The Last Week of Jesus's LifeSample

Thursday, April 2, 33 AD

Passover preparation day.

The House of Annas 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.

Jesus 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.

Jesus and his inner twelve disciples come into Jerusalem and make their way to a large furnished upper room (suggesting yet another wealthy gospel patron). Jesus 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 (builder), one of the last lines triumphantly declares, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”

It is no coincidence that Jesus has chosen his death day to fall on Passover. He is the ultimate sacrificial lamb whose blood shields us from the obliterative power of God’s holiness. Yet the disciples still don’t get it. They sense Jesus’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, and 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). Jesus 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 Jesus and his disciples have taken this specific saunter. Luke 22:39 says Jesus 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 Iscariot knows the place well.