The Last Supper
THE LAST SUPPER
MATTHEW 26:14-25
Look at Jesus’ amazing love: he still appeals to Judas and warns him.
Whatever provided the stimulus, Judas immediately made his way from Bethany to seek an audience of the chief priests and undertook to enable them to lay their hands on Jesus. Matthew is the only evangelist who names the price of the betrayal as “thirty pieces of silver”; the last clause of 26:15 is almost a quotation of the last clause of Zechariah 11:12, where thirty shekels (12 oz. or 342 grams) of silver are the derisory wages paid to the prophet for tending the flock of Israel (cf. 27:9f.). This was the price fixed in Israel’s earliest law-code as compensation paid to the owner for a slave gored to death by someone else’s ox (Exodus 21:32), and God assures the prophet that the implied insult is directed primarily at him.
Jesus knew that there was a traitor in the camp; hence his care to make the arrangements for eating the Passover meal with the disciples as secret as possible. The venue had evidently been fixed in advance with the master of the house (26:18). There were more ways than one of calculating the date of the Passover and other feasts, and it is possible (though this does not affect the study of Matthew’s narrative in itself) that Jesus and his circle followed a different reckoning from that which regulated the temple calendar (cf. John 18:28; 19:14). In that case they must have dispensed with the paschal lamb, which could be slaughtered only in the temple on the official date (and no mention is made of Jesus and his disciples eating the lamb); but every Passover meal eaten away from Jerusalem lacked the lamb in any case.
During the meal, at which all reclined (the proper Passover posture), as is indicated by the Greek word rendered “sat at table” (26:20), Jesus reveals the presence of a traitor. None but Judas knows who is meant; each of the others wonders if he himself has inadvertently said or done something to his Master’s disadvantage. The words of 26:23 echo Psalm 41:9 (actually quoted in John 13:18), but as all were dipping their hands in the same dish the traitor’s identity was not thereby divulged. There may be an implication that, as the Son of Man’s way of suffering had been “written of him” (26:24) a reference perhaps to Isaiah 52:13–53:12 and similar Old Testament Scriptures—so the traitor was a subject of prophecy (cf. Acts 1:20). At any rate, he is the most unenviable of men. When Judas repeats his fellow disciples’ question, the responsibility for the answer is thrown back on himself (26:25): he had still time to renounce his plan. Here and in 26:49 “Master” is actually “Rabbi”; in this Gospel Judas is the only one to address Jesus by this title.
Thought Is it merely coincidence that money is involved in the downfall of both Judas and Ananias (Acts 5:1-6)?