.” The great feast day of the Passover fell on a Saturday and this was Thursday.

Jesus had but one more day of freedom, the last day.

Before leaving His friends, those who were to abandon Him that night, He wished once more to dip His bread in the same platter with them. Before the Syrian soldiery should have spit upon Him, before He should be defiled by the Jewish filth, He wished to kneel down and wash the feet of those who until the day of their death were to travel all the roads of the earth to tell the story of His death. Before the blood dropped from His hands, His feet, His chest, He wished to give the first fruits to those who were to be one soul with Him until the end. Before suffering thirst, nailed upon the cross, He wished to drink a cup of wine with His companions. This last evening before His death was to be like an anticipation of the banquet of the Kingdom.

On the evening of Thursday, the first day of unleavened bread, the Disciples asked Him, “Where wilt thou that we go and prepare that thou mayest eat the passover?”

The Son of Man, poorer than the foxes, had no home of His own. He had left His home in Nazareth forever. The home of Simon of Capernaum, which had been in the early days like His own, was far away; and the home of Mary and Martha in Bethany, where He was almost Master, was too far outside the city.

He had only enemies in Jerusalem or shame-faced friends: Joseph of Arimathea was to receive Him as his guest only the next evening, in the dark cave, the banquet-hall of worms.

But a condemned man on his last day has a right to any favor he may ask. All the houses of Jerusalem were rightfully His. The Father would give Him the house best suited to shelter His last joy. And He sent two Disciples with this mysterious command, “Go ye into the city, and there shall meet you a man bearing a pitcher of water; follow him. And wheresoever he shall go in, say ye to the good man of the house, the Master saith, My time is at hand; where is the guest chamber, where I shall eat the passover with my disciples? And he will show you a large upper room furnished and prepared: there make ready for us.”

It has been believed that the master of that house was a friend of Jesus and that they had arranged this beforehand. But that cannot be. Jesus would have sent the two Disciples straight to him, giving his name, and would not have had recourse to the following of the man with the pitcher.

There were many men on the morning of that feast day who must have been coming up from Shiloah with pitchers of water. The two Disciples were to follow the first one whom they saw before them. They did not know why they were not to stop him instead of going after him to see where he went in. His master, since he had a servant, certainly was not a poor man, and in his house, as in all those of prosperous people, there would certainly be a room suitable for serving a supper, and he would know at least by hearsay who “the Master” was. In those days at Jerusalem there was little talk of anything else. The request was one which could not be refused. “The Master saith, My time is at hand.” The time which was “His” was the hour of death. No one could shut out from his house a man at the point of death, who wished to satisfy his hunger for the last time. The Disciples set out, found the man with the pitcher, entered the house, talked with the master, prepared there what was necessary for the supper: lamb cooked on the spit, round loaves without leaven, bitter herbs, red sauce, the wine of thanksgiving, and warm water. They set the couches and pillows about the table and spread over it the white cloth. On the cloth they set the few dishes, the candelabra, the pitcher full of wine, and one cup, one cup only to which all were to set their lips. They forgot nothing: both were experienced in this preparation. From childhood up, in their home beside the lake, they had watched, wide-eyed, the preparations for the most heart-warming feast of the year. And it was not the first time since they had been with Him whom they loved, that they had thus eaten all together of the feast of the Passover. But for that last day—and perhaps their dull minds had at last understood the dreadful truth that it was really the last—for this last supper which all the thirteen were to have together, for this Passover which was the last for Jesus and the last valid Passover for old Judaism because a new covenant was about to begin for all countries and all nations: for this festal banquet which was a memorial of life, and a warning of death, the Disciples performed those humble menial tasks with a new tenderness, with that pensive joy that almost brings tears.

With the setting of the sun, the other ten came with Jesus and placed themselves around the table, now in readiness. All were silent as if heavy-hearted with a presentiment which they were afraid to see reflected in their companions’ eyes. They remembered the supper in Simon’s house, almost funereal, the odor of the nard, the woman and her endless weeping, and Christ’s words on that evening, and His words of those last days; the repeated warnings of ignominy and of the end; the signs of hatred increasing about them, and the indications, now very plain, of the conspiracy, which with all its torches was about to come out from the darkness.

