“Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon. And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly.” (John 13:26-27). It is possible that the Last Supper was also a traditional Jewish Passover Seder. Part of the rituals of the Seder are to dip the vegetables, bitter herbs, and unleavened bread in either salt water or a paste of fruits and spices called charoset. The salt water is said to represent the tears and the sorrow of slavery. The charoset represents the mortar that the Hebrew slaves made for their Egyptian masters. Dipping the vegetables is said to have two possible symbolic meanings. It could represent Joseph's brothers dipping Joseph's coat into goat’s blood as they sold him into slavery. Or, it could represent the night of the first Passover when the children of Israel dipped hyssop into the blood of a lamb and coated their doorways to keep away the angel of death. When Jesus gave Judas the sop He had dipped possibly in salt water or charoset, He knew that His apostle and friend was on the precipice. He was giving Him one last chance. Was this sop going to represent his descent into captivity and slavery or was it going to be his protection from the destroying angel? Was it covered in the redeeming blood of the lamb, or the goat’s blood of betrayal and deceit? Was he going to immerse himself in the bitter and salty tears of the damned, or was he going to throw himself into building up the kingdom of God with the mortar represented by the charoset? Jesus told him, essentially, that his window was closing and if he was going to escape from Satan’s clutches, then he had to act now. I can’t begin to understand the sequence of justifications and rationalizations that led Judas to betray not just the Son of God, but a Man he had known and loved and given his life to. But I do know that whenever we find ourselves in a place where the Lord is handing us our daily bread, whether that seems to be dipped in honey or vinegar or toxic sludge, we have the choice to receive it as a punishment or as a gift. We get to choose what it represents - our salvation or our condemnation.
