Jesus enjoined us to love our enemies. We count it a hard saying. An enemy is not lovable. The sight of him wakes instinctively not affection, but antagonism. It is not easy to wish him well, to do him good. We find it difficult to endure his presence without show of repugnance. Still harder is it to pity him, to help him, to do him a service. But there is something worse than an enemy, something more repulsive, more unforgivable. That is a traitor—the faithless friend, who pretends affection with malice in his breast, who receives our love while he is plotting our ruin, and under cover of a caress stabs us to the heart. Open hostility may be met, resented, and forgotten, but cold-blooded treachery our human nature stamps as the all but unpardonable sin. Its presence is revolting, and its touch loathsome. An honest heart sickens at the sight of it. Among the guests gathered around the table, that night before our Lord's death, was Judas, who betrayed Him. He had sold his Master for thirty pieces of silver, and was watching his opportunity to complete the covenant of blood. He sat there while Jesus washed their feet. Jesus knew all his falseness, all his heartlessness, all his treachery. He knew it, and He washed the traitor's feet. The perfection of our Lord's holiness is apt to mislead us into the idea that because it was faultless, it was therefore easy. We conceive His goodness as spontaneous, His sinlessness as without effort. But in truth He was a man tempted in all points like as we are. He was obedient unto death, but His obedience He learned by the things which He suffered. He was perfect in purity, meekness, self-denial, but only by humbling Himself and crucifying the flesh. His self-control was absolute, but it cost Him as much as it does us—perchance more. His sinless, holy heart shrank from sin's foulness, and suffered in its loathsome contact as our stained souls cannot. The base presence and false fellowship of a Judas must have been a perpetual pain to His pure spirit. But He endured his meanness with a heavenly self-restraint that curbed each sign of repugnance, and to the last He maintained for the traitor a Divine compassion that would have saved him from himself, and that in Jesus's nature compelled the very instincts of loathing to transform themselves into quite marvellous ministries of superhuman loving. It was no empty show of humility and kindness, it was pity and love incarnate, when Jesus knelt at Judas's back, and washed the feet of His betrayer.