But two of them—for opposite reasons—were more oppressed, more moved than the others: the two for whom this was the last of their lives, the two who were about to die: Christ and Judas, the one sold and the seller; the Son of God and the abortion of Satan.

Judas had finished his bargain, he had the thirty pieces of silver on his person wrapped tightly so that they would not clink. But he knew no peace. The Enemy had entered into him, but perhaps the friend of Christ was not yet dead in his heart. To see Him there in the midst of His friends, calm but with the pensive expression of the man who is the only one who knows a secret, who is aware of a crime, a betrayal; to see Him, still at liberty in the company of those who loved Him, still alive, all the blood still in His veins under the delicate protection of the skin—and yet those bargainers who had paid the price refused to wait any longer, the affair was arranged for that very night!—and they were only waiting for Judas to act. But suppose Jesus, who must know all, had denounced him to the eleven? And suppose they, to save their Master, had thrown themselves on Judas to bind him, perhaps to kill him? Judas began to feel that to betray Christ to His death was perhaps not enough to save himself from the death, which he so greatly feared and yet which was near upon him.

All these thoughts darkened his somber face, more and more blackly, and at times terrified him. While the more active ones busied themselves with the last arrangements for serving the supper, he looked furtively at the eyes of Jesus—clear eyes scarcely veiled with the loving sadness of parting—as if to read there the revocation of his fate, so close at hand. Jesus broke the silence: “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer: For I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God.”

Such great love had not up to that moment been expressed by any words of Christ to His friends: such a longing for the day of perfect union, for the feast, so ancient and destined to so great a sublimation. They knew that He loved them; but until this evening their poor bruised hearts had not felt how poignant His love was. He knew that this evening was the last respite of rest and cheer before His death, and yet He had desired it ardently as though it were a boon, with that fervor which is the mark of passionate souls, souls on fire, loving souls, those who battle for the love of victory, who endure all things for a high prize. He had ardently desired to eat this Passover with them. He had eaten others: He had eaten with them thousands of other times, seated in boats, in their friends’ houses, in strangers’ houses, in rich men’s houses, or seated beside the road, in mountain pastures, in the shadow of bushes on the shore; and yet for so long He had ardently desired to eat with them this supper which was the last! The blue skies of happy Galilee, the soft winds of the spring just passed, the sun of the last Passover, the waving branches of His triumphant entry, did He think of them now? Now He saw only His first friends and His last friends, the little group destined to be diminished by treachery, and dispersed by cowardice. Still, for a time they were there about Him in the same room, at the same table, sharing with Him the same overwhelming grief, but sharing also the light of a supernatural certainty.

Up to that day He had suffered, but not for Himself; He had suffered because of His ardent desire for this nocturnal hour, when the air was already heavy with the tragedy of farewells. And, when He had thus told them how great was His love, Christ’s face, soon to be buffeted, shone with that noble sadness which is so strangely like joy.

THE WASHING OF THE FEET

Now that He was on the point of being snatched from those whom He loved, He wished to give them a supreme proof of this love. From the time they had begun to share His life, He had always loved them, all of them, even Judas: He always loved them with a love surpassing all other affections, a love so bountiful that their narrow hearts could not always contain it; but now about to leave them, knowing that He was to be with them again only when transfigured after death, all His hitherto unexpressed affection overflowed in a great wave of tender sadness.

Before beginning the supper where He was the head of the family, He wished to be kinder than a Father, humbler than a servant. He was their King, and He would humble Himself to the service performed by slaves: He was their Master and He would put Himself below the level of His disciples; He was the Son of God and He would accept a position despised of men: He was the first and He would kneel before His inferiors as if He had been the last. So many times, to rebuke their pride and jealousy, He had told them that the Master must serve his servants, that the Son of Man was come to serve, that the first must be last. But His words had not yet been assimilated by those souls, since even up to the last, they continued to quarrel for priority and precedence.

For raw, untrained minds, action has more meaning than words. Jesus prepared Himself to repeat, with the symbolic aspect of a humiliating service, one of His most important instructions. John tells us, “He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a bason and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.”

