Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Large Upper Room
Luke 22:7-13
7 The day of unleavened bread came, on which the Passover must be sacrificed. · WEB
Two disciples are sent into the city on the strength of a sign about a man carrying water.
Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, "Go and prepare the Passover for us, that we may eat" Luke 22:8.
This account names the two, which the others do not. Peter and John are the pair who will run to the tomb and stand together in the temple in the second volume; here they are sent to book a room and buy a lamb.
"Behold, when you have entered into the city, a man carrying a pitcher of water will meet you. Follow him into the house which he enters" Luke 22:10.
The arrangement is told in the earliest account Mark 14:1–21. The sign is precise because it is unusual: carrying water was women's work, so a man with a jar on his shoulder would stand out in a crowded street.
What the whole passage describes is a set of arrangements made in advance and kept off the record. A contact, a signal, a room already furnished. The reason is not mysterious — Judas is at that moment looking for a place away from the crowd, and the location of this meal is the one thing he does not know until he is in it.
"The Teacher says to you, 'Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?'" Luke 22:11. The word for guest room is the same one used of the place where there was no room at his birth Luke 2:7, which is a small echo the writer may well have intended.
"He will show you a large, furnished upper room. Make preparations there" Luke 22:12. Someone in Jerusalem had made a room ready and told nobody. This Gospel is full of such people — a steward's wife funding the work, women following from Galilee, a councilor with an unused tomb.
They went, found things as Jesus had told them, and they prepared the Passover Luke 22:13.
The preparation itself was substantial: a lamb taken to the temple to be killed, the bread, the wine, the bitter herbs. Two men spent that afternoon doing ordinary domestic work for a meal whose meaning they would not understand for three days.
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