Ep. 107: The plot against Jesus

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MATTHEW 26:1-5, MARK 14:1,2

The three busy days of Passion Week were past. We now have a day of rest, a Sabbath to his Soul before its great agony. Then he would refresh himself and prepare for the terrible conflict before him. And he did so as the Lamb of God, meekly submitting himself to the will and Hand of his Father and so fulfilling all types, from that of Isaac’s sacrifice on Mount Moriah to the Passover lamb in the Temple. He would be bringing the reality of all prophecy from that of the woman’s seed that would crush the serpent’s head to that of the Kingdom of God in its fullness when its golden gates would be flung open to all men and heaven’s own light flow out to them as they sought its way of peace.

Only two days more! And Jesus knew it well and he passed that day of rest and preparation in quiet retirement with his disciples, perhaps in some hollow of the Mount of Olives, near the home in Bethany, speaking to them of his crucifixion on the Passover. They sorely needed his words; they, rather than he, needed to be prepared for what was coming. And all the time he thought only of them. Such thinking and speaking are not that of man, it is that of the Incarnate Son of God, the Christ of the Gospels.

He had, indeed, before that, gradually prepared them for what was to happen on the following night. He had pointed to it at the very opening of his ministry, on the first occasion that he had taught in the Temple, as well as to Nicodemus. He had hinted at it, when he spoke of the deep sorrow when the Bridegroom would be taken from them, of the need to take up his cross, of the fulfilment in him of the Jonah-type, of his flesh which he would give for the life of the World, as well as in what might have seemed the teaching on the Good Shepherd, who laid down his life for the sheep and the heir whom the evil servants cast out and killed.

But he had also spoken of it quite directly and this always when some highpoint had been reached and the disciples might otherwise have been carried away into Messianic expectations of exaltation without humiliation, a triumph not a sacrifice. We remember that the first occasion on which he spoke so clearly was immediately after that confession of Peter, which laid the foundation of the Church, against which the gates of hell should not prevail; the next, after descending from the Mount of Transfiguration; the last, on preparing to make his triumphal Messianic Entry into Jerusalem.

And now the Master was telling it to them in plain words; he was calmly contemplating it and that not as in the dim future, but in the immediate present - at that very Passover, barely two days away.

This is an extract from the book, Jesus : Life and Times, available for £10 here (Finalist for Academic Book of the year at 2023 CRT awards)