“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
— Deacon David Jones
Satan at The Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light
The central figures present before the Sacrament for the Life of the World are Jesus on the eve of Sacrifice and Satan on the eve of battle to restore the darkness.
The central figures present before the Sacrament for the Life of the World are Jesus on the eve of Sacrifice and Satan on the eve of battle to restore the darkness.
As I begin this eleventh Holy Week post behind These Stone Walls all the world is thrust under a shroud of darkness. A highly contagious and pernicious coronavirus threatens an entire generation of the most vulnerable among us on a global scale. Many Catholics face Holy Week without the visible support and consolation of a faith community. Many of our older loved ones face it entirely alone, separated from social networks and in dread of an unknown future darkness.
A week or so before writing this, I became aware of a social media exchange between two well-meaning Catholics. One had posted a suggestion that a formula for “exorcized holy water” would repel this new viral threat. The other cautioned how very dangerous such advice could be for those who would substitute it for clear and reasoned clinical steps to protect ourselves and others. I take a middle view. All the medical advice for social distancing and prevention must be followed, but spiritual protection should not be overlooked. Satan may not be the cause of all this, but he is certainly capable of manipulating it for our hopelessness and spiritual demise.
This “down time” might be a good time to reassess where we are spiritually. A sort of “new age” culture has infiltrated our Church in the misinterpretations of the Second Vatican Council since the 1960s. There is a secularizing trend to reduce Jesus to the nice things He said in the Beatitudes and beyond to the exclusion of who He was and is, and what Jesus has done to overcome the darkest of our dark. In a recent post, I asked a somewhat overused question with its answer in the same title: “What Would Jesus Do? He Would Raise Up Lazarus — and Us.” Without that answer, faith is reduced to just a series of quotes.
By design or not I do not know, but the current darkness drew me in this holiest of weeks to a scene in the Gospel that is easy to miss. There are subtle differences in the Passion Narratives of the Gospels which actually lend credence to the accounts. They reflect the testimony of eye witnesses rather than scripts. One of these subtle variations involves the mysterious presence of Satan in the story of Holy Week.
This actually begins early in the Gospel of Luke (Ch. 4) in an account I wrote about in “To Azazel: The Fate of a Church That Wanders in the Desert.” Placed in Luke’s Gospel after the Baptism of Jesus and God’s revelation that Jesus is God’s “Beloved Son,” Jesus is led by the Spirit into the desert wilderness for forty days. He is subjected there to a series of temptations by the devil. In the end, unable to turn Jesus from his path to light, “the devil departed from him until an opportune time.” (Luke 4:13)
That opportune time comes later in Luke’s Gospel, in Chapter 22. There, just as preparations for the Passover are underway, the conspiracy to kill Jesus arises among the chief priests and scribes. They must do this in the dead of night for Jesus is surrounded by crowds in the light of day. They need someone who will reveal where Jesus goes to rest at night and how they can identify him in the darkness.
Remember, there is no artificial light. The dark of night in First Century Palestine is a blackness like no one today has ever seen. This will require someone who has been slyly and subtly groomed by Satan, someone lured by a lust for money. This is the opportune time awaited by the devil in the desert:
“Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was of the number of the Twelve. He went away and conferred with the chief priests and the captains how he might betray him to them. And they were glad, and engaged to give him money. So he agreed and sought an opportunity to betray him to them in the absence of the multitude.”
The Hour of Darkness
In Catholic tradition, the Passion Narrative from the Gospel of John is proclaimed on Good Friday. In that account, there is a striking difference in the chronology. Satan enters Judas, not in the preparations for Passover, but later the same day, shockingly at the Table of the Lord at the Last Supper on the eve of Passover:
“So when he dipped the morsel, Jesus gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. Then, after the morsel, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, ‘What you are going to do, do quickly.’… So after receiving the morsel, he immediately went out, and it was night.”
Who could not be struck by those last few words, “and it was night”? They describe not only the time of day, but also the spiritual condition into which Judas has fallen. Judas and Satan are characters in this account from the Temptation of Jesus in the desert to the betrayal of Jesus in the hour of darkness. But darkness itself is also a character in this story. The word “darkness” appears 286 times in Sacred Scripture and “night” appears 365 times (which, ironically, is the exact number of nights in a year).
