21 When Jesus had said this, He became troubled in spirit, and testified and said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, that one of you will betray Me.”
Calm, cool and collected, Jesus seemed to be calm up until this point. But that was now changing. Though Son of God, He was also human with the full range of emotions. Facing the troubling truth of betrayal by one of His own disciples, the Master became agitated. The word used here, “troubled,” has as its most basic meaning, “to be shaken, stirred up.” When used to describe a person’s emotional state, it carries the sense of inner turmoil and unsettledness, being greatly disturbed. It is the same reaction Jesus had after Lazarus died—when Jesus saw Mary weeping, “He was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.”
This is the beginning of His passion, that is, the strong emotional reaction to the events leading up to and including His crucifixion. His incarnation was not a “piece of cake” as some might think, nor was His dying. While retaining full deity, He was also fully human. The mystery of the two natures combining in one individual stretches the capacity of human contemplation. Because of His deity, He had absolute foreknowledge; in particular, His betrayal by Judas was no surprise to Him. Yet for the God who created time and is outside of time and therefore not subject to the time sequences of before and after—for this God to intersect with time as the incarnation depicts, means that things will happen or exist that would otherwise be impossible. Here we have the God-man, Jesus, “becoming,” that is, experiencing a change of His emotional state.
This is not what some theologians hold to, that is called “process theology,” where God is mutable, that is, He is “in process” and changing, depending on how creation turns out. On the contrary we believe God is immutable, He does not and cannot change (Ps 55:19). At times God appears to change, like the wind seems to change when we turn around and walk into it. God Himself does not change.
But, in becoming a human, the God-man’s foreknowledge did not stem His human emotional response. He was troubled that one of His closest followers was about to betray Him. This hit Him hard, for He loved Judas as He did all the disciples. And He knew this was the catalyst that would ultimately lead to His death. The fuse was about to be lit, Judas would soon leave to report to the religious leaders and collect his bounty. The spiritual battle was beginning which would escalate to the point of no return.
Lord, thank You for entering into the depths of human pain and emotion, and the experience of being betrayed. Thank You that You will never betray me.
I enjoyed that. It’s somehow comforting and reassuring to know that the Lord experienced a full range of human emotions like us.