Gospel of Mark Study #46

“The Passover Lamb”

Mark 14:12-21

Study #46 in Mark Series

INTRODUCTION:

In Exodus 3 we learn about Moses’ encounter with the Living God at the Burning Bush when the LORD said to Moses, “Do not come near here; remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” That is how I feel about the passage of Scripture we are entering into today—it is “holy ground.” Of course, all Scripture is holy ground in a sense, but this portion describes those last hours of our Lord’s earthly life and the events leading up to His death for us on Calvary’s cross.

TRANSITION:

We have been slowly working our way through the Gospel According to Mark and have been taking our time to stop along the way to savor each moment and to investigate the details. I believe this is how Bible study should be done. I believe that Christians grow through the systematic, word-by-word, line-upon-line, precept-upon-precept, literal, historical, grammatical, contextual approach to the study of God’s Word.

My goal as a preacher and teacher of God’s Word is not to entertain people or to make them feel good. That is not my job. My assignment is to feed them, to help them understand God’s Word, and to provoke them into doing something with it that will move them the next step forward in their Christian growth and maturity. Today we are in Mark 14, starting at verse 12.

NOTES on the Text:

Verse 12: On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb was being sacrificed, His disciples said to Him, “Where do you want us to go and prepare for You to eat the Passover?”

·       The Feast of Unleavened Bread, which in Hebrew is called “Pesach,” from the verb meaning, “to pass over, or to spare,” is one of the most important religious festivals in Judaism and one of the three pilgrimage feasts in which Jewish men who lived in ancient Israel and Judea were required to make the trip to the Temple in Jerusalem to offer their sacrifices. (The other two pilgrimage feasts were Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks/Harvest, later called Pentecost, and Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles.)

·       The Feast of Unleavened Bread always began on the evening of the fourteenth day of the first month of the Jewish year (i.e., Nisan) and ran for a total of eight days (N.B. after sundown on the 14^th was the 15^th by Jewish reckoning). The Jewish calendar was based on the phases of the moon, so Passover always started on the night of the first full moon after the vernal (i.e., spring) equinox. This meant that from year to year the feast would start on different days of the week. That year, the 14th fell on our Thursday.

·       Passover was the commemoration of the miracle that God performed many years before when He freed His people from their captivity in Egypt. You can read the whole story of this Tenth Plague in Exodus 12. The Pharaoh hardened his heart and refused to free the Israelites, despite the series of plagues that God inflicted upon the Egyptians. Finally, God sent His angel of death among them to slaughter the firstborn of every Egyptian family. However, before He did that, He commanded His people to kill a spotless lamb and to sprinkle its blood on the doorposts and lintels of their houses. That was a sign of their faith and obedience and wherever the blood was applied, the angel of death “passed over” those homes. Later, God told His people that they were to commemorate that event annually so that they would never forget what God had done for them. He had saved them through the blood of the Passover Lamb.

·       Now on that day every family in Israel was slaughtering a perfect, spotless lamb and preparing it for their Passover meal, not realizing that God was also preparing a Perfect, Spotless Lamb, who would soon be dying for the sins of every man, woman, and child, not only in Israel but in the whole world.

Verses 13-15: And He sent two of His disciples and said to them, “Go into the city, and a man will meet you carrying a pitcher of water; follow him; ¹⁴ and wherever he enters, say to the owner of the house, ‘The Teacher says, “Where is My guest room in which I may eat the Passover with My disciples?”’ ¹⁵ And he himself will show you a large upper room furnished and ready; prepare for us there.”

·       We know that Jesus and His disciples had been spending each night in Bethany, probably at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. They would walk the 2.5 miles back and forth each day. On that Thursday morning, the 14^th of Nisan, Jesus sent two of His men into Jerusalem to finalize preparations for Him and the Apostles to commemorate Passover together.

·       But you must look at the details here. He said, “Go into the city, and a man will meet you...” He did not describe the man or say where they would find him. But Jesus said that he would be coming toward them: “...he will meet you.” But there would be something strange about him: “...a man will meet you carrying a pitcher of water.” What kind of description is that? Not much to go on. However, what you need to know is that in that culture men did not carry water! Ever! That was considered women’s work. To find a man carrying a pot of water was rare, indeed. Then Jesus said: “Follow him, and wherever he enters, say to the owner of the house...”

·       Jesus even supplied the disciples with the dialogue they were to use with the house owner: “...Say to him, The Teacher says, “Where is My guest room in which I may eat the Passover with My disciples?” Think about this. Did Jesus already have a relationship with this fellow or did He just know that the man was supportive of His ministry? Or had Jesus talked to the man previously about using his room? We do not know; however, it is apparent that Jesus knew that the man would be amenable to loaning that upper room to Him and His followers. Yet we know nothing about the man, nor do we have any indication in any of the Gospel accounts of Jesus making prior arrangements. “And he himself will show you a large upper room furnished and ready; prepare for us there.” Jesus was already acquainted with the room and knew that it would be furnished and ready. How remarkably interesting! 

Verse 16: The [two] disciples went out and came to the city and found it just as He had told them; and they prepared the Passover.

·       Here we see their obedience despite their questions, and in their going they got the confirmation that they needed. We often want to turn the process around the other way. We want God to lay everything out first so that we can look at His plan and decide whether we like it or not. Then, if it looks good, we might obey Him. However, we need to learn to trust that Jesus knows what He is doing. We need to obey Him unquestioningly. We do not need to have full disclosure to be able to obey Him. We just need to have faith in Him.

