The passage: When the disciples pointed out the magnificent stones of the temple, Jesus foretold its total destruction and spoke of wars, false Christs, tribulation, the desolation of the holy place, the coming of the Son of Man, and the end of the age — urging His followers to watch, since no one knows the day or hour.
We now come to those famous chapters reporting our Lord’s conversation with His disciples when they showed Him the goodly stones of the temple. I will follow St. Matthew, as before, noting any important differences in the other Evangelists as I go.
I. There is no dispute about the occasion. The disciples were struck by the temple’s fine stones, and whatever else His words meant, they plainly declared that not one stone of that building would be left standing. This remark is obvious, but its very obviousness may have kept it from getting the attention it deserves. Think what that building meant to a Jew. The tabernacle was the sign of God’s presence in the nation; its loss at Shiloh was seen as the nation’s temporary downfall; its move to the hill above Jerusalem was bound up with the covenant with David, with the nation’s whole history, and with the deepest and most rapturous Psalms. Think what Solomon’s building and dedication of the temple and his bringing in of the Ark implied; how much of Isaiah turns on his vision, in the year King Uzziah died, of the glory of the Lord filling the temple; how the whole of Jeremiah and his Lamentations concern that temple’s desecration; how Ezekiel’s visions begin, turn, and end with its desertion and restoration; how its downfall and a future abomination of desolation connect with Daniel and the captivity; how the temple is plainly the subject of Haggai and Zechariah; and how the expectation of One who would come to purify it and its priests is central to Malachi. Consider all this, and we see how this subject relates to every book of the Old Testament, and so to God’s whole training of mankind. Here was the place that told the Jew, and declared to the universe, that a God whom no eye can see and who can be pictured in no likeness nevertheless truly exists, is really connected with His creatures, dwells near them, and may be approached by them. Of this building our Lord said not one stone would be left on another. What could the disciples make of it? St. Matthew states, and the others imply, their feeling: privately, on the Mount of Olives, they asked, “Tell us when these things will be, and what will be the sign of Your coming and of the end of the age.” Either the temple’s destruction meant God had left the world — the start of outright atheism — or it meant the start of something higher: the kingdom of One greater than the temple, who would draw God and man nearer and prove the God of Abraham to be Lord of the whole earth. The Apostles, I think, must have taken one of these. Amid utter confusion they had the faith and courage to believe their Master spoke truly when He said the Kingdom of God was at hand. We seem to have decided they were mistaken. Our Lord did not tell them so.
I will not inquire into the exact force of the words “Your coming, and the end of the age,” nor even into what the Apostles meant by them then. Their real meaning is precisely what we must learn from the later history and revelation — this very discourse being one of our great guides. The Apostles were of course confused here, as about everything: about the Christ, His kingdom, His relation to themselves, their nation, and the world. The Evangelists assume this confusion throughout, so those who trust their record must admit it more readily than any modern philosopher. But it is quite another thing to say the words they used were wrong, or that they expected too complete a fulfilment, or were wrong to place it in their own time. Religious people today may attach very vague and false notions — borrowed from heathenism and self-contradictory — to the words Heaven, Hell, and Judgment; yet those who try to correct these errors may feel that the words themselves carry a tremendous reality, weakened rather than exaggerated by common misunderstanding. So too the Apostles may not have used words too large when they questioned our Lord — words we must dilute before we can adopt them; they may simply not yet have learned to give them their full, literal strictness.
“Take heed that no man deceive you: for many shall come in my Name, saying, I am Christ, and shall deceive many.” Few doubt that this was a warning to the very men then looking at the temple. It fits all His earlier teaching exactly. The great danger to the Apostles, as to all men, was being led astray by a false Christ — being led to look for a King coming with the signs the Pharisees or the people demanded, signs wholly unlike those with which Jesus came. Many such would arise, He warns them — men claiming David’s throne and the marks of a divine mission. How, they might ask, could they ever, after believing Jesus was the Christ, think another was? But the warning was given, and in time they would learn why they needed it.
