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And he took a cup,” we read in Matthew, “and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, ’Drink of it, all of you.’” (Matthew 26:27, ESVScripture quotations marked (ESV) are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version^® (ESV^®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.). Mark’s account adds, “and they all drank of it” (Mark 14:23). Every one of them: the distracted, the dismayed, the baffled, the puzzled, and the one who was to betray him.

Da Vinci’s rendering of this moment reminds us just what a motley group of followers they were. Gesticulating hands point in every direction. Faces register varying degrees of shock, dismay, and confusion following the announcement that one of them would betray Jesus. Their bodies tilt in various directions, like leaves in a whirlwind. Only Jesus sits calm and upright, centered and centering, an anchor in the midst of his followers’ roiling anxieties.

If we imagine this little band of twelve followers as an inscape and mirror of the church, we can see in this mirror vivid, unsettling, even comical reminders of how we, too, turn away from Jesus, how we get caught up in our own dithering in moments of crisis, how we splinter into factions, how many of us fail to keep our eyes trained on the one who is the Light we live by.

But we might see something else: the betrayer, the enemy, sits at the table and is explicitly included in the invitation: “Drink of it, all of you” (Matthew 26:27). This is radical inclusivity: Jesus knew Judas’s plans and still invited him, fed him, shared with him the most intimate, most sacred moment yet in the amazing history of his three years of self-revelation to these, his closest friends. Before that Judas had sat among them and listened to Jesus’ tender farewell discourses: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you” (John 15:9). “No longer do I call you servants . . . but I have called you friends” (verse 15). “You did not choose me, but I chose you. . . .” (verse 16). He had witnessed miracles and enjoyed privileged hours of instruction and rest when the crowds had gone away. Imperfect as his understanding may still have been, he knew what manner of man he was handing over for a bagful of silver.

There is even some evidence that Judas and Jesus shared a particularly full-hearted affection. Clarence Jordan, writer of The Cotton Patch Gospel, makes the remarkable point that the Greek word used for the kiss or embrace Judas gave Jesus as a signal to waiting cap tors did not refer to an ordinary peck on the cheek, but to a gesture of deep, full-hearted affection—the kind “you give a man who is closer to you than your own heart.”

He goes on to point out that Jesus, in return, uses another word that indicates particular affection: In the sentence usually translated, “Friend, why are you here?” the word for “friend” is more familiar than the more common term, and might be translated something like “buddy.” So Jesus, when Judas kissed him, said something equivalent to, “Oh my buddy, my buddy, has it come to this?” Jordan imagines Jesus’s deep compassion for Judas in that fateful, tragic moment, rooted in a heartbreaking understanding of the enormous pressure he was under, and the weight of temptation.

But at supper—at least in da Vinci’s rendering, Judas sits close to Jesus, huddled together with Peter and John—Jesus’s two closest companions—a position that reinforces the notion that he was an intimate, and beloved. As we consider his presence there, the conflict he must have been experiencing, and Jesus’s awareness of his intentions, we may be led to marvel anew at Jesus’s equanimity. Leonardo didn’t go in for haloes, but he frames Jesus’s head in natural light coming from the central arched window. One hand lies open on the table in a gesture that is not only explanatory and indicative, but inviting, vulnerable, and peaceful. He is at peace with his betrayer. Though he may later descend into agony, in this incarnational moment of communion, gathered with his community, speaking for the last time to the twelve, he radiates a calm that speaks forcibly about how the church has, can, and will survive: Christ is the calm at the center of all our storms. Christ is the one who can afford to extend hospitality not only to “the least,” but to the worst, offering them grace they may or may not be ready to receive. Jesus’ love for Judas is a key part of the story of the Last Supper and harks back to the psalmist’s words, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies” (Psalm 23:5). Here the “enemy” is not an outsider, but a full-fledged member of a community that will suffer a significant wrench and loss when his body is found at the end of a rope. Before Judas condemned and destroyed himself, he was given a long, close, generous look at the very face of love.

We, of course, are not Jesus. We will fail him in our following. But we are called to follow anyway. And Jesus’ urging to love our enemies is no abstraction: it is a challenge to do what he does here. Commune with them. Invite them to the table. Give them a chance. Show them ready acceptance. Recognize their membership. Understand that our “enemies” are more often among us than from outside, and people very like ourselves—all capable of betrayal, crippling fear, greed, and self-deception. Ask ourselves, “With whom am I willing to share a meal?” No one at this table is “worthy” except Jesus himself. U. A. Fanthorpe’s startling, irreverent poem “Getting it Across” portrays one disciple after another, wryly described from Jesus’ perspective, in distinctly unflattering terms to remind us of this theologically important fact:

 

Pete, with his headband stuffed with fishhooks,
His gift for rushing in where angels wouldn’t,
Tom, for whom metaphor is anathema,
And James and John, who want the room at the top—
These numskulls are my medium. I called them.U. A. Fanthorpe, New and Collected Poems (London: Enitharmon Press, 2011).

 

Da Vinci invites a very similar recognition: not only the betrayer who gave him over, but the betrayer who denied him, and the ten others who abandoned him share this gracious prelude to the heavenly banquet. Also the one who doubted, and the brothers who vied for status in the kingdom, and the collaborator who abetted the Romans in their extortion. Several of them turn away from their teacher and Lord to seek clarity and comfort from each other, blind leading blind in the very presence of Light. But all have been invited to the table.

The protection of the communion table has been a matter of ongoing controversy in Christian churches. There is reasonable argument for any of three basic positions churches take when inviting worshipers to the Lord’s Supper: only the baptized who have confessed and repented may come; only the baptized may come; all are welcome. My purpose here is not to resolve this controversy; it may well provide a healthy tension around the paradox of inclusivity and exclusivity that is threaded throughout the Gospel story and the biblical idea of how God calls and chooses his own on different terms at different times. My purpose is rather to consider how da Vinci’s depiction of this moment may call us to reflect on how we practice inclusion and exclusion in our own very human celebrations, our practices of hospitality, our gathering for worship, our understanding of initiation, adjudication, membership, and excommunication. Who, we might ask ourselves in all seriousness, do we think we are?

We are, as Martin Luther put it, simul justus et peccator—at the same time, justified and sinners. We are the ones who meet crises with our various temperaments and tendencies, often uncentered and uncertain, forgetting in moments of greatest need the One who is more present to us than our own heartbeats, who enters into our very selves like the bread, the wine, the air we breathe. As we gaze at this one artist’s rendering of Christ and his followers, we might do well to locate those with whom we identify. (The one who is outraged? The one who demands an explanation? The one who nearly faints from shock and sorrow? The one who is ready to rise up and object? The one who turns to Jesus for answers, or the one who seeks comfort in equally confused companions?) And we might consider the nature of the meal itself: it is simple, unpretentious, familiar, and transcendent. Since that Last Supper no one in Christian tradition can hear the words “breaking bread together” without recognizing in that simple human act of sharing food and drink a reminder of divine provision. Where two or three are gathered, over tea and toast, over chicken casserole or rice and beans, at kitchen tables or banquet tables or stained picnic tables in parks, God is present, offering an occasion of grace. That grace is ours to extend, in the name of Christ, a host at every banquet whose invitation reaches beyond every social barrier, who seeks and finds his guests in the unlikeliest places and says to them, and to us, “All is made ready. Come to the table.”