·       Before AD 70 the custom was to take the Passover lamb to the Temple to have it ritually slaughtered by the priests. This is almost certainly what the disciples did that day. After arranging things with the owner of the upper room they went out and bought a lamb and had it killed and prepared for roasting. They purchased the other components of the Passover meal, such as the wine, the bread, the bitter herbs, the vegetables, etc. and prepared the meal for that evening. This would have involved a considerable amount of time and labor and some expense. 

Verse 17: When it was evening, He came with The Twelve.

·       Around sundown Jesus and the 12 disciples showed up and made their way up to the upper room, probably via a stairway up the outside of the house. They made themselves comfortable, reclining on rugs arranged around a common low table, propping themselves with pillows. 

Verses 18-19: As they were reclining at the table and eating, Jesus said, “Truly I say to you that one of you will betray Me—one who is eating with Me.” ¹⁹ They began to be grieved and to say to Him one by one, “Surely not I?”

·       Here we see them with the meal already underway. In fact, they were ¾ of the way into the Passover liturgy and ceremony. The way the disciples formed their question expected a negative response: Literally, “It is not I, is it?” Such a betrayal seemed monstrous to them, and they could not imagine anyone doing such a heinous thing.

·       Interestingly, Matthew 26:25 tells us that Judas also asked the question; however, this was obviously an attempt to hide his treachery. He already knew full well what he was going to do and how he was going to betray the Lord Jesus with a kiss. 

Verse 20: And He said to them, “It is one of the twelve, one who dips with Me in the bowl.”

·       This verse used to confuse me because I thought He was saying that it was the one whose hand was in the bowl with Him at that moment. But that is not what Jesus was saying. It was just His way of saying that the betrayer was one of them, one of the twelve who were in the room eating with Him. Had Judas’ hand been in the bowl at that moment everyone would have known immediately that the Master was referring specifically to him. However, that fact was not yet clear to them until a few hours later. That is why they all kept saying, “Is it me?” 

Verse 21: “For the Son of Man is to go just as it is written of Him; but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been good for that man if he had not been born.”

·       “For the Son of Man is to go [i.e., go to His death] just as it is written of Him...” This means that it all must happen the way it has been prearranged by God—including the betrayal by a friend. However, that does not lessen the personal responsibility of Judas. Nobody made him do what he did. He had a choice. He could have believed in Christ and refused to listen to the devil’s voice. He was not merely a helpless pawn in God’s hand, forced to play his foul role in this drama. No, he was responsible for his own wickedness, even though God knew ahead of time what he would do and wove it into the tapestry of His plan.

·       Jesus said: “...But woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been good for that man if he had not been born.” That is a powerful statement, and one that gives us pause. He said it would have been better if Judas had not even been born. Frankly, I have had that same thought a few times about people I have known or known of. I feel that way about Adolf Hitler, Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, and every trafficker of teens and little children in the sex traffic industry.

·       Modern theologians have tried to give Judas a makeover. They have called into question the biblical account and have tried to say that Judas’ motives may have been pure. They theorize that perhaps Judas just wanted to force Jesus into a situation where He would have to declare Himself, to come out of the closet, so to speak, and to take a more active stand in speaking out against Rome, etc. They say that Judas was really a true believer but was misguided in his actions. You might have read about the so-called, “Gospel of Judas,” which even the National Geographic weighed in on. The Gospel of Judas, translated in 2006 by the National Geographic Society, is a Gnostic “gospel” purported to document conversations between the apostle Judas Iscariot and Jesus. Rather than portraying Judas as the low-down traitor as he is described in the biblical Gospels, the Gospel of Judas interprets Judas’ act not as betrayal, but rather as an act of obedience to the instructions of Jesus Himself. This assumption is that Jesus required a second agent to set in motion a course of events which He had planned. In that sense Judas acted as a catalyst and in direct obedience to Jesus.

·       What rubbish! This view is totally incompatible with Scripture and with Jesus own words concerning Judas as recorded in John 6:70 where Jesus called Judas a “devil,” and John 17:12 where He said that He had lost none that the Father had given Him except for one: “...not one of them perished but the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.”

·       It is hard to do a nice-guy makeover on somebody that Jesus called “a devil and a son of hell.” But that is how the world rolls. The world wants to take Jesus, the sinless Lamb of God, and turn Him into a scoundrel and a fake, and at the same time take Judas and turn him into a virtuous hero. How screwed up is that? 

CONCLUSION:

It is interesting to me that only Jesus and Judas knew of the evil plan in Judas’ mind and heart. Had the other disciples learned of it they would have tried to stop him, even using violence if necessary. In the same way, there may be things that we succeed in hiding from our fellow men, but we cannot hide them from God. He sees everything and weighs the thoughts and intentions of our hearts.

Also, Jesus could have easily stopped Judas. When Jesus confronted Judas and told him to go quickly and finish what he had planned to do, I think that was Jesus’ way of offering Judas a way out. At that point he could have repented and turned away from his plan. However, he hardened his heart and went ahead with it anyway.

How often do we do the same thing? Even knowing that something is wrong, and even knowing that God is aware of what we are up to, we still rush out and sin against Him. We do it with our eyes “wide open.”