For their spiritual meaning, darkness and night are often used interchangeably. In St. John’s account of the betrayal by Judas, the fact that he “went out, and it was night” is highly symbolic. In the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament, darkness was the element of chaos. The primeval abyss in the Genesis Creation story lay under chaos. God’s first act of creation was to dispel the darkness with the intrusion of light. “God separated the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:4) which, in the view of Saint Augustine, was the moment Satan fell. In the Book of Job, God stores darkness in a chamber away from the path to light. God uses this imagery to challenge Job to know his place in spiritual relation to God:
“Have you, Job, commanded the dawn since your days began, and caused it to take hold of the skirts of the Earth for the wicked to be shaken out of it? … Do you know the way to the dwelling of light? Do you know the place of darkness?”
In the Book of Exodus, darkness is one of the plagues imposed upon Egypt. For the Prophet Amos (8:9) the supreme disaster is darkness at noon. In Isaiah (9:1) darkness implies defeat, captivity, oppression. It is the element of evil in which the wicked does its work (Ezekiel 8:12). It is the element of death, the grave, and the underworld (Job 10:21). In the Dead Sea Scrolls is a document called, “The Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness.” In the great Messianic Proclamation of Isaiah (9:2): “The People who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”
In the New Testament, the metaphors of light and darkness deepen. In the Gospel of Matthew (8:12, 22:13) sinners shall be cast into the darkness. In the Gospel of Mark (13:24) is the catastrophic darkness of the eschatological judgment. The Gospel of John is filled with metaphors of darkness and light. Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus confronts those who plot against him as under the influence of darkness and Satan:
“If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God. I came not of my own accord, but He sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father, the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
I once wrote about the person of Judas and the great mystery of his betrayal, his life, and his end in “Judas Iscariot: Who Prays for the Soul of the Betrayer?” At the Passover meal and the Table of the Lord, he dipped his morsel only to exit into the darkness. In the original story of the Passover in Exodus (13:15-18) God required the lives of the firstborn sons of Pharoah and all Egypt to deliver His people from bondage. Now, in the Hour of Darkness set in motion by Satan and Judas, God will exact from Himself that very same price, and for the very same reason.
The Hour of Light
Biblical Hebrew had no word for “hour,” nor was such a term used as a measure of time. In the Roman and Greek cultures of the New Testament, the day was divided into twelve units. The term “hour” in the New Testament does not signify a measure of time but rather an expectation of an event. The “Hour of Jesus” is prominent in the Gospel of John and also mentioned in the Synoptic Gospels. Jesus is cited in John as saying that His Hour has not yet come (7:30 and 8:20). When it does come, it is the Hour in which the Son of Man is glorified (John 12:23; 17:1).
In the Gospel of Luke (22:53), Jesus said something ominous to the chief priests and captains of the Temple who came, led by Judas (and Satan), to arrest Him: “When I was with you day after day in the Temple, you did not lay hands on me but this is your hour, and the power of darkness.”
In all of Salvation History there has never been an Hour of Darkness without an Hour of Light. In the Passion of the Christ the two were not subsequent to each other, but rather parallel, arising from the same event rooted in sacrifice. This was the ultimate thwarting of Satan’s “opportune time.” Jesus, through sacrifice, did not just defeat Satan’s plan, but used its Hour of Darkness to bring about the Hour of Light.
Amazingly, “Light” and “Darkness” each appear exactly 288 times in Sacred Scripture. It is especially difficult to separate the darkness from the light in the Passion Narratives of the Gospel. Both are necessary for our redemption. Without darkness there is no sacrifice or even a need for sacrifice.
The Hour of Light began, not at Calvary, but at the Institution of the Eucharist at The Last Supper, the Passover meal with Jesus and His Apostles. The Words of Institution of the Eucharist are remarkably alike in substance and form in each of the Synoptic Gospels and in St. Paul’s First letter to the Corinthians (11:23).
The sacrificial nature of the Words of Institution and their intent at bringing about communion with God are most prominent in the oldest to come into written form, that of Saint Paul:
“For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it, and said, ‘This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way also the chalice, after supper, saying, ‘This chalice is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the chalice, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”
The enormity of this gift, the beginning of the Hour of Light, comes in the midst of words like “betrayal” and “death.” It is most interesting that the Gospel of John, which has Satan enter Judas at the Passover Table of the Lord, has no words for the formula of Institution of the Eucharist. But John clearly knows of it. The Gospel of John presents a clear theological allusion to the Eucharistic Feast in John 6:47-51:
“Truly, Truly I say to you, he who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate manna in the desert and they died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats this bread he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
The term “will live forever” appears only three times in all of Sacred Scripture: twice in the above passage from John, and once in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures in Genesis 3:22. There, God expels Adam and Eve from Eden for attempting to be like God. It is a preventive measure in Genesis “lest they eat from the Tree of Life and live forever.” For John’s Gospel, what was denied to Adam is now freely given through the Sacrifice of Christ.
