A Passover meal with new words, the night John tells differently, the prayer under the olive trees, and the cup
The Supper and the Garden
On the last night the four accounts split. Matthew, Mark and Luke give a Passover meal, bread and a cup with sentences that the church has repeated ever since. John gives the same evening with no bread and cup at all, but a basin, a towel, and four chapters of talk. Then, in three of the four, a garden, and a prayer that asked for something and did not get it.
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Lesson 10 of 12 · Thursday night
The last night is a Passover meal in the first three Gospels: bread broken with the words this is my body, a cup passed with the words this is the new covenant in my blood. Paul, writing before any of them, gives the same words and says he received them, so they are the oldest fixed sentences of the Christian faith. John tells the same evening without the bread and the cup. He gives a basin and a towel instead, Jesus washing feet, and then a new commandment, and then a long conversation and a prayer; and he dates the night differently, so that Jesus dies on the afternoon the Passover lambs are killed rather than after the meal. Whether the difference is chronology or theology is an old question. After supper, Matthew, Mark and Luke go to a garden, where the one who told the disciples to pray that they not enter into temptation asks three times to be spared, and Luke says he sweated like blood. John has no garden prayer. He has said what it says already, in chapter 12, and has the arrest instead.
The meal
Luke’s account of the bread and cup is the one nearest to Paul’s, and the words are the point.
He took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body which is given for you. Do this in memory of me.” Likewise, he took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. — Luke 22:19–20 · WEB
Read the comment on This Cup Is the New Covenant
He took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke and gave it to them, saying, this is my body which is given for you; do this in memory of me. Likewise the cup after supper: this cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. The setting is Passover, the meal Israel ate on the night the blood on the doorposts turned the destroyer aside (Exodus 12:13), and every element of the meal was already a memory. Jesus took two of them and attached himself to them. "Given for you," "poured out for you," and, in Mark and Matthew, "for many," which is Isaiah 53 again, as it was in the ransom saying. The church did as it was told. Within twenty-five years Paul was quoting the sentences to Corinth as something handed down (1 Corinthians 11:23-25).
διαθήκη diathḗkē G1242
from διατίθεμαι; properly, a disposition, i.e. (specially) a contract (especially a devisory will):--covenant, testament.
A disposition, an arrangement; a will or testament, and, following the Greek Old Testament, a covenant — the binding relation God made with Noah, Abraham, Israel at Sinai and David. The cup is the new covenant, and the phrase is Jeremiah’s: the days come, says Yahweh, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, with the law written on the heart (Jeremiah 31:31-33). Sinai’s covenant was sealed with blood thrown on the altar and the people; this one is sealed, he says, with his. The word gave the two halves of the Bible their names. Testament is covenant, and the New Testament is the new covenant, named after this cup.
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John’s supper
John has the meal, but not the bread and the cup; what he has in their place is a towel.
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” — John 13:34–35 · WEB
Read the comment on A New Commandment
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; just as I have loved you, you also love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples. John has already given his bread, in chapter 6, where Jesus says I am the bread of life and the bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh; at the supper he gives an action, washing the disciples’ feet, the work of the lowest slave in the house, and says you also ought to wash one another’s feet (John 13:14-15). Then come four chapters of farewell: the way, the truth and the life, the vine, the Comforter, and a prayer that they may all be one, that the world may believe (John 17:20-21). Where the other three give a rite, John gives a command and an example. Both are what the night was for, and the church kept both.
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Which night
The four accounts do not agree on the date, and a reader should see the difference rather than be told it is not there. In Matthew, Mark and Luke the supper is the Passover meal, eaten on the evening the feast began, and Jesus is crucified the next day, inside the feast. In John the supper is before the feast (John 13:1), the priests will not enter Pilate’s hall the next morning because they have not yet eaten the Passover (John 18:28), and the crucifixion is on the day of preparation, at the hour the lambs were being killed in the temple. Some hold that two calendars were in use and both accounts are right; some hold that John moved the day so that Jesus would die as the Passover lamb, which his Baptist had called him in chapter 1; some hold the reverse, that the synoptics moved the meal. The evidence does not settle it. What both traditions agree on is the meaning: the death is a Passover, whether the lamb was eaten the night before or killed that afternoon.
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The garden
He said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Please remove this cup from me. However, not what I desire, but what you desire.” — Mark 14:36 · WEB
Read the comment on This Is My Body, and Gethsemane
Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Please remove this cup from me. However, not what I desire, but what you desire. Mark keeps the Aramaic word for father, the word a child used, and it is the only place in the Gospels it survives. The cup is the one he has just passed, and now he asks not to drink it. He asks three times, in Matthew and Mark, and finds the three disciples asleep each time. Luke shortens the prayer and adds the detail the others lack: being in agony, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood (Luke 22:44). The prayer is refused. That is the plain reading, and the Gospels do not soften it: he asked, and what he asked for did not happen, and he went to meet the arresting party having said "not what I desire."
“The blood shall be to you for a token on the houses where you are. When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will be on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.” Exodus 12:13 · WEB
When I see the blood, I will pass over you: the night the meal remembers, and the reason a cup of blood at a Passover table meant what it meant.
“For I received from the Lord that which also I delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed took bread. When he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “Take, eat. This is my body, which is broken for you. Do this in memory of me.” In the same way he also took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink, in memory of me.”” 1 Corinthians 11:23–25 · WEB
The Lord Jesus, on the night in which he was betrayed, took bread: Paul’s account, earlier than any Gospel, and the phrase "in which he was betrayed" is the verb of the eighth lesson.
“saying, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”” Luke 22:42 · WEB
Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done: Luke’s form of the prayer, the one most Christians have memorized.
““Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this time’? But I came to this time for this cause.” John 12:27 · WEB
Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say? Father, save me from this time? But I came to this time for this cause: John’s Gethsemane, said in public a week earlier, with the request raised and withdrawn in one breath.
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What the night asks
It asks two things, one from each half of the accounts. The supper asks to be repeated, and the church has done so, in more forms than it has agreed on, for two thousand years; the command was do this, and it has been done. The garden asks something harder, which is to be believed. The one who was called Son at the river, who stilled a storm and raised the dead, asked to be spared and was not, and the Gospels record it, though it would have been easy not to. A reader who has prayed for something and not received it has, in Gethsemane, company that most religions would not have allowed their founder to keep.
Read Luke 22:14-23 and John 13:1-17 together. Write down what each account gives the disciples to keep doing, and then say in one sentence how the towel and the cup are the same instruction.
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