Only a mother or a slave would have done what Jesus did that evening. The mother would have done it for her little children, but for no one else: the slave for his masters, but for no others. The mother would have served joyfully because of her love, the slave would have been resigned through obedience. But the Twelve were neither Christ’s children nor His masters. Son of Man and of God, His love was above that of all earthly mothers,—King of a kingdom existing in the future, but more legitimate than all existing monarchies, He was the unrecognized Master of all masters.

And yet He was willing to wash and wipe those twenty-four callous and sweaty feet, in order to engrave on those unwilling hearts, still swollen with vanity, the truth which His lips had so long vainly pronounced; “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.”

So after He had washed their feet and taken His garments and was set down again He said unto them, “Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you. Verily, verily I say unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord; neither is he that is sent greater than he that sent him. If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.”

Jesus had not only given them a memory of complete humility, but an example of perfect love. “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you.”

But this action, with its deep meaning hidden under the appearance of menial service, signifies purification as well as love. “He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all.”

The eleven, although not of lofty character, had some right to this cleansing service from Jesus. For many months those feet had trodden the dusty, muddy, filthy roads of Judea to follow Him who brought life; and after His death, year by year, they were to tread longer and harder roads in countries the very names of which they then did not know; and foreign clay would soil the sandaled feet of those who were to go as pilgrims and strangers to repeat the call of the Crucified One.

TAKE—EAT

These thirteen men had apparently come together to perform the old social rite in memory of the liberation of their people from Egyptian slavery. They seemed to be thirteen devout men of the people, waiting about a white table redolent of roasted lamb and wine, for the signal to begin an intimate and festal supper.

But this was only in appearance. In reality it was a vigil of leave-taking and separation. Two of these thirteen, He into whom God had entered and he into whom Satan had entered, were to die terrible deaths before the next nightfall. The very next day the others were to be dispersed, like reapers at the first downfall of hail.

But this supper which was the viaticum of an ending, was also a wonderful beginning. In the midst of these thirteen Jews the observance of the Jewish Passover was about to be transfigured into something incomparably higher and more universal, into something unequaled and ineffable; into the great Christian mystery. The simple eating of bread was to become actual communion with God.

For the Jews, Easter is only the feast in memory of their flight from Egypt. They never forgot their victorious escape from their slavery, accompanied by so many prodigies, so manifestly under God’s protection, although they were to bear on their necks the yokes of other captivities, and to undergo the shame of other deportations. Exodus prescribed an annual festivity which took the name of the Passover; Pasch, the paschal feast. It was a sort of banquet intended to bring to mind the hastily prepared food of the fugitives. A lamb or a goat should be roasted over the fire, that is, cooked in the simplest and quickest way; bread without leaven, because there was no time to let yeast rise. And they were to eat of it with their loins girded, their staves in their hands, eating in haste, like people about to set out upon a journey. The bitter herbs were the poor wild grasses snatched up as they went along by the fugitives, to dull the hunger of their interminable wanderings. The red sauce, where the bread was dipped, was in memory of the bricks which the Jewish slaves were obliged to bake for the Pharaohs. The wine was something added: the joy of escape, the hope of the land of promise, the exaltation of thanksgiving to the Eternal.

Jesus changed nothing in the order of this ancient feast. After the prayer He had them pass from hand to hand the cup of wine, calling on God’s name. Then He gave the bitter herbs to each one and filled a second time the cup which was to be passed around the table for each to sip.

What taste did that wine have in the mouth of the traitor, when Jesus in that deep silence pronounced those words of longing and hope which were not for Judas, but only for those who could ascend to the eternal banquet of the Father: Take this and divide it among yourselves, “but I say unto you I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

A sad farewell; but nevertheless the confirming of a solemn promise. Perhaps they felt only the promise, and perhaps there flashed before their poor men’s eyes a vision of the great Heavenly feast. They did not believe that they would have a long time to mourn: after that other vintage-time, after the fruit of the vine had fermented, and the sweet wine had been poured into the flasks, the Master would return, as He had promised, to summon them to the great wedding of Heaven and Earth, to the everlasting banquet. They must have thought, “We are men growing old, elderly men, more than mature, within sight of old age; if the Bridegroom tarries too long He will not find us among the living, and those who have believed Him will be mocked at.”

