The gospel appointed for today is John 13:21-32. Two things in this text fascinate me. First that the gospel writer states “Jesus was troubled in spirit.” It’s something of an anomaly for John, because throughout the gospel Jesus is well aware of what is going to happen to him. For example, in chapter 12, Jesus says, “And what should I pray? Father, save me from this hour? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” It seems almost as if it is John’s direct contradiction of the scene in Gethsemane in the Synoptic gospels, where Jesus prays that “this cup may be taken from me.”

The second interesting thing is Judas. We are fascinated with him, we want to understand why he betrayed Jesus. That attempt to figure Judas out is present already in the gospels. We see it hear, with the reference to Satan entering him. But we may be misdirecting our focus.

This takes place at the Last Supper, just after Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet, including the feet of Judas, and after he explained his actions as a model of servanthood for his disciples to imitate. Chapter 13 begins, “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” What may matter most about Judas is that Jesus loved him, modeled that love in service, and invited him to participate in a life of loving service.

It’s customary during Holy Week for the clergy to gather with their bishop for the reaffirmation of our ordination vows. I’m not a big fan of it, on the theory that either we mean what we say when we make our vows at ordination, or we don’t mean it. But I went, in part because I now have a new bishop and it seemed appropriate to reaffirm my vows. I also went because traditionally it is also the time when the bishop consecrates a new supply of oils (oil of the sick, chrism for baptizing, and oil of the catechumens).

Something Bishop Miller said in his homily struck home and the whole notion of reaffirmation began to seem significant. He began by mentioning 2 recent news items concerning Christianity: the continuing sexual abuse scandal in Roman Catholicism as well as the reports coming out of Michigan about the Christian militia group that was arrested. He pointed out the importance of trust–the trust our congregations in us as clergy and the trust that is important in our relationships with one another.

Once lost, trust is very difficult to regain and re-establish. Moreover, we live in a culture in which distrust of one other is profound and distrust of institutions is ubiquitous. Simple things like reaffirming the vows one made at ordination symbolize the work we all need to do to trust one another.

There’s a rawness about Holy Week. It feels like emotions are laid bare as we walk through the events of Jesus’ last days, that our defenses are stripped away as Jesus was stripped by the soldiers, and the altar is stripped on Maundy Thursday. In the end, we stand before the cross on Good Friday naked before God, with our only hope the prayer we say at the conclusion of the liturgy that day: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death.”

When all of our self-deception and self-defenses are stripped away, that is how we stand before God, and what we have to hope for; and it might be a good place to begin to establish trust.

What a difference a few verses makes. The gospel appointed for today is John 12:1-11. All of the propers for the day are here. We read much of the same gospel two weeks ago, on the fifth Sunday in Lent. That gospel is here.

The key difference is that the Sunday gospel concludes with “You always have the poor with you. You do not always have me with you.” Today’s gospel added three verses that put it into the context of John’s theme highlighting the increasing conflict between Jesus and “the Jews.” Here are those verses:

When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he was there, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.

The addition of these three verses completely transforms the gospel reading from a story about a woman anointing Jesus, modeling discipleship, to intense, and intensifying anti-Judaism. I never preach sermons on weekday services (unless it’s a major feast, of course) so I rarely do more than begin to struggle with the text and with what preaching the “gospel” from this text might be.

I suppose, if pressed hard enough, I might be able to come up with something, but given that tonight is the first night of Passover, all I could do was mull over the anti-Judaism of the Gospel of John, and the Jewishness of Jesus.