A Kiss in the Dark

He is still speaking when they arrive. Judas comes with a crowd carrying swords and clubs, sent by the chief priests and the scribes and the elders, and Mark says of him what he said at 14:10 and at 14:20: one of the Twelve. The signal had been worked out in advance.

The One I kiss is the man; arrest Him and lead Him away securely.

So he walks up to Jesus, calls him Rabbi, and kisses him. A kiss was how a student greeted his teacher. Judas did not point, and he did not shout a name across the garden; he took the ordinary sign of respect between them and turned it into a marker for men with clubs. David had written about being wounded in that particular way. It is not an enemy who insults me, he says, or I could bear it, but you, my companion and close friend, and we walked into the house of God together.

Then the arrest, and then a sword. Mark does not tell us whose. One of the bystanders draws and cuts off the ear of the high priest's servant, and Mark gives us no name and no outcome. John 18:10 gives both: it was Peter, and the servant was called Malchus. Luke 22:51 adds that Jesus touched the man's ear and healed him. So the last thing he does before they lead him away is repair the damage his own friend did on his behalf. Then Jesus speaks to the crowd, and it is not a plea.

Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest Me as you would an outlaw? Every day I was with you, teaching in the temple courts, and you did not arrest Me. But this has happened that the Scriptures would be fulfilled.

He is accusing them. They came at night, in numbers, armed, for a man they could have taken any day that week in daylight, and the size of the crowd is a confession about them. He does not say which scriptures. Isaiah had written of a servant numbered with the transgressors, and here is a man being arrested like a criminal. Then comes the end of something that began in chapter one.

Then everyone deserted Him and fled.

The men who left their nets ran. And then two verses that sit oddly in the account. A young man is following, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They get hold of him, he pulls free, leaves the cloth behind, and runs away naked. Mark does not say who he was and never mentions him again. There is a line in Amos about the bravest of men fleeing naked on the day the LORD acts, and whether Mark had it in mind we cannot say. What those two verses do is finish the sentence above them. Everyone fled, even this one, and even at that price.