Comforted by the certainty of an early and glorious reunion, they chanted together, as the custom was, the Psalm of the first Thanksgiving, a chant of praise to the Father from Him who served Him. “Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob; which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint into a fountain of waters.—He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dung-hill; that he may set him with princes, even with the princes of his people.”

These old words, colored at that moment with a new meaning, were sung with a joyful conviction of their truth. They, too, the Disciples, were poor men and they would be raised out of the dust of poverty by the intercession of the Son of God: they too were poor men and He would soon raise them out of the misery of their beggary, to make them masters of inconsumable wealth.

Then Jesus, who saw how insufficiently they understood, took the loaves, blessed them, broke them and, as He gave them each a piece, set the dreadful truth before their eyes. “Take, eat; This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.”

So He was not to return as quickly as they thought! After His brief stay during the Resurrection, His second coming was to be delayed, so long that it might be possible to forget Him and His death.

“This do in remembrance of me.” The breaking of bread at the common table among those who await Him shall be the signal of a new brotherhood. Every time that you break bread, I will not only be present among you, but by that means you will be intimately united with me. Because, as this bread is broken in my hands, my body will be broken by my enemies. As this bread eaten to-night will be your food until to-morrow, my body which I will offer in death to all men shall satisfy the hunger of those who believe in me, until the day when the great granaries of the Kingdom shall be open to all, when you shall be angels in the presence of your Father whom you shall have found again. I will leave you therefore not merely a memory; I will be present with a mystic but real presence in every particle of bread consecrated to me and this bread shall be a living necessary food for souls, and my promise to be with you shall be fulfilled till time shall be no more.

In the meantime, this evening, eat this unleavened bread, this bread made by the hand of man, made of water and grain, these loaves which have felt the heat of the oven and which my hands, not yet cold in death, have divided amongst you—and which my love has changed into my flesh so that it may be your everlasting food. It is sweet to the heart of a friend to see his friends eating bread at his table, bread born of the earth, bread which was green blades with flowering lilies among them, and then the ripe ear bending down the tall stalk with its golden weight. You know how many efforts, how much anxiety, how much trouble, are contained in a piece of bread; how the great oxen cultivated the earth, how the countrymen threw great handfuls of the grain into the fallow land in winter, how the first blade softly penetrated the damp darkness of the earth, how the reapers all day long cut down the ripened stalks, and then the sheaves were bound, and carried to the threshing floor and beaten so that the ears let fall the grain. The workers must wait for a little wind, neither too gentle nor too violent, to winnow out the good grain from the chaff. Then they grind it, sift out the bran from it, make a dough with warm water, heat the oven with dry grass or twigs. All this must be done with love and patience before the father may break a piece with his children, the friend with his friends, the host with strangers. Plowers, sowers, reapers, winnowers, millers and bakers sweat in the heat of the sun, in the heat of the oven, before the golden wheat can be transformed into well-baked golden bread for our table.

Truly it is sweet to eat good wholesome bread with friends: the soft white crumb, covered with the crisp crust. So many times with me you have begged bread in poor men’s houses; and all your lives you are to beg it in my name: you will have the moldy hard crusts which dogs refuse, the dry bits left at the bottom of the dish, the crusts gnawed by children and old people which they have let fall upon the hearth. But you know want, and nights of fasting and the pale face of poverty. But you are strong; you have the powerful jaws of those who eat hard bread. You will not lose courage, if no place is made for you at the tables of the well-to-do.

But verily it is infinitely sweeter for Him who loves you to transform the bread which comes from the hard earth and from hard labor into the Body which will be eternally offered for you, into the Body which every day will come down from Heaven as the visible means of grace.

Remember the prayer which I taught you: “Give us this day our daily bread—” For to-day and for always your bread is this bread, my Body. He shall never know hunger who shall eat my Body, which every morning throughout endless centuries shall be changed into endless morsels of transubstantiated bread. But whosoever shall refuse it, shall be anhungered to all eternity.

WINE AND BLOOD

As soon as they had eaten the lamb with the bread and the bitter herb, Jesus filled the common cup for the third time and gave it to the Apostle nearest Him, “Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.”