It is somewhat of a mystery why the Gospel of John places so beautifully his account of the Institution of the Eucharist there in Chapter 6 just after Jesus miraculously feeds the multitude with a few loaves of bread and a few fish, and then omits the actual Words of Institution from the Passover meal, the setting for The Last Supper in each of the other Gospels and in Saint Paul’s account.
Perhaps, on a most basic level, the Apostle John, beloved of the Lord, could not bring himself to include these words of sacrifice with Satan having just left the room. At a more likely level, John implies the Eucharist theologically through the entire text of his Gospel. In the end, after a theological and prayerful discourse at table, Jesus prays for the Church:
“When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him power over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
Now Comes the Hour of the Son of God, The Cross stood only for darkness and death until souls were illumined by the Cross of Christ. From the Table of the Lord, the lights stayed on in the Sanctuary Lamp of the Soul.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Take a time out from anxiety and isolation this Holy Week by spending time in the Hour of Light with these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
A Personal Holy Week Retreat at Beyond These Stone Walls
Waking Up in the Garden of Gethsemane
The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King But Caesar’
Judas Iscariot: Who Prays for the Soul of a Betrayer?
Judas Iscariot: The most reviled name in all of Sacred Scripture is judged only by his act of betrayal, but without him among the Apostles is there any Gospel at all?
Judas Iscariot: The most reviled name in all of Sacred Scripture is judged only by his act of betrayal, but without him among the Apostles is there any Gospel at all?
False witness and betrayal are two of the most heinous themes in all of world literature, and Sacred Scripture is no exception. Literature is filled with it because so are we. Not many of us get to live our lives without ever experiencing the false witness of an enemy or the betrayal of a friend.
Recently, I was confronted by the death of someone whom I once thought of as a friend, someone who once betrayed me with a self-serving story of false witness for nothing more redemptive than thirty pieces of silver. It’s an account that will be taken up soon by some other writer for I am not objective enough to bring justice, let alone mercy, to that story.
But for now, there is one aspect of it that I must write about at this of all times. As I was preparing to offer Mass late on a Sunday night, the thought came that I should offer it for this betrayer, this liar, this thief. Every part of my psyche and spirit rebelled against that thought, but in the end, I did what I had been beckoned to do.
It was difficult. It was very difficult. And it cost me even more of myself than that person had already taken. It cost me the perversely comforting experience of eternal resentment. I have not forgiven this false accuser. That is a grace I have not yet discovered. Nor could I so easily set aside the depth of his betrayal.
In offering the Mass, I just asked God not to see this story only as I do. I asked Him not to forever let this soul slip from His grasp, for perhaps there were influences at work that I do not know. have always suspected so.
The obituary said he died “peacefully” just two weeks before his 49th birthday. It said nothing about the cause of death nor anything about a Mass. There was a generic “celebration of his life.” False witness does not leave much to celebrate. Faith, too, had been betrayed for money.
I am still angry with this person even in death, but I take no consolation that his presence in this world has passed. My anger will have to be comfort enough because at some point I realized that my Mass was likely the only one in the world that had been sacrificed for this soul with any legitimate hope for salvation.
That’s the problem with false witness. Its purveyors tell themselves they have no need for salvation. I do not know whether he is any better off for this Mass having been offered, but I do know that I am.
Ever Ancient, Ever New
The experience also focused my attention on history’s most notorious agent of false witness and betrayal, Judas Iscariot. Who has ever prayed for the soul of a betrayer? Not I — at least, not yet — but I also just weeks ago thought it impossible that I would pray for the soul of my accuser.
I cannot get Judas off my mind this week. And as with most Biblical narratives, once I took a hard look, I found a story on its surface and a far greater one in its depths. In those depths is an account of the meaning of the Cross that I found to be staggering today. It changes the way I today see the Cross and the role of Judas in bringing it about. It strikes me that there is not a single place in the narrative of salvation history that does not reflect chaos.
Understanding the Sacrifice of Calvary requires a journey all the way back to the time of Abraham, some 2000 years before the Birth of the Messiah. God had earlier made a covenant with Abraham, a promise to make of his descendants a great nation.
The story of the birth of his son, Isaac, foreshadows that of John the Baptist who in turn foreshadows Jesus. Abraham and Sarah, like Zechariah and Elizabeth, were too old to bear a child, and yet they did. And not just any child. Isaac was the evidence and hope of God’s covenant with Abraham. “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven.”