“You shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that you are not troubled; these things must be, but the end is not yet. Nation shall rise against nation, and there shall be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places; all these are the beginning of sorrows.” Every word here is addressed directly to the Apostles: “you shall hear; see that you are not troubled.” To suppose this does not refer to actual reports reaching their ears — of insurrections in Judæa, quarrels among nearby rulers, threats from the imperial power — shows strange carelessness about language. If anyone objects that “nation against nation, kingdom against kingdom” is too grand for a city in one province, read the history of the Roman Empire and see how local events stirred the legions there into rivalries and military revolts that spread like magnetism through the empire, until every part joined the strife. Or read Tacitus, not Josephus, on the years from Nero’s end to Jerusalem’s fall, and see how the greatest convulsions were tied to Syria, of which every Jew had bitter experience. So whether or not we admit a divine purpose behind Jerusalem’s calamities, we must admit as fact that the whole world must have seemed to a Jew to share the convulsions shaking his own land. I do not use “convulsions” to explain away “earthquakes, pestilences, and famines” as metaphor; I take those words to mean exactly what they say, and no reader of Tacitus can doubt they happened just so, in various places. There was to be no single, general earthquake matching the great political one, but enough to serve as signs that the physical world sympathizes with the moral and obeys the same Ruler. Our Lord’s aim seems to have been to warn His disciples that, while they noticed these signs, they must not be distracted by them or mistake them for the great tokens that God had come to judge the earth. “All these are the beginning of sorrows.”
V. “Then they will deliver you up to be afflicted and killed, and you will be hated of all nations for my Name’s sake. Many will be offended and betray and hate one another; many false prophets will arise and deceive many; and because iniquity abounds, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved. And this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.” I take the whole paragraph because its closing words stand in direct contrast to the last one’s. There: “the beginning of sorrows.” Here: “then shall the end come.” Wars, earthquakes, and famines are not signs of the end but preludes to it; the preaching of the Gospel is the sign the end is near. I also join these verses because the difficulty supposed to lie in verse 14 is removed by verse 9: “you shall be hated of all nations,” and “the Gospel shall be preached… unto all nations.” The phrase “the whole world” would hinder no one, since anyone recalls that Augustus taxed “all the world” — the same expression. The stumbling-block is “all nations.” But those words were just used in a sentence that must apply to the Apostles. Preaching the Gospel as a witness to all the Gentiles is exactly what a Jew would have understood: if all the Gentile races the Jews knew, in whose lands they lived, were told that Jesus was their King and that they too belonged to God’s Kingdom, then the witness spoken of would have been borne. If it came to special pleading, I could plead too — since the great European and American peoples were then still in Asia, it does not follow that all the earth’s tribes were not reached, even without adopting vague traditions of apostolic missions. But I need no such arguments; I simply keep to the text. The Apostles were told they would be hated by all nations; in whatever sense they took that, they must have understood they were to be the instruments of preaching to all nations, and so, after something they had done, within their age, the end would come. Many shrink from the idea that iniquity abounded and Christian love grew cold in the apostolic age; whether the facts justify that doubt we shall judge better when we come to the apostolic writings and certain testimonies of Christian antiquity, which bear also on the rise of false prophets then.
“When you see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those in Judæa flee to the mountains; let no one on the housetop come down for his goods, nor the man in the field turn back for his clothes. Woe to those with child and nursing in those days! Pray that your flight be not in winter nor on the sabbath, for then shall be great tribulation, such as was not from the beginning of the world, nor ever shall be; and except those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved, but for the elect’s sake they shall be shortened.” Without settling exactly what desecration is meant, notice that our Lord keeps fixing His disciples’ thoughts on the very object their eyes were on — the temple — which is truly the subject of His whole discourse, as its opening led us to expect; and all these calamities, greater than any the world has seen or will see, and the flight He commands, are bound to it. If the family of Mattathias had no trouble knowing when the abomination of desolation was set up in their day, the disciples might hope, even in their half-belief, to be shown wherein this fuller desertion of the Divine presence would consist.
