Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
We continue to consider in parallel Jesus, the servant of the Lord, and Judas, the betrayer of the Lord.
Mysteriously, even by his betrayal, Judas serves the Lord, but unknowingly and without merit.
And once again it is Isaiah who speaks to us of Jesus.
Today he has a difficult lesson to teach, so he goes step by step so as to not lose us.
I'll use an alternative translation.
The Lord God has given me a disciple's tongue, for me to know how to give a word of comfort to the weary.
Those who suffer in this world are often weary and need to hear a word of comfort.
Through Isaiah, Christ speaks to them as a disciple who has learned from God the value of suffering.
Morning by morning, he makes my ear alert to listen like a disciple.
Every morning he listens to the Lord in prayer to learn wisdom.
And God opens his ear, that is, gives him the grace to hear and accept.
Isaiah speaks of Christ as man.
As such, he can learn by experience, and already he can learn what experience, what he already knows perfectly in a theoretical way.
This is the sense in which the letter to the Hebrews says, he learned obedience through what he suffered.
That we should let ourselves be led into suffering is a difficult lesson to accept.
We might say, this is a hard saying, who can listen to it?
Those can listen who accept the grace to do so.
Christ and the Christians who follow their master, trusting him even when he leads them toward suffering.
They can say, the Lord God has opened my ear and I have not resisted.
I have not turned away.
By cooperating with God's grace, the servants of God do not close their ears to their Lord's message.
They have learned not to resist their sufferings and not to turn away from them, for if they are God's will, good will come of them, even if the opposite might seem more likely.
The servant does not suffer because he is wicked, but because he is righteous.
Christ's uprightness and forthrightness attract the crowds and arouse the envy of hypocrites.
Because he is righteous, he is able to merit by his sufferings.
As a well-trained disciple, he knows he is fulfilling his mission, the one that we heard about yesterday and the day before in the first two songs of the servant of the Lord.
This is why he does not resist his persecutors, but bears all, knowing that great good will come of it, for the Lord is his help.
He will not be put to shame.
In the end, his sufferings will be his glory, for, as St. Paul says, this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.
Also in the Responsorial Psalm, we heard Christ's voice.
He said, Zeal for your house consumes me. These are the words that Jesus' disciples recalled in relation to the first cleansing of the temple.
On that occasion, Jesus declared, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.
And he was speaking about the temple of his body.
That temple will be destroyed by the passion, but rebuilt by his resurrection, and the latter glory shall be greater than the former.
This will happen to him because of his zeal for God's house, because he is zealous to eliminate sin.
Because of this zeal, he is hated by men who love their sins, and they plot his death.
Because of this zeal, he does not resist, does not turn back.
Other words of the Psalm are Christ speaking of something that will happen on the cross.
They put gall in my food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.
So that scripture would be fulfilled on the cross, he said, I thirst.
A bowl of vinegar stood there, so they put a sponge full of the vinegar on his hip and held it to his mouth.
When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished, and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
Then all the scriptures had been fulfilled, all the things that spoke of what he had to suffer.
In the Gospel passage we heard, we can see these prophecies beginning to be fulfilled.
In it, Jesus, who took the form of a servant, was sold for the price of a slave, thirty pieces of silver.
These events took place on Wednesday and Thursday.
After the Lord's solemn entry on Sunday with palms and hosannas, he spent Monday and Tuesday teaching in the temple.
The Pharisees and the Sadducees tried to trap him with difficult questions, but Christ answered well in every case, and in the end they gave up the attempt.
On Wednesday he stayed in Bethany, and that day Judas went to Jerusalem to betray him, as we heard.
Since he was the group's treasurer, or at least kept the money bag, it was easy for the others to suppose that he was going into the city to give alms to the poor or to buy something that would be needed for the feast.
As Isaiah prophesied, Christ did not resist Judas' betrayal in the sense of stopping it.
However, he did try to awaken his betrayer's conscience so that he would not be lost.
Until the time appointed by the Father, until his hour, he kept himself from being stoned or handed over to the chief priests.
This is the purpose of the mysterious way he designated the place for the Last Supper.
He sent Peter and John to prepare the place and to have the lamb sacrificed and roasted, but in such a way that Judas would not know in advance where they were going.
In this way he was able to celebrate the Last Supper in peace, and in it offer himself in sacrifice and institute the Eucharist and the priesthood of the new covenant.
He also made one more attempt to save Judas.
The curious way of designating the place also serves another purpose.
The apostles, and especially Peter and John, could have realized from this that Jesus knew the future.
So, if he knows what is happening and doesn't do anything to stop it, then events must be proceeding according to plan.
This should have helped them to accept Jesus' betrayal and capture as part of God's plan, but they were not sufficiently open to accept it in this way.
Also in Gethsemane, Jesus clearly knew what was going to happen, but did not resist it.
On the contrary, he said to his disciples, Rise, let us be going, see, my betrayer is at hand.
He did not say, let us get away, but let us go to meet him.
He teaches us a radical trust in God, which fears nothing but disobeying him.
He teaches us not to resist God's plan for our lives, whatever it may involve.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.