Read 1 Sam. xxiv., and Luke xxii. 47-62.
THE FAITHLESS.—John xiii. 11.
Jesus enjoined us to love our enemies. We count it a hard saying. An
enemy is not lovable. The sight of him wakes instinctively not
affection, but antagonism. It is not easy to wish him well, to do him
good. We find it difficult to endure his presence without show of
repugnance. Still harder is it to pity him, to help him, to do him a
service. But there is something worse than an enemy, something more
repulsive, more unforgivable. That is a traitor—the faithless friend,
who pretends affection with malice in his breast, who receives our love
while he is plotting our ruin, and under cover of a caress stabs us to
the heart. Open hostility may be met, resented, and forgotten, but
cold-blooded treachery our human nature stamps as the all but
unpardonable sin. Its presence is revolting, and its touch loathsome. An
honest heart sickens at the sight of it.
Among the guests gathered around the table, that night before our Lord's
death, was Judas, who betrayed Him. He had sold his Master for thirty
pieces of silver, and was watching his opportunity to complete the
covenant of blood. He sat there while Jesus washed their feet. Jesus
knew all his falseness, all his heartlessness, all his treachery. He
knew it, and He washed the traitor's feet.
The perfection of our Lord's holiness is apt to mislead us into the idea
that because it was faultless, it was therefore easy. We conceive His
goodness as spontaneous, His sinlessness as without effort. But in truth
He was a man tempted in all points like as we are. He was obedient unto
death, but His obedience He learned by the things which He suffered. He
was perfect in purity, meekness, self-denial, but only by humbling
Himself and crucifying the flesh. His self-control was absolute, but it
cost Him as much as it does us—perchance more. His sinless, holy heart
shrank from sin's foulness, and suffered in its loathsome contact as our
stained souls cannot. The base presence and false fellowship of a Judas
must have been a perpetual pain to His pure spirit. But He endured his
meanness with a heavenly self-restraint that curbed each sign of
repugnance, and to the last He maintained for the traitor a Divine
compassion that would have saved him from himself, and that in Jesus's
nature compelled the very instincts of loathing to transform themselves
into quite marvellous ministries of superhuman loving. It was no empty
show of humility and kindness, it was pity and love incarnate, when
Jesus knelt at Judas's back, and washed the feet of His betrayer.
That seems to me one of the most wondrous, most tragic scenes in this
world's story. Could we but have seen it—Jesus kneeling behind Judas,
laving his feet with water, touching them with His hands, wiping them
gently dry, and the traitor keeping still through it all! What a theme
for the genius of a painter—the face of Jesus and the face of Judas—the
emotions of grandeur looking out of the one, of good and evil contending
in the other! If anything could have broken the traitor's heart, and
made him throw himself in penitent abasement on the Saviour's pity, it
was when he felt on his feet his Master's warm breath and gentle touch,
and divined all the forgiving love that was in His lowly heart.
This was our Lord's treatment of a faithless friend. On the night of His
betrayal He washed the feet of His bitterest enemy, of the man who had
sold Him to death. He rises from that act, and speaks to you and me, and
says, "I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to
you." If you have a friend that has deceived you, do not hate him; if
you have an enemy, forgive him; if you can do him a humble kindness, do
it; if you can soften and save him by lowly forbearance, be pitiful and
long-suffering to the uttermost. It is the law of Christ. If you call it
too hard for flesh and blood, remember how your Master, that night He
was betrayed, washed the feet of the man that betrayed Him.