“Then if any say, ‘Here is Christ,’ or ‘there,’ do not believe it; for false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to deceive, if possible, even the elect. I have told you beforehand. So if they say, ‘He is in the desert,’ do not go out; ‘He is in the secret chambers,’ do not believe it. For as the lightning comes out of the east and shines to the west, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be. Wherever the carcass is, there the eagles gather. Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun shall be darkened, the moon shall not give her light, the stars shall fall, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.” We would naturally take “then” to refer to the event just spoken of, and “you” to mean some of the questioners, unless we had strong evidence otherwise; and until such evidence is proved, we must not read these words less strictly merely because they concern events of great solemnity. Taken in their obvious sense, would they have led the Apostles to expect the Son of Man’s appearing in their own age? I think there is no doubt of it. False Christs and prophets would appear; the true Christ would appear to confound them, and confidence in His appearing would be their only escape from their deceptions. Second, would this appearing be visible? Most visible in its effects and in its accompanying signs, but not visible as the false Christs would be visible. For their falsehood would consist precisely in this: they came to reform the world on the opposite principle to God’s Son — to change the surface of things — while He came to lay the axe to the root. In whatever judgment He appeared, He came for that. So if the disciples truly took these words in, not twisting them to their old notions but using them to correct those notions, would they not have understood Him to say: “All these visible appearances of men leading you into the desert or the chamber will tempt you sorely, because the greatest temptation is to seek Me in the outward world, to turn Me into a Cæsar rather than a real divine King, to picture Me on a lofty throne like earth’s lords rather than as the Judge who searches every motive and lays every heart bare, before whom all falsehood flies.” As the lightning fills the whole sky, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be — mighty words to shatter every sensual dream that puts an apparent Christ for the real one. “Do not think of the desert or the chamber, but of a light felt at once through all heaven and falling as a terrific, illuminating power on earth. And do not suppose this judgment will be felt only where the temple stands. You Jews are scattered over all the earth, everywhere bearing the sign of a divine covenant, meant to be life-givers to the world. But the life has left the body; it has become a carcass, and wherever any part of it lies, the birds of prey — God’s commissioned destroyers — will gather. In all these places there will be a manifestation of the Son of Man, clear tokens that He has come to judge the chosen people, and through them the whole earth.”
“Immediately after that tribulation… then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn, and they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with power and great glory. And He shall send His angels with a great trumpet, and they shall gather His elect from the four winds. Now learn a parable from the fig-tree: when its branch is tender and puts forth leaves, you know summer is near; so, when you see all these things, know that it is near, at the doors. Truly I say to you, this generation shall not pass till all these things are fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” The Evangelists agree here, except that St. Luke is more vivid: “signs in the sun, moon, and stars; distress of nations in perplexity; the sea and waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear of what is coming; for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.” Comparing the two shows that actual signs in the visible heavens must be meant, as before. Whoever reads these as mere political changes, to escape any physical reference, does violence to the text. Luke especially shows that physical convulsions would startle men most, as such things always do, and be felt as most ominous. But ominous of something — they are not themselves what they foretell. So there is warrant for those who make “the powers of heaven” mean more, not less, than signs in moon and stars. When they say it means dynasties, I cannot condemn them as weakening the words, for the fall of a dynasty is far greater than a volcano’s eruption. But I do not think they have reached the words’ full force, or read them literally enough.
All the old world’s dynasties confessed something higher than themselves — kings who bowed to gods above and powers beneath. Astrology was bound up with worship, and demons ruling in sun and stars were thought to uphold earthly thrones. So the simplest reading of our Lord’s words is that these powers of heaven were to be shaken, the thrones of these demons and demi-gods to totter. This interpretation demands no strain, agrees with the ordinary language of His hearers and with the facts of heathen life, and involves only the very confusion between the visible and invisible that really existed in false worshippers’ minds — a confusion the words, if true, ought to express. Whether they were fulfilled in this sense we must ask later; I deal now only with the prophecy. The same applies to “then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn, and see Him coming in the clouds with power and great glory.” I will not now say what the sign was, or how the tribes mourned, or how they saw Him; I only say that, taken with what precedes, the words must mean a victory of the Son of Man over those powers men had worshipped — a victory felt by the tribes of the earth in some striking, terrible way, with visible accompaniments. It must be the victory of Christ as a living Person, not of a religion or doctrine — a victory understood at once by those who saw in God’s light, understood in part by some on earth, and leaving the deepest marks in the world’s history, marks that would at last make plain that the greatest of all crises had occurred. Whatever the sign and the appearing were, they must answer these conditions to fit the words, and cannot contradict the words just before about the lightning filling the whole sky.
The next words — “He shall send His angels with a great trumpet, and they shall gather His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other” — exactly match the description in the seventh chapter of the Apocalypse. I will consider their meaning carefully when I treat that book. For now I only note that, so far as the context shows, they seem closely linked to the temple’s desecration and overthrow. No language could be more exact than “immediately after the tribulation of those days,” which governs the whole passage. Judged by this Gospel and the others, these words suit exactly the tenor of John the Baptist’s first prophecy and all our Lord’s earlier prophecies. The people who boasted “We have Abraham as our father” would be left without capital or temple, the great witnesses of their election’s meaning. But the purpose of the election would stand; God would raise up children to Abraham, show why He had called them, and reveal a deeper society and kingdom hidden beneath theirs.
