The Last Supper

179:0.1Dur­ing the af­ter­noon of this Thurs­day, when Philip re­minded the Mas­ter about the ap­proach­ing Pass­over and in­quired con­cern­ing his plans for its cel­e­bra­tion, he had in mind the Pass­over sup­per which was due to be eaten on the evening of the next day, Fri­day. It was the cus­tom to be­gin the prepa­ra­tions for the cel­e­bra­tion of the Pass­over not later than noon of the pre­ced­ing day. And since the Jews reck­oned the day as be­gin­ning at sun­set, this meant that Sat­ur­day’s Pass­over sup­per would be eaten on Fri­day night, some­time be­fore the mid­night hour.

179:0.2The apos­tles were, there­fore, en­tirely at a loss to un­der­stand the Mas­ter’s an­nounce­ment that they would cel­e­brate the Pass­over one day early. They thought, at least some of them did, that he knew he would be placed un­der ar­rest be­fore the time of the Pass­over sup­per on Fri­day night and was there­fore call­ing them to­gether for a spe­cial sup­per on this Thurs­day evening. Oth­ers thought that this was merely a spe­cial oc­ca­sion which was to pre­cede the reg­u­lar Pass­over cel­e­bra­tion.

179:0.3The apos­tles knew that Je­sus had cel­e­brated other Passovers with­out the lamb; they knew that he did not per­son­ally par­tic­i­pate in any sac­ri­fi­cial ser­vice of the Jew­ish sys­tem. He had many times par­taken of the paschal lamb as a guest, but al­ways, when he was the host, no lamb was served. It would not have been a great sur­prise to the apos­tles to have seen the lamb omit­ted even on Pass­over night, and since this sup­per was given one day ear­lier, they thought noth­ing of its ab­sence.

179:0.4Af­ter re­ceiv­ing the greet­ings of wel­come ex­tended by the fa­ther and mother of John Mark, the apos­tles went im­me­di­ately to the up­per cham­ber while Je­sus lin­gered be­hind to talk with the Mark fam­ily.

179:0.5It had been un­der­stood be­fore­hand that the Mas­ter was to cel­e­brate this oc­ca­sion alone with his twelve apos­tles; there­fore no ser­vants were pro­vided to wait upon them.