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The Apostles Want To Know the Betrayer (John 13:21-30)

 Even if Jesus was speaking prophetically just before, it moved him emotionally, to realize that one of his closest friends, as an apostle, would be the one to betray him. We almost get the sense that they didn't understand Jesus, when he said that he would be betrayed by one of them before. So this finds him saying it again, and he said it clearly enough that they understood the weight of it, and were asking him to tell them.

If we hang out with Jesus and the apostles enough, we will start to notice that Jesus will say strange and interesting things, and the apostles want to ask him about it, but sometimes they lack the courage. Even among the twelve apostles, there is a sort of chain of command. They know that they should ask St. John or St. Peter, if they want to know what Jesus meant, and he isn't talking. So they succeed, and our Lord tells St. John which one of them it will be. On the other hand he doesn't come straight out and say it, but he says that the one he gives a morsel of bread to will be the one. This might be one of those times where St. John didn't quite put it together at the time, but after the fact, he remembered, and it made more sense. After all, the others didn't react or sense anything out of the ordinary, when Jesus essentially told Judas to get it over with. And this would make sense with what we said earlier about when St. John probably wrote this Gospel: perhaps more than 50 years after the events he describes.

Many skeptics and scholars use this kind of evidence against St. John, as though because he were explaining the meaning of things after the fact, he must have created the meaning himself, after the fact. This seems unfair to me, because how many times when we are telling a story, do we say something like, "I didn't understand it at the time, but looking back, it makes so much sense"? If we do it, an ordinary man like St. John can do it, even when talking about the most important spiritual things. There's a tough balance I suppose, between asking tough questions of God, and of the Gospels, and not being open to being convinced, or even having any opinion, as long as it doesn't require faith. That's something that everyone has to wrestle with, from the most intelligent people in the world, all the way down to the ordinary person.

Judas took the morsel, and then he left. St. John tells us that it was night, and I don't think he was actually telling us about the time of day. I think he was using the metaphor of darkness to talk about the evil of what Judas was about to do. I'm just borrowing from great saints and thinkers on that one, so who am I to disagree?

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