For how does He continue? “Learn a parable from the fig-tree: when its branch is tender and puts forth leaves, you know summer is near; so, when you see all these things, know it is near, at the doors.” All these events, in which at first one sees only winter’s icy hand withering and destroying, are really foretastes of a coming summer; death prepares for life. Instead of being cast down, you are to lift up your heads when they appear, for they speak of redemption, not ruin. The world’s regeneration — the manifestation of the kingdom your fathers died expecting, which I said is at hand and have come to reveal — will be the fruit of that judgment which leaves not one stone of this building on another.
He says this, then adds: “Truly I say to you, this generation shall not pass till all these things are fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” He had said “immediately after the tribulation,” and “when you see all these things,” and now “this generation shall not pass.” No language could be more awful. I do not ask those who think the speaker was only Matthew the publican, or the fallible report of a good man, to weigh it heavily. But I do ask those who believe these are the words of the Son of God, who spoke as never man spoke, and who insist on the record’s inspiration and authority, to take care how they trifle with “Truly I say to you” and “Heaven and earth shall pass away.” Let them notice that the language grows more exact and emphatic in the parts they suppose cannot have been fulfilled at the temple’s fall than in the parts they eagerly claim, with quotations from Josephus, were fulfilled then. Let them weigh the whole sequence, and then ask whether they can be satisfied with the explanation of “generation” that Mede made popular and that others have adopted in slavish deference, or in eager relief at any escape from such severe language. Did our Lord, saying the temple should be destroyed, mean only that it would fall before the Jewish race died out? Did He not mean γενεά (generation) in its ordinary sense at all? Were they not to expect the city besieged by Roman armies within that age? Consider that it is one thing to say a prophecy has a double or treble sense — meaning that what is true of one time is even more clearly true of another, as historians note that the same principles ruled Charlemagne and Napoleon, that facts repeat, and that their governing laws come out more fully in later events — and quite another thing to use words in a double sense, meaning that within the very same discourse their meaning changes, so the interpreter may make them mean one thing here and another there. To say a prophet must go beyond a single event when he lays down a great law of the Divine Mind is to grant him the very insight his name implies; but to say he juggles with words in a double sense is to call him a false prophet, a heathen oracle. Had Mede’s followers only said, “Christ’s words cannot pass away; they were not exhausted at the temple’s fall; the law of the Divine Mind fulfilled then must be eternal, for He is eternal; we live under His government as they did, so what came to pass in that generation is a guide for later ones” — how one would have honored and thanked them for helping us read the future by the past! But when they say, “Our Lord did not mean that all these things would come in that generation, though He used these very words, but only some, leaving us to decide which belong to that time and which to ages hence,” then all security in reading the Divine Word is lost; no neologian undermines the authority of the Evangelists, or of our Lord Himself, more effectively than these honest, earnest believers.
- “But of that day and hour no one knows, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. As the days of Noah were, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be. For as before the flood they ate, drank, married, and gave in marriage until Noah entered the ark, and knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so shall it be. Then two shall be in the field; one taken, one left. Two women grinding at the mill; one taken, one left.” Right after His emphatic “all these things shall come in this generation,” He adds, “of that day and hour no one knows… but the Father only.” The Apostles had asked when; He answers plainly, in varied yet harmonious ways: “It will be within this age, within a human lifetime, within the years some of you will live to see. Some of you may be brought before rulers and killed before the moment comes, but all of you will witness the events I have described as its forerunners. More I cannot tell you. The day and hour are not revealed — men know them not, angels know them not, only the Father. Men so deeply concerned will have all the preparation they need; the inhabitants of the invisible world, no less concerned, will understand more clearly when it has happened and what it means. But the first must understand by watching and waiting, keeping an attitude of spiritual expectation, not by guessing at times and seasons; the others will not need to guess, resting in the assurance that past, present, and future are in the hands of Him who is perfect goodness and truth and will establish His Son’s Kingdom on earth.” How deeply this went into the disciples’ hearts — how sure they were the coming was in their generation, yet how careful to warn their followers against asking the day or hour — we shall consider later. Here I only ask you to see how our Lord strengthens their conviction that a great era was ending by having them compare their generation with the one that ended an earlier era: “As the days of Noah were, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be.” The words that follow surely mean there would be the same security and indifference about the coming crisis as about that ancient one. Yet it too would be a crisis of destruction and of restoration, showing what the earth and men are without God and showing Him as its Ruler and Renewer. All that follows accurately describes a great judgment, where one is taken and another left, the onlooker knowing not why, only feeling an invisible power at work — which he either curses as arbitrary and hostile or blesses as righteous, believing its purpose is to set righteousness in the earth. It is the description of a judgment — not a sudden sweeping destruction but a searching, penetrating fire sent to try men’s hearts. All this fits the belief in an unseen Lord of the earth making His government felt in men’s hearts and through the visible world, fits the appearing of the Son of Man in His Father’s glory with the holy angels — but it does not in the least fit the advent of a visible prince in the tinsel of ordinary royalty. Such an advent would be announced precisely as to day and hour; its visible tokens would be the decisive ones; the secret witnesses would matter little; the command would be, “expect me, prepare in this place, for there I will appear.” But not, “Watch, for you know not, any more than those around you, at what hour your Lord comes.”
