The Passover Meal
THE PASSOVER MEAL
MARK 14:12-21
The highest exercise of free will is submission to God’s will.
During the afternoon of Nisan 14 Jesus made his preparations for what he knew would be his last Passover meal. The feast required a suitable room in Jerusalem, and the food (the lamb, bread and bitter sauce) and wine. The story of how the room was obtained suggests a prior arrangement made in the interests of holding the meal in privacy and peace rather than an act of supernatural foreknowledge. A man carrying a water jar would be a sufficiently unusual sight to be a means of recognition. The room is often identified with that in Acts 1:13 (possibly in the house of Acts 12:12).
The meal was duly held in a context of tension and suspicion. Over the table hung the shadow of betrayal, a betrayal all the more awful because it meant breaking up the fellowship of the sacred meal (Psalm 41:9; John 13:18). The disciples were all sufficiently aware of their weakness to ask anxiously which of them Jesus had in mind as he uttered his fateful prophecy. But he refused to name the offender, merely indicating that it was one of those present who was dipping his bread in the same dish of bitter sauce as himself. (The identification in Matthew 26:25 was probably made in quiet reply to Judas himself, or else he might have been lynched on the spot: Peter had a sword!)
The New Testament does not speculate on why Judas behaved as he did. Jesus said that the way appointed for the Son of Man to tread was that laid down by God in Scripture for him (cf. comment on 8:31), but this necessity in no way diminished the awful responsibility of the man who freely chose to betray him. That man’s fate would be so dreadful that he had better never have been born. Here the factors of divine sovereignty and human responsibility are brought together in a way which denies the reality of neither but simply states the mystery of their juxtaposition. More important than speculation into that mystery (which we shall never be able to understand this side of eternity) is to observe how Jesus freely chose to follow the path laid down for him.