The Night He Was Betrayed

Beloved, we are at crunch time.  The darkness is nearing, and will soon overwhelm.  We need quality oil in our lamps, and I mean to touch down on each aspect of this in the coming lessons ahead.  These lessons are to stir you up, spiritually.  If there is anyone you know that may profit from these lessons, please, pass them on or send me their email addresses.

As ever, God's Blessings, and fear not, greater is He that is within you then he that is in the world.

This is an excerpt from the book, The Night He Was Betrayed, by R.E.O. White.  It is out of print, but you can still access it on some sites online.  This excerpt is from chapter two, The Right Approach.  It is a preparatory chapter to get us thinking about the teaching to come, and stands alone in itself. He is writing here about the upper room, and John 13-17.

~Al

 …It is evident, from comparing John with the other Gospels, that chapters 13-17 are more than simple devotional passages suitable for spiritual meditation in a relaxed hour. They contain Jesus' own final teaching on the meaning of his imminent passion and stimulating practical preparation for the coming crisis and beyond.

 The Setting in Immediate Circumstances

 Christ's cautious — and secret — preparations for this evening have already reminded us that this upper room discourse had its immediate context in the menacing situation confronting Jesus and the Twelve on that fateful night. We shall miss much of Jesus' meaning if we do not appreciate the atmosphere in that guest-chamber as he spoke.

The disciples' perplexity has been described, but preparation for the future required far more than explanation. A strong emotional tension runs through the whole conversation. Fear and foreboding fed on bewilderment; the dawning realization that they were about to lose Jesus aroused suspicion that all their glowing hopes might after all be disappointed. Awareness of Jesus' peril brought dread that they themselves might share it. The upper room was shadowed with the fear of approaching tragedy, for which all except Jesus were totally unprepared.

"I go"... "I go"... "I am leaving", "I was with you, but now I am going," ... "I go away"... "I will no longer talk much with you" ... "I go"... "I go"... "You will see me no more" —like nineteen strokes of a tolling bell Jesus reiterates the warning, together with seven undertones of sorrow, grief, weeping, and tribulation. Beneath all sounds five times the still darker note, full of regret and reproach: "betray," "betrayer," "he who eats my bread will kick back at me like a treacherous ox," "Judas went out and it was night." Nothing quite like this threnody[1], this long lament for Jesus, occurs anywhere else in the New Testament.

With foreboding is mingled the sharp warning of hostility. Thirty-five times in the five chapters John names "the world," and he uses at least sixteen pronouns referring to the world.

Nothing is said here of God's loving the world, little of Christians serving the world; these references are to the world's hating (four times), the world loving its own, the world under judgment, the world not knowing the Father or Christ, the world not able to bestow peace or to receive the Spirit, and the world planning tribulation and persecution. And all the while, behind the menacing world, waiting for Jesus and then for themselves, stood "the ruler of this world."

In the opening verses of these chapters John draws the battle lines: "His hour had come to depart out of this world, ... having loved his own who were in the world"; and at the end, "I am no more in the world, but they are in the world... I pray not for the world." All is menace, hostility, and hatred out there in the darkened streets and beyond into the future: hostility that breeds fear.

No wonder, then, that "the disciples looked at one another, uncertain" and said, "What is this that he says to us? ... We do not know what he means." No wonder, either, that Jesus spoke so much of comfort, of peace, of not letting one's heart be troubled. It was not simply lack of understanding that shook their souls with dread: "I tell you now so that when it happens you may believe... Believe also in me." Their very faith might well be shaken.

 Such was the background to that upper room conversation, to Christ's reassurances, his warnings, his call for unity, his commissioning of his men to bear fruit in such a world; the background also to his own solemnity of spirit.

 

But shadow deepens now toward the close:

  His spirit darkens with the coming doom,

While they, in whom his heart had found repose

Of sympathy in good, fold close the gloom;

For he who pours his very being forth

Divinely rich and pure for these, must hear

These even now, so nigh the end, in wrath

Dispute pre-eminence: while, deadly near,

Looms Peter's base denial, and each one's broken troth!

(R.B.W. Noel [1834- 1894], "And there arose a contention among them")

 In such an atmosphere Jesus labored to prepare his friends, mentally and morally, for what lay ahead. It is in the light of this setting of John 13-17 within John's Gospel, within the gospel records, and within the immediate situation that we define our approach to obviously vital chapters. Here for the last time before his death Jesus seeks to explain his mission and his destiny; to encourage and fortify his disciples against the future; to define their task and commission them for it; and so to instruct and to warn that when the storm broke over himself, and then over them, they would remember his words, understand, believe, and endure.

The Night He Was Betrayed, R.E.O. White, 1982

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[1] A song of lamentation; a dirge; especially, a poem composed for the occasion of the funeral of some personage.