“On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, when it was customary to sacrifice the Passover lamb, Jesus’ disciples asked him, ‘Where do you want us to go and make preparations for you to eat the Passover?’” (14:12).  A place must be available.  Also, a lamb.  It’s no Passover without a lamb.  Who provides the lamb?  Where is the lamb?  What Abraham told Isaac, so many generations earlier, still holds true: God shall supply the lamb (Gen 22:8).

To participate in the Passover, as one Jewish source describes it, is to commemorate Israel’s “miraculous exodus from Egyptian slavery.”[1]  For Jewish people, the Passover is a supreme reminder of the power of God in fulfillment of His promise to His people.

Power, promise, people.  Faith teaches that the promise is still being fulfilled and will be perfectly fulfilled in God’s own time, at the end of the age.  For us, as for those first disciples, it all begins with preparation.  John the Baptist, and then Jesus throughout his ministry, called for people to prepare by repenting—turning from the former life, our former ways—and believing the good news.  That isn’t something you and I do in a moment only.  Repentance, belief, and preparation are now our ongoing way of living in this world.  Would that more would turn, and return.

In that season, Jerusalem and the surrounding area were swollen with Passover pilgrims from the furthest corners of the Roman world.  Into that press and clamor Jesus sends two; Luke tells us it was Peter and John.  The arrangements have all been made already—of course they have!  Jesus tells them to follow a man “carrying a jar of water” (14:13).  He tells them this man will meet them.  Who was this man with this jar of water?  He may have been known to Jesus, something prearranged, though how the man would know exactly when to be at just the place to meet the disciples remains unclear.  Jesus doesn’t say go find the man with the water jar.  He says the man will meet them, as though he would be waiting for them, expecting them.

I wonder if, just maybe, he was an angel.  Jesus doesn’t call him one.  Scripture shows us that angels often meet people, and that we don’t always recognize them, until afterwards.  Who better than a messenger from God to be the one with the water, to guide the disciples to the house of celebration?  To get to the celebration, you’ve got to follow the one who has the water.

Angel or not, we see here, again, that power of God in Jesus, knowing everything about everyone.  Jesus had seen Nathanael sitting under the tree.  He knew what the teachers of the law were thinking in their hearts.  He knew Lazarus was dead.  Jesus knew what would happen to him in Jerusalem.  He knew the man with the water would meet the disciples.  All was arranged according to a plan higher, deeper, and holier than those disciples could have imagined.

The man with the water will take Peter and John to a house.  “Say to the owner of the house he enters, ‘The Teacher asks: Where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’” (14:14).  Many who hear Jesus call him Teacher; people understand that Jesus teaches.  Jesus didn’t often speak of himself as a teacher.  One of the few instances I recall is that same evening in the Upper Room, as he washes the feet of his disciples, when he uses the term his disciples—his students—call him.  This evening, supremely, Jesus is teaching.

Tonight, Jesus is seeking his guest room, the place made ready for him, prepared, the place where he will be welcome, and may enter in to celebrate.  “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (Rev 3:20).  Make room for him.  Have a place ready for him.  Welcome him.  In a world of careless indifference and thoughtless distraction, welcome him.

The disciples are sent to make preparations.  Preparation is everything.  Everything that Jesus has done and will do through this day is both teaching and preparation.  Not all teaching, maybe not always even the best teaching, is by words.  Actions.  Jesus is always saying “follow me.”  Our life is preparation, by grace, through the Spirit who causes the Word to come alive in us, for us, even Jesus Christ.  For us to receive his blessings and benefits, he must be alive in us, by faith.  Jesus says, “apart from me, you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5).  Apart from faith, we can do nothing, and nothing can be done in us or through us.  Mark reminds us how, in Jesus’ own town, he “could not do any miracles [. . .] except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.  He was amazed at their lack of faith” (Mk 6:5-6).  We do not come here tonight, without faith.  If we come here at all, tonight, it is only through faith, and faith shall have its reward.

“When evening came, Jesus arrived with the Twelve” (14:17).  The Passover celebration, the feast of the slain lamb, did not, could not begin before sunset.  The people had been in darkness, awaiting a great light.  Slavery is darkness, sin is darkness, but until we know this, we do not understand darkness, or light.  God called creation out of darkness, light where there had been emptiness.  In this world, day gives way to night, and darkness to first light.  In the growing darkness, Jesus and his faithful ones share the sacred meal of freedom: the power of God fulfilling the promise of God for His people.  God shall provide the lamb.

