Gesture, Desire, and the Gaze: A New Interpretation of Jesus’s Gesture of Offering Bread in John 13:26–27

Abstract In John 13:26–7, Jesus reveals his knowledge about Judas’s plan to betray him by offering him a piece of bread. Then, John states that Satan entered into Judas. This raises the question whether Jesus deliberately causes Satan to enter into Judas and how the gesture accomplishes this aim. The article applies Lacan’s theory of gesture to suggest that the offering of bread implicitly allows Satan to accomplish his desire to have Jesus killed by manifesting Jesus’s own desire to lay down his life. Jesus’s interaction with Satan thereby marks a libidinal and affective dimension of the gesture that reveals Jesus’s ambiguous relationship to Satan and to the fact of his own impending death.