The Last Supper = 1991 Years Ago Tonight 🐑
We really need to fix the ever-shifting Easter calendar
April 2, 33 AD
1991 years ago today.
Jerusalem.
Passover preparation day.
The House of Annas — the greedy Jewish crime family who rule the Jerusalem temple and were the real masterminds behind Jesus’s assassination — is hard at work in the temple, skinning animals and skimming millions off the backs of the hard-working masses, slaughtering sacrificial animals and filling their coffers to the brim.
Yehoshua (Jesus in English) has sent two of his inner twelve ahead to help prepare the feast (Luke 22:8). Because of his fame and his impending arrest, the whole affair is executed with espionage-like secrecy, complete with the clandestine signal of a man carrying a jug of water (Luke 22:10), a task normally reserved for the women-folk.
Sunset in Jerusalem arrives at 6:58 p.m.
It’s now technically Friday by the Jewish sundown-to-sundown reckoning of a day, but we’ll call it Thursday until we reach midnight in the garden of Gethsemane.
Yehoshua and his inner twelve disciples come into Jerusalem and make their way to a large furnished upper room (suggesting one of many wealthy gospel patrons.)
Yehoshua washes their feet, eats a full sunset Seder supper, shares a bunch of legendary teachings, predicts one of the Twelve will betray him posthaste, foretells Simon Peter will disown his rabbi three times before the morning rooster crows, tells them to drink wine and break bread as a way to remember him, and sings a hymn.
The song in question is probably the traditional Passover dirge of Psalms 113–118. In an ode to his former career as a tektón craftsman, one of the last lines triumphantly declares, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”
It is no coincidence that Yehoshua has chosen his death day to fall on Passover. He is the ultimate sacrificial lamb whose blood shields us from the obliterative power of YHWH’s holiness.
Yet the disciples still don’t get it.
They sense Yehoshua’s climactic overthrow of the Romans is just moments away, so they pepper him with questions about the details ( John 14:5; John 14:22). The disciples are still convinced this is going to be a military conflict, and they bicker about who will be the greatest among them (Luke 22:24).
The meal finished, the group takes their post-prandial stroll across the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives, with Simon Peter and everyone else insisting they will never deny their master (Mark 14:29–31).
Yehoshua promises that he will soon stop speaking in figures of speech ( John 16:25), and the overconfident disciples immediately think they understand him.
This is not the first time Yehoshua and his disciples have taken this specific saunter. Luke 22:39 says Yehoshua left the Last Supper and went “as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives.” The exact destination on the mount is a quiet garden called Gethsemane. John 18:2 tells us that during their festival week, they “met there often.”
In other words, Judas the betrayer knows the place well.
April 3, 33 AD
The garden of Gethsemane is perfectly named for that which is about to take place within its environs this dark night. The name means “Garden of the Oil Press,” and like the olives that surround him, Yehoshua is about to be pressed to death, drained of life under the weight of sin, so that through his spilled blood we may experience life anew.
It is dark.
It is quiet.
It is late.
Most Passover pilgrims are asleep.
It is the perfect time to arrest a rabbi. And Yehoshua knows it.
The story is told in all four gospels, and it is fraught with terror.
In Luke 22:44, the doctor reports that Yehoshua’s agony is so great that “his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” Whether this means he is simply sweating profusely, or suffering from an extremely rare case of hematidrosis, we don’t know.
After three rounds of lonely prayers, Yehoshua rushes back to his disciples. “The hour has come. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.”
Before he can finish speaking, Judas Iscariot and a mob breach (or surround) the garden. Judas has procured officers of the temple guard and a crowd supplied by the House of Anna, plus a Roman captain and his band of soldiers in case things get out of control. They have lanterns and torches and are armed with swords and clubs. Judas wends his way through the sleeping crowd of disciples. “Greetings, Rabbi!” He kisses Yehoshua on the cheek. Embodying forgiveness to the bitter end, the rabbi replies, “Friend, do what you came to do.”
Yehoshua steps toward the crowd. “Who are you looking for?” “Yehoshua of Nazareth,” they reply.
“I am he.”
John says the mob draws back, perhaps as the rest of the disciples rouse and make ready for battle.
He asks them again, “Whom do you seek?”
“Yehoshua of Nazareth.”
“I told you that I am he. So, if you seek me, let these men go.” As the mob closes in, the disciples panic. “Lord, should we strike with our swords?” a disciple asks.
Simon Peter doesn’t wait for an answer. He draws his sword and swings at the high priest’s slave, chopping off his right ear. The slave is called Malchus (a nickname meaning “the king”), and there is some speculation that this is actually a young Saul of Tarsus. Whether or not this is the case, this slave, acting as the eyes and ears of the high priest, has likely heard Yehoshua speak many times in the temple courts. There is a definite sense this violent episode is historical, as it is unlikely the gospel writers would make up a story that paints them so poorly.
Peace-loving Yehoshua snaps at Simon. “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:52–53).
Doctor Luke reports that Yehoshua touches Malchus’s ear and heals him before addressing the mob. “Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me.
The soldiers rush in and arrest Yehoshua. As the mob tries to seize the rest, the disciples scatter and flee. One young disciple, wearing nothing but his linen nightgown, escapes arrest by pulling free of his would-be captors and sprints away naked (Mark 14:52).
Yehoshua is bound and led away, abandoned by those he has loved and served.
Jesus meets his murderer
Making good on his promise to never desert his master, only Simon “Rocky” Peter and John the Thunder Son have the stones to follow their rabbi at a distance.
They trail the murderous mob in the dark for at least ten minutes, down the hill from the Mount of Olives, across the Kidron Brook, up the hill to Jerusalem, and through the gate where the not-so-triumphal entry took place.
Where are they taking our rabbi?
Peter and John wend their way through a warren of streets to the soundtrack of a hundred thousand Passover pilgrims snoring softly.
They head uphill, to the posh part of town.
The soldiers don’t take Yehoshua to the Roman praetorium. They don’t take him to the Herodian palace.
They don’t even take him to the Jewish temple.
Instead, they take him to a colossal two-story villa with an inner courtyard, the palace of an aristocratic Sadducee priest (Matthew 26:3) — the kind of place only the most corrupt and powerful of Jews could afford. Yehoshua is about to meet the political mastermind who quietly engineered this murder plot.
Inside the villa, an aging terrorist in a high priest’s costume emerges from the shadows. It is none other than Israel’s premier power broker, the head of the most powerful crime family in Jerusalem, the father-in-law of Joseph Caiaphas, the current high priest. It is Annas himself ( John 18:13). He is in his mid-fifties, but he is more lethal than ever. Like his son-in-law, Annas has zero reservations about sacrificing the life of one peasant Galilean to save the nation and his profitable place atop the echelon.
Yehoshua and Annas stare at one another by firelight.
The former believes himself to be God enfleshed; the latter believes himself to be the holy mediator between man and God. One believes he is the fulfillment of Judaism as a living temple; the other wishes to maintain the status quo as controller of a man-made temple.
One offers direct access to God for free; the other acts as a middle-man broker for a crushing fee.
While Caiaphas assembles some like-minded priests, elders, and lawyers, Annas grills Yehoshua in hopes of extracting a useable accusation ( John 18:19–23). It is the first of five corrupt “trials” Yehoshua will endure this dark night.
This has been an excerpt from A God Named Josh: Uncovering the Human Life of Jesus Christ by Jared Brock