What If? (Luke 22:39-54)

“First Station: Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane” ©3TTman (2010)

This sermon was preached on Maundy Thursday (April 17, 2025) at Gethsemane Lutheran Church, and was based on Luke 22:39-54 in the Garden of Gethsemane.

It was followed immediately by the Stripping of the Altar
during which Amy sang
"Ah Holy Jesus."

The full service may be viewed here. The sermon & song alone are below and on YouTube.

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What if? These past few days, I’ve been swimming in a deep sea of What Ifs? Even though I know it’s wiser to deal with what is; Even though I know that, especially in the face of chaos, loss, and grief, what if’s are almost universally more destructive than they are helpful…. I can’t stop myself.

Because this is The Night to which Lent leads us all, and this is the place where all our time and energy given to fasting and self-reflection, to contemplation and prayer culminates; the place where our story both ends and begins: In the garden with the disciples who have just been washed and fed; and given Jesus’s final and foremost Commandment to love others as He loved them. Here, the disciples will make the choices on which the rest of the dastardly story turns. And we, too, will be asked to decide who we are, whose we are, and what we’ll do when the Ruling Powers come for Christ among us. 

So I’ve been wondering what they might say now -- these twelve men who spent three years living and serving and ministering with Jesus, and learning how to Be from God Incarnate. What if they could go back, knowing what we know? What would they do? 

I’ve also been thinking about how we’ve lionized and canonized the disciples. About how easy, and clean, it is to sanitize and mythologize their lives and reduce them into a cast of predictable characters within a mythic tale of Eternal Good versus Cosmic Evil. Judas stars as the Villain, Jesus the Champion Savior, Peter the Impulsive Coward, while The Evil Roman Empire looms over and around them like a dark cloud gathering itself into a hurricane, all the rest play their assigned roles in the story of the God who dies. Read like that, it’s easy to accept it all as divinely ordained; to find meaning and purpose in the moments when the villain and saints alike abandon, deny, and betray Jesus precisely when it matters the most. Because that’s what had to happen for God to win -- but what if it wasn’t? And what if they’re just men?

I’ve especially been worried about Judas, which is, frankly, very unlike me. And as I’ve worried, I’ve wondered who we would meet if we exorcised the Devil from him for a moment, and tried to see him not as a betrayer, but as the friend and brother Jesus loved so much that, even knowing and naming his imminent betrayal, he still washed his feet and still gave him his full self, body and blood? What could happen, what fruit could grow, from choosing to see and love Judas and the rest of them the way Jesus saw and loved them? And what IS that love, anyway? What does it look like, what shape does it take? Where do we even begin?

In his book, ‘A History of My Brief Body,’ Queer Indigenous poet and author Billy Ray Belcourt writes this: “To love someone is to firstly confess: I am prepared to be devastated by you.” 

”To love someone is to firstly confess: I am prepared to be devastated by you.” 

Is that not what Jesus told the disciples when he broke the bread and offered it to them as his own broken body; when he poured the wine, and said he was ready to bleed for their liberation, healing, and wholeness? What else can that all be, but his own confession that he is and has been prepared, from all eternity, to be devastated by those he loves? 

And what if they love him too…and are just unprepared for the devastation? 

More specifically, What if Judas loves him? And Believes in him? What if he isn’t a monster, but a man who doesn’t know the end from the beginning like we do; who doesn’t know his betrayal of Jesus will directly facilitate the execution of God?  A man who knows nothing except that if anyone can confront and defeat the violently fascist Roman Regime, it has to be Jesus, the One who gave sight to the blind and fed thousands of people and raised the dead right in front of them. What if he was so fully convinced of Jesus’s Divine Power, that he hastened his arrest in order to hasten Rome’s demise? What if he thought he was doing the thing no one else was bold enough or brave enough to do, having no idea history would record him not as the hero who facilitated Christ’s victory, but as his enemy -- a man possessed by satan, whose name would become synonymous with betrayal? 

What if he had believed there was a way back from all that, like there would be for Peter? 

Or what if over time Judas just lost hope? Maybe he started believing that Jesus was a delusional insurrectionist, and big enough threat to all their survival that he must be stopped before it was too late -- or, conversely, that Jesus was all talk, no real action, and so he was doing his part to get rid of a ragamuffin so the real radicals could take charge and defeat Rome?

Or what if, maybe — probably more likely than anything else — Judas was neither predisposed nor predestined to evil and betrayal. But was just a guy trying to get ahead in a world that was in the business of taking heads; a guy who figured it was better to earn some cash by handing over a target, than to become one himself. Utterly average and forgettable, but for one terrible choice.

That’s the thing about Judas and Peter and all the rest who betrayed or abandoned Jesus. When we strip away the mythologies, they’re just people making choices. It’s the thing about us, too — all us humans trying to survive and make a life for the few years we have here:

No one — not Judas or Herod or Pilate, not Nero or Hitler or any of their soldiers, nor anyone else who’s facilitated or committed diabolical acts of evil, either in service to self or in service to Power  — none of them were born evil or became evil. They were neither special nor unique, but were, foremost and always, people: born of God and made in God’s likeness, just like you and me. People who could be swayed that the wrong might be right under certain circumstances.

This is what Holocaust historian & survivor, Hannah Arendt, a world renowned expert on fascism, calls the banality of evil. It’s boring and basic. "Requiring neither inherent perversion nor particular sadism, nor even evil intent." All it takes to do great evil is a “terrifyingly normal” person with the ability to detach themselves from the gravity and consequences of their own choices, coupled with an “inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’.” 

Which is to say, all of us have the capacity for both good and evil. Have probably done both, as well as everything in between. This is the point. This is what it means to be human. We have the choice, every single day.

And I mean that literally. We do not have to wonder what we would do if we found ourselves in the Garden with Jesus: whether we would fall asleep, exhausted by grief, or rise up ready to kill in his name. Whether we would retreat into hiding, afraid of the Powers; or hand Christ over to them to be unjustly detained, tortured, and disappeared by a State that delighted in cruelty for its own sake.

We do not have to wonder because we are all doing it right now.

To Christ in the flesh of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Mahmoud Khalil, and so many other immigrants who, regardless of legal status or criminal background, are being detained without due process, transported to undisclosed prisons, and deported to foreign concentration camps where they are tortured, starved, and will die. Jesus said that whatever we do to these, we do to him, so we do not have to wonder.

Whatever we ignore, accept, normalize, or justify against the God of the vulnerable who comes to us in the bodies of Black, Trans, Palestinian, Disabled and other marginalized and erased Image Bearers, we do to Christ.

However and whenever we succumb to the temptation to diminish and dehumanize others, we do this also to Christ, because Christ is all and is In All.

We are in the Garden, Beloved of God. And the powers are still coming for Christ every single day. So we do not have to wonder, but we do get to choose.

So let us pray: Tonight of all nights, as ones who’ve been fed and nourished at Christ’s table, as disciple who’ve been commanded to love as he does, Let us stay in the garden and pray! That we too might be strengthened to resist the temptation of evil, and stay awake to the grief around us; That we might be brave enough to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with each other as with Christ our God, even if and when we must risk our lives to do so. Beloved, Let us pray.

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