“Watch, therefore, for you know not what hour your Lord comes. Know this: if the householder had known when the thief would come, he would have watched and not let his house be broken into. So be ready, for the Son of Man comes at an hour you think not. Who then is the faithful and wise servant, made ruler over the household to feed them in due season? Blessed is that servant whom his lord finds so doing; truly, he shall make him ruler over all his goods. But if that evil servant says in his heart, ‘My lord delays,’ and begins to beat his fellow servants and eat and drink with the drunken, his lord will come in a day and hour he does not expect, and will cut him in pieces and give him his portion with the hypocrites, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.” I want to press the point I made in the last section before I finish this chapter, because I know the moral obstacle to the literal view I have taken is far stronger than any other. If our Lord really meant all these things would come in that generation, what has the chapter to do with us? What promises or warnings does it hold that we may not set aside as mere adaptations, not spoken to us by His own lips? My answer: its promises, warnings, and commands will be far weightier and more awful for us if we believe every one of them was strictly fulfilled in that day. For then we believe the Kingdom of God has actually come with power, has come to us, and that we live under its shadow. Then the question, “how have we used this gift, how have we behaved as subjects of this kingdom?” brings before us not a vague fancy of some future judgment but the clear knowledge that we must be judged — a steady watching for signs that the Judge is at the door, and a direct use of our Lord’s comparison of the world’s first period with its second, as a ground for judging the third by the second. If there had been no real manifestation of the Son of Man as judge and deliverer, we would give ourselves up, as we do, to mere fancies of a great assize — fancies that never touch the heart, that make children afraid of their Father and keep them from Him, that men cast aside with the rattles of infancy, that eloquent, terrifying preachers press on weak nerves and sin-sick consciences with as much harm as good, and that pass away leaving the hollowest unbelief behind. But if He has come to judgment in the most real way — if the death of a whole nation and the birth of a whole Christendom were and remain the proofs of that judgment; if it was a judgment mysterious, invisible, yet real, going to the roots of society, touching every outward relation, meeting each conscience and either raising it or leaving it in a deep abyss; if the Christian Church was a witness to the dying world of what it was meant to be, and might become a feeble, false witness — then the voice of Christ as a present King, a present Son of God, speaks to individuals, nations, and churches now. It bids them watch lest their house be broken into and the invisible world be shut from them, through indulgence, party-spirit, the worship of idols outward or inward — self worst of all — through following false prophets, through swapping a partial Christ for a universal one, an imaginary king for a real one; lest, when He comes to His higher temple, He find it full of buyers and sellers, moneychangers for priests, mammon on Jehovah’s throne, and decree that of this defiled temple too not one stone shall be left on another. I have anticipated some of what I shall say later; but the subject seemed to demand even more solemn treatment than those before it, especially as it introduces the history of the Last Supper and the Passion.
The Passover
The passage: When Jesus had finished all these sayings, he told his disciples that in two days the Passover would come, and the Son of Man would be handed over to be crucified. At the same time the chief priests, scribes, and elders gathered at the palace of the high priest Caiaphas, and plotted to seize Jesus by trickery and kill him — but agreed not to do it during the feast, for fear the people would riot.
