Naming the Enemy
Homily for Wednesday in Holy Week
April 16, 2025
Homily for Wednesday in Holy Week
April 16, 2025
Homily for Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Wednesday in Holy Week
Psalm 70
Our readings tonight offer the lectionary’s “last words” before the Passion, and they help us to make sense of and to prepare for the “Great Three Days” that begin tomorrow: The Old Testament lesson is one of Isaiah’s four so-called “Servant Songs.” Psalm 70 is one of the “Psalms of lament.” The epistle from Hebrews urges us not to grow weary or to lose heart, but to look to him who endured the cross. And tonight’s Gospel tells of the moment in John in which – finally, after saying multiple times in the Gospel that his “hour” had not yet come (e.g., 2:4; 7:6; 8:20) – now in tonight’s Gospel Jesus says that his hour has come: “Now,” he says, “theSon of Man has been glorified.”
John is an extremely“precise” writer, doing things like: placing the passage about Jesus the Good Shepherd in the exact center of his Gospel, making a kind of sheepfold out of words; or connecting the water and wine of the wedding at Cana to Jesus’ body and blood at the crucifixion by the only two appearances in John’s Gospel of “the mother of Jesus,” who appears in both scenes; or by the exact number of times John uses a word, such as the word “joy” [Greek, “χαρα”] which in the final discourse (John 13-17) Jesus speaks exactly seven times, which is another way of saying what Jesus says elsewhere, that our joy may be complete (e.g., 15:11).
Keeping in mind how precise John is as a writer, tonight’s text from John contains the Gospel’s only reference to “Satan:” “After [Judas]received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him,” John writes.
Naming “Satan” before Jesus’ crucifixion is significant. There is a story of how, during our most recent Prayer Book revision, the committee in charge of the Baptismal liturgy thought to jettison the older rite’s language about “Satan” – “Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?” the rite asks. “We are modern, 20th-centurypeople,” the Prayer Book committee purportedly reasoned. “We no longer need such language.” But the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead happened to be on that committee, and the story goes that she reminded them that unless we are able name our enemy, that enemy will have power over us. Here, on the night before he was crucified, Jesus in John names the enemy.
“Satan” (or “the devil”) is hardly mentioned in the Hebrew scriptures. Aside from the stories of Job and perhaps Balaam’s Donkey (Num 22), the best-known Old Testament story in which Satan figures (or is understood to figure) is that of Adam and Eve with the serpent in the opening chapters of Genesis. Given the echoes of Genesis in John’s opening Prologue – “[the Word] was in the beginning with God,” John writes, “All things came into being through him” (John 1:2-3); given that in John Jesus’ resurrection takes place (like the Creation) in a garden; given that John understands Jesus to be the High Priest making his way through the Temple on the Day of Atonement to the Holy of Holies to offer sacrifice; and given that the ancient Hebrews understood the sacrifice on the Day of Atonement to re-create the world anew… I can’t help but wonder if John is suggesting that by Jesus’ death and resurrection, the fall of Genesis is reversed, Satan no longer has power over us, that we are restored to the Garden of Eden, and that we are once again reunited with God. “As you, Father,are in me and I am in you,” Jesus prays, “May… they may be one, as we are one”(17:21-22).
I invite us to fully take part in the liturgy of the Triduum (or “The Great Three Days”). For it is Jesus’ death and resurrection,triumphing over “the powers of Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness,” that sets us free, re-creates us anew, and enables us to know the joy and peace of Jesus.
