During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, I would often wake in the morning with an enormous, aching feeling of dread.

When I read John’s 18th chapter, I can’t help but remember this dread. The new death count each week, the new stage of depression or mania or anxiety that took hold of us all. The ways that fear and hopelessness kept manifesting in new and newly horrific ways as we sorted through the week’s news of murder of black and brown people by police, COVID-19 infection rates, poverty, disconnection, loneliness—all the sins of our collective were in broad and violent display. Chapter 18 of John is such a display of the worst of humanity—the steps to the cross are paved with deception, betrayal, and confusion.

In the last line of the chapter, Pilate asks, “What is truth?” As we know, the truth is not as simple as it should be. The truth of Judas’ long friendship with Jesus is overturned when he leads the soldiers to the garden where he knew Jesus would seek refuge. The truth of Jesus’ prediction of Peter’s denial becomes reality and even Peter must have heard the accusation in the cock’s crow that day.

Perhaps, on this side of that day in the garden, we can read this chapter as a step towards our great mystery of faith, but on that day, in that place, there is no good news for those paving the way to the cross. Maybe for all that we have survived, it does us good to linger in the helplessness for a while and remember that on the road to glory we may also lose hope and connection, we may betray and deny, but Jesus is with us in the struggle—a steadfast love in the face of the worst of humanity.