The first two verses come from Matthew; the report of the priests’ plotting is found in all three of the first Evangelists. What both our Lord’s words and the priests’ words put before us is the Passover. In the first three Evangelists — and we will see later how different the fourth is — the Jewish festivals are not prominent in the rest of the narrative, which is mostly set in Galilee. When harmonists have tried to arrange the history by the recurring passovers and pentecosts, we can be sure they drew that help from somewhere other than the three accounts they were comparing. These three Evangelists seem to want to fix our attention on this Passover, showing everything leading up to it and bearing on it. Jesus enters Jerusalem shortly before it; the Jewish rulers are certain that His aim is to present Himself at that time, before the crowds gathered from all over the empire, as the Son of David, their rightful king. Some decisive blow must be struck before then, or it may be too late. Yet no time is more dangerous, since it is a sacred one: the man who entered Jerusalem to strewn palm-branches is loved by the people and has devoted followers, so He must be taken by trickery or there will be a riot. These are the plain, natural thoughts recorded of the rulers of the Sanhedrin, and the Evangelists mean us to notice how all this plotting pointed to the connection between the Passover — the beginning of Israel’s deliverance and of its commonwealth — and the kingdom that had been declared to be at hand.
The Betrayal
The passage: One of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and asked what they would give him to hand Jesus over. They agreed on thirty pieces of silver, and from then on he watched for a chance to betray him.
I leave out the story of the alabaster box of ointment, because I will not assume that this event is the same as the one recorded in the seventh chapter of St. Luke. Despite the two hosts sharing a name, the difficulties in identifying them are very great, and I will not force my way past them merely to draw out another parallel in the history, or to supply a link in the life of Judas Iscariot. That could only be done by borrowing ahead from the fourth Gospel, a liberty I have resolved never to take. So I move straight to verse 14: Judas went to the chief priests and offered to deliver Jesus for a price, they agreed on thirty pieces of silver, and he began looking for his chance. St. Mark’s account is even shorter and omits the amount; St. Luke’s is a little longer and adds that Satan entered into Judas. I need not dwell on how this record contains no cries or exclamations; by now we know that trait of the Gospels well enough that pointing it out is almost an impertinence. I mention it only to show how completely the thought of their personal friend was swallowed up in their acknowledgment of the King and Son of God, even here, where the most striking instance of one man’s affection and familiarity was about to be told. How could men merely speaking of Jesus of Nazareth, their beloved friend betrayed by one of their own, hold back all indignation and horror? If they had only credited that friend afterward with certain heavenly attributes, that would not have prevented such outbursts — it would have made them more natural. What can explain the bareness, the seeming coldness, of the narrative at an event that pierced so deeply into Christ’s own heart and formed so mysterious a part of His suffering, except the feeling that they were speaking of One who needed no such bursts of earthly vehemence, about whom they would be profane to indulge them, whose history they were simply to set out so that men might know their King and deliverer — a revelation to which even the chief priests and Judas were mysteriously contributing?
The Feast
The passage: On the first day of the feast of unleavened bread, the disciples asked Jesus where he wanted them to prepare the Passover. He told them to go into the city to a certain man and say the Master would keep the Passover at his house with his disciples. They did so and prepared it. That evening he sat down with the twelve, and as they ate he said one of them would betray him. Grieved, each asked, “Lord, is it I?” He said the one who dipped his hand with him in the dish would betray him; the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to the man who betrays him — better for that man never to have been born. Then Judas, the betrayer, asked, “Master, is it I?” and Jesus answered, “Thou hast said.”
When we think of the Passover as a great national festival binding all Israelites together, we easily forget how much it was also a family occasion. Anyone reading the words of its first institution carefully sees that the command for each man to take a lamb from his father’s house belongs to the very heart of it, and that this blending of the domestic with the national runs through the whole life and history of the chosen people. Every great painter who has attempted the Last Supper leaves the spectator with the impression of a family gathered, with one at its head who holds all its members together, and one dark figure among them who has broken free of him and is destroying its unity. This impression comes from the Evangelists. Nothing could be more simply human and personal than the bitter words “One of you shall betray me,” and the question they drew out, “Is it I?” Once we lose the sense that this was a real family meeting, we fail to see how fully the feast in that upper room fulfilled the idea of the old Passover, and we are unprepared for the next step in the story — the carrying of the Passover’s idea into its highest meaning and power.