Then, in Genesis 22, God called Abraham to do the unthinkable: to sacrifice his only son, the one person who was to fulfill God’s covenant. The scene unfolds on Mount Moriah, a place later described in the Book of Chronicles (2 Ch 3:1) as the very site of the future Jerusalem Temple. In obedience, Abraham placed the wood for the sacrifice upon the back of his son, Isaac, who must carry the wood to the hilltop (Gen 22:6).
On that Via Dolorosa, the child Isaac asked his father, “Where is the lamb for the sacrifice?” Abraham’s answer “God will provide Himself the lamb for a burnt offering.” Notice the subtle play on words. There is no punctuation in the original Hebrew of the text. The thought process does not convey, “God Himself will provide the lamb…. but rather, “God will provide Himself, the lamb for sacrifice.”
An Angel of the Lord ultimately stayed Abraham’s hand, and then pointed out a ram in the thicket to complete the sacrifice. In his fascinating book, The Lamb’s Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth (Image Books 1999) author Scott Hahn provides a reflection on the Genesis account that I had long linked to the Cross:
“Christians would later look upon the story of Abraham and Isaac as a profound allegory for the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross.” (p. 18)
The similarities in the two accounts, says Scott Hahn, are astonishing. The first line of the New Testament – Matthew 1:1 — identifies “Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham…” Jesus, like Isaac, was a faithful father’s only son. Isaac, like Jesus, carried “the wood” for his own sacrifice upon Mount Moriah. In fact, Calvary, the place of the Crucifixion of Christ, is a hillock in the Moriah range.
This places three pivotal Scriptural accounts — each separated by about 1,000 years — in the same place: The site where Abraham was called to sacrifice Isaac, the site of the Jerusalem Temple of Sacrifice, and the site of the Crucifixion of Christ.
In Hebrew, that place is called “Golgotha,” meaning “the place of the skull.” Its origin is uncertain, but there is an ancient Hebrew folklore that the skull of Adam was discovered there. Before the Romans arrived in Palestine, it was a place used for public executions, primarily for stoning. The word “Calvary” is from the Latin “calvaria” meaning “skull.” It was translated into Latin from the Greek, “kranion,” which in turn was a translation of the Hebrew, “Golgotha.”
No angel would stay the Hand of God. God provided Himself the Lamb for the sacrifice. This interplay between these Biblical accounts separated by 2,000 years is the source for our plea in the Mass, “Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.”
At the Hour of Darkness
The four Gospel accounts in the Canon of Scripture all came into written form after the apostolic witnesses experienced the Resurrection of Jesus. So everything they set out to preserve for the future was seen in that light. The outcome of the story is triumphantly clear in the minds of the New Testament authors. Had the Gospel ended at the Cross, the accounts would be very different.
Judas Iscariot, therefore, is identified early in each Gospel account when he is first summoned by Jesus to the ranks of the Apostles as “the one who would betray him.” John (6:71) adds the Greek term, “diabolos” (6:70), to identify Judas. It is translated “of the devil,” but its connotation is also that of a thief, an informer, a liar, and a betrayer, one drawn into evil by the lure of money.
These adjectives are not presented only to explain the character of Judas, but also to explain that greed left Judas open to Satan. Each Gospel account is clear that Jesus chose him among the Twelve, and in all three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus presents a constant awareness of the coming betrayal of Judas — seemingly as a necessary part of the story.
During Holy Week this year, we hear the full account of the Passion Narrative from Mark (on Palm Sunday) and John (on Good Friday). But for this post I want to focus on the version from Luke. The Gospel of Luke is unique in Scripture. It is the only Scriptural account written by a non-Jewish author.
Luke’s Gospel is the only account with a sequel, Acts of the Apostles, which was also written by Luke. And it is the only Gospel account to include the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, all of which figure into this story set in motion by the betrayal of Judas.
Luke, though a Gentile and a physician, was also a scholar. He makes few direct references to Old Testament texts, but his Gospel is filled with echoes and allusions to Old Testament themes. Greek Christians may not have readily understood this, but he also wrote his Gospel for Jewish Christians in the Diaspora who would have found in Luke a rich and valuable affirmation of salvation history in their life of faith.
What is most clear to me in Luke’s treatment of Judas is that the story is written with a theme that I readily identify with spiritual warfare. The Passion Narrative has a thread that begins with a story I have written before. In “A Devil in the Desert for the Last Temptation of Christ,” I wrote about the meaning of Satan’s temptation of Christ in the desert. It ends in Luke’s Gospel:
“When the devil had ended every temptation [of Christ], he departed from him until an opportune time.”