His blood, mixed with sweat, had not yet fallen on the ground, under the olives, and had not yet dropped from the nails upon Golgotha. But His desire to give life with His life, to redeem with His suffering all the sorrows of the world, to transmit at least a part of His substance to His immediate heirs; this desire to give Himself up wholly for those whom He loves is so great that from this moment on, He feels the immolation complete and the gift possible. If bread is the body, blood is in a certain sense the soul. The Lord said to Noah: “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.” With blood as visibly representing life, the God of Abraham and of Jacob had established the covenant with His own people. When Moses had received the law, he had sacrificed oxen, took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar: “And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words.”

But after a trial of many centuries, God had announced by the voice of the prophets that the Old Covenant was obliterated and abrogated, and that another was henceforth necessary. The blood of animals sprinkled upon stubborn heads and upon blaspheming faces had lost its virtue; another Blood, purer and more precious, was needed for the New Covenant, for the Last Covenant of the Father with His perjured children. In many ways He had already tried to lead His first-born towards the narrow door of salvation; the rain of fire on Sodom, the washings of the waters of the flood, the Egyptian slavery, hunger in the desert, had terrified them without reforming them.

And now there had come a Liberator at once more divine and more human than the old Captain of Exodus. Moses also saved a people, spoke upon a mountain, announced a promised land. But Jesus saves not only His people, but all peoples; writes His laws not upon stone, but upon human hearts; and His promised land is not a country of rich grazing-land and vineyards, with great clusters of grapes, but a Kingdom of holiness and eternal joy. Moses had killed a man, and Jesus brought the dead to life; Moses changed water into blood and Jesus, after having changed water into wine at the wedding banquet, changed wine into blood, into His own blood, at the melancholy last supper of His marriage with death. Moses died full of years and honors on a solitary mountain top, glorified by his people; and Jesus was to die among the insults of those whom He loved.

The blood of oxen, the impure blood of earthly animals, involuntary and inferior victims, is no longer sufficient. The New Covenant was established that night with the words of Christ, who under the appearance of wine shed His own blood and His own soul: “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.”

It was shed not merely for the Twelve who were there; they represent in His eyes all of humanity alive at that time and all those to be born thereafter. The blood which was to be shed the next day, on Golgotha, was real blood, actual, warm blood congealing on the cross in clots which all the tears shed by Christians can never wash away. But the blood of the Last Supper symbolizes a soul which gave itself up to make over into His own likeness, the souls shut up in the bodies of men: which was given to those who asked for it and to those who fled away from it, which had suffered for the sake of those who had received it and for those who had blasphemed it. This baptism of blood which came after the baptism of water by John, after the baptism of tears by the women of Bethany, after the baptism of spitting by the Jews and by the Romans, this baptism of blood, red as the baptism of fire announced by the prophet of fire, and mixed with the tears shed by women over His blood-stained body, this is the greatest sacrament, revealed to His betrayers, by Him who was betrayed.

I have broken bread for you, daily bread for which you pray every day to the Father, as my body will be broken to-morrow, and I offer you now my blood in this wine which I drink for the last time on earth. If you always do this in memory of me, you will feel no hunger, no thirst. There is no food better than wheat-bread, and no drink better than wine, but the bread and wine which I have given you to-night will feed you and quench your thirst for all your lives, by virtue of my sacrifice and of that love which makes me seek for death and which reigns beyond death.

Ulysses advised Achilles to give the Achaians, before they went into battle, “bread and wine that they should have strength and courage.” For the Greek the strength of his members came from bread and homicidal courage from wine. Wine was to intoxicate men so that they should destroy each other and bread was to strengthen their arms so that they could battle without weakness. The bread given by Christ does not strengthen the flesh, but the soul, and His wine gives that divine intoxication which is Love, that Love which the Apostle, scandalizing the descendants of Ulysses, was to call in his Epistle to the Corinthians, “the foolishness of God.”

Judas also ate that bread and swallowed that wine, partook of that body, in which he had trafficked, drank that blood which he was to help shed, but he had not the courage to confess his infamy, to throw himself down weeping at the feet of Him who would have wept with him. Then the only friend remaining to Judas warned him, “Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.”

The eleven were capable of leaving Him alone in the midst of Caiaphas’ guards, but they never could have brought themselves to sell Him for money, and at this they shuddered. Every one looked in his neighbor’s face, almost dreading to see in his companion the livid look of guilt, and all, one after the other, said, “Lord, is it I?”