“While they were reclining at the table eating, he said, ‘Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me—one who is eating with me.’  They were saddened, and one by one they said to him, ‘Surely you don’t mean me?’” (14:18-19).  One will betray, another deny; all will abandon.  Now abandonment, denial, and betrayal, these three abideth, and the greatest of these is betrayal.  Beloved, you and I, we have abandoned Jesus many a time, whenever we’ve dashed off after sin.  Not that we’ve done that.  We may even have denied Christ, God help us, but the one thing you and I cannot do, as the Spirit has claimed us and does now live in us, preparing us for the fulfilment of God’s promise—the one thing neither you nor I can now do is betray Christ.  Not because it isn’t thinkable—it is, and can cause us all sorts of panic.

One betrays a trust; one betrays a friend.  Disciple and friend though he had been, Judas could betray Jesus because he no longer loved Jesus, if he ever had.  Judas had declined to surrender all in the Spirit.  Love grows and wanes, as we know, and I daresay love can indeed fade to nothing, from our side of eternity, but God’s love is not like this.  Because Judas did not know God, he did not love God—oh, he loved some god, his own god, the god he had made out of his times, his culture and society, his hurts and hopes, and what little he knew or wanted to know of Scripture and Spirit, and when Jesus didn’t turn out to be that god, when God didn’t turn out to be that god, Judas was ready to betray Jesus, because Jesus wasn’t the god Judas wanted.

If we would know God, we must know Jesus.  To know Jesus is to know God, to see Jesus is to see God, to walk with Jesus is to walk with God.  Now, true love requires more than one.  True love continually flows back and forth, like energy, like blood: shared, treasured, given and received.  Where there is true love, there can be no betrayal; oh, we can abandon, we can deny, and we have, but so long as you have faith in Christ, you cannot betray him.  And God never will betray His own.

The Passover was a sacred, solemn, deep reminder; the lamb was the potent, sensible, visceral reminder, and Jesus tonight reminds us unequivocally that the lamb was always but a substitute and sign for what was to come, one to come.  True love takes more than one in the giving and receiving.

“While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take it; this is my body.’  Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it.  ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many,’ he said to them” (14:22-24).  O, mystery upon mystery!  The twelve—though, in John’s telling, Judas seems to have left before this—the apostles had seen Jesus do enough staggering, impossible, incomprehensible things, that these words of his surely sank in deep, watering the waiting soil, germinating the seed to become fruitful in time.

Those men understood that Jesus, by these words of his, wasn’t merely being poetic or strange.  Somehow, in some holy way, the bread was the body and the contents of the cup the blood, and they knew the stern prohibition against consuming blood—the blood was the life!—yet here Jesus was inviting them to, giving them permission to, insisting that they must drink, if they would have life and live.  Our physical living is unto death.  Christ’s life, the life we have in him, and the life he offers to put in us by faith through grace, is from the Lord and to the Lord, forever.  Christ makes us spiritually alive.

Feasting together upon the offered lamb was a fellowship meal, a meal of peace with God.  It was reconciliation, solidarity, renewal.  It was thanks and praise.  And the blood, the blood of the lamb was for atonement, cleansing, clearing.  No forgiveness without blood; no restoration without blood; no salvation without blood.  Oh beloved, the cost of our sin!  And there was Jesus, telling them it was his blood, his life, his offering.  They understood he was going to die, die for them, for them all, though they still hoped there might be another way, could be some other way.  Yes, we know.  If he truly was the sin offering, then he must die, else we die in our sin.  And still they hoped there might be another way, some other way.  Yes, we know.

Thinking on it, I don’t recall hearing anything said about what Jesus says next: “Truly I tell you, I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God” (14:25).  Jesus is proclaiming a rendezvous, a joyous celebration, a day of new wine, kingdom wine: completion, perfection.  Christ’s accomplishment is a beginning and a conclusion.  In the meantime, we walk our disciple’s journey, together.  We know what has happened; we know what will happen.  Why, then, do we still allow fear to govern our walk?  Because fear is large, and fear is dark?  But God is larger; God is light.  May your participation in this holiest meal this evening help make you light.

Courage, hope, strength, peace—is Jesus not all this, and more, for us?  Receive him; receive his blessing as from his own hands.

[1] www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/default_cdo/jewish/Passover-2024-Pesach.htm.