— Luke 4:13
Luke constructs his account of the Judas story with threads throughout his Gospel. He shows that the power of Satan, which is frustrated by Jesus in the account of his 40-day temptation in the desert “until an opportune time,” finds its opportunity, not in Jesus, but in Judas whose act of betrayal triggers “the hour of darkness” and the Passion of the Christ:
“Then Satan entered Judas, called Iscariot, who was a member of the Twelve. He went away and conferred with the chief priests….”
— Luke 22:3
The origin and meaning of “Iscariot” is uncertain. It is not known whether it is a name or a title associated with Judas. In Hebrew, it means “man of Keriot”, a small town marking the border of the territory of the Tribe of Judah (see Joshua 15:21.25), to which both Judas and Jesus belonged. Betrayal is all the more bitter when the betrayer is closely associated. The Greek Iskariotes has the cognate sicarias, meaning “assassin,” a name ascribed to a band of outlaws in New Testament times.
It is clear in Luke’s presentation that this act of Judas is equated with original sin, the sin of Adam and Eve lured by the serpent. At the Last Supper, after the Institution of the Eucharist, Jesus said:
“But behold the hand of him who is to betray me is with me at this table, for the Son of Man goes as it has been determined.”
— Luke 22:21
Jesus added, “But woe to that man by whom he is betrayed.” That “woe” is symbolized later in the way the life of Judas ends as described below. The phrase, “as it has been determined,” however, implies that the betrayal was seen not only in its own light but also as a necessary part of God’s plan.
Later, with Judas absent, Jesus warned his disciples at the Mount of Olives, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.” They did anyway. After the arrest of Jesus at Gethsemane, they scattered. Peter, leader of the Twelve, denied three times that he even knew him. Then the cock crowed (Luke 22:61) just as Jesus predicted. This is often depicted as a literal rooster crowing, but the bugle ending the third-night watch for Roman legions at 3:00 AM was also called the “cockcrow.”
At Gethsemane, Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss, perverting a sign of friendship and affection into one of betrayal and false witness. This is what begins the Passion Narrative and the completion of Salvation History. Jesus tells Judas and the servants of the chief priest:
“When I was with you day after day in the Temple you did not lay a hand on me, but this is your hour, and the power of darkness.”
— Luke 22:53
Later, in the Acts of the Apostles (26:18) Luke identifies the power of darkness as being in opposition to the power of light, an allusion to spiritual warfare. For Luke’s Gospel, it is our ignorance of spiritual warfare that leaves us most vulnerable.
Following immediately after the betrayal of Judas, one of the disciples present draws his sword and cuts off the ear of the servant of the High Priest. In the Gospel of John, the disciple is identified as Peter. This account is very significant and symbolic of the spiritual bankruptcy that Judas set in motion.
In the well-known Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel, a priest came upon the broken body of an injured man left beaten by robbers on the side of the road. Jesus says in the Parable that the priest just passed by in silence, but this was readily understandable to the Pharisee to whom the parable is told.
The Pharisee, an expert in the Old Covenant law of Moses, understood that the Book of Leviticus forbade a priest who is defiled by the dead body of an alien from offering sacrifice in the Jerusalem Temple. The severed ear of the High Priest’s servant at Gethsemane refers back to the same precept:
“So no one who has a blemish shall draw near [to the Sanctuary], no one who is blind or lame or has a mutilated face…”
— Leviticus 22:18
The symbolism here is that the spiritual bankruptcy of the High Priest, who is not present at the arrest, is represented by his servant. In Luke’s Gospel, and in Luke alone, Jesus heals the ear. It is the sole miracle story in the Passion Narrative of any of the four Gospels and represents that Jesus wields the power of God even over the High Priest and Temple sacrifice.
When the role of Judas Iscariot is complete, he faces a bizarre end in Luke. The Gospel of Matthew (26:56) has Judas despairing and returning his 30 pieces of silver to the Temple. Luke, in Acts of the Apostles (1:16-20) explains that the actions of Judas were “so that the Scriptures may be fulfilled.” But in Luke, Judas meets an even more bitter end, bursting open and falling headlong as “all his bowels gushed out.” The field where this happened then became known as the Field of Blood, and the money that purchased it, “blood money.”
The point of the story of Judas in the Gospel of Luke is that discipleship engages us in spiritual warfare, and spiritual blindness leaves us vulnerable to our own devices, as it did Judas. This life “is your hour, and the power of darkness.” The plot against Jesus was Satan’s, and Judas was but its pawn.
So who prays for the souls of our betrayers? I did, and it was difficult. It was very difficult. But I can see today why Jesus called us to pray for those who persecute us. It is not only for their sake but for ours.
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Editor’s Note: Please share this post. For further reading, the Easter Season comes alive in these other posts from Beyond These Stone Walls: