Let us consider with what words the spirit of Jesus would greet that wailing ghost of Judas, wandering through the populous gloom of Hades, before we venture on his epitaph.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE LAST SUPPER AND THE ARREST OF CHRIST

Ir was probably on the Wednesday of this week that Judas made his compact with the priests. This day Jesus spent in retirement in Bethany. Some of the long discourses reported by St. John may have been uttered on this day. Nothing could have been more natural than that Jesus should have spent this last quiet day of His life in intimate revelations of His own mind and spirit to His disciples. He had many things to say to them, and He knew that His time was short. In these discourses He communicates to His disciples the last testament of a spirit conscious of departure. For such an act of solemn valediction there could be no more suitable spot than the home of Bethany, which had so frequently afforded Him a peaceful refuge from those public contentions and debates which were now concluded.

There are several reasons to support this conclusion, the chief of which is that it is extremely unlikely that all the elaborate discourses reported in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth chapters of St. John's Gospel could have been delivered in the brief space occupied by the Last Supper, which was crowded with incidents and teachings of its own. We may also recollect Christ's invariable method of drawing His analogies direct from Nature; and not from a general memory of Nature, but from those particular effects which lay close to His hand. The exquisite discourse about the vine is as suggestive of immediate contact with Nature as those passages of the Sermon on the Mount which describe

the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. Let us picture Jesus, then, as spending this last quiet day at Bethany in the open air with His disciples. With the vineyards spreading round Him, now putting forth their earliest leaf, Jesus speaks of Himself as the Vine, and of His disciples as the branches, as He had long before spoken beside the Sea of Galilee of His words as good seed that sprung up among the weeds. Peace is the prevailing note of this day at Bethany. All the bitter feuds and controversies of Jerusalem are forgotten in the deep felicity of One who has overcome the world, and is saying His farewell to it.

On this Wednesday evening the Passover began. It commenced with the moment when the first three stars were counted in the sky, and ended with the appearance of the same three stars on Thursday evening. It was during this period that Jesus made those preparations for the Passover, which are inimitably reported in the synoptic Gospels. He sent two of His disciples, identified by St. Luke as Peter and John, into Jerusalem to secure a room where he might celebrate the feast. There can be little doubt that the proprietor of this room was a friend if not a disciple. It has been suggested that he was the father of Mark himself, who resided in Jerusalem, to whose house Peter came long afterward when he was delivered at midnight from his prison. However this may be, the instant obedience of the man to the request of Jesus proves him a sympathizer with the Galilean movement. In the meantime Judas, as the acting man of business for the little band, would have gone to the market to purchase a Paschal lamb for the intended supper. On the afternoon of Thursday the Temple was a scene of solemn and sad excitement. The evening sacrifice took place at half-past three. In the gloom of the Temple the voices of the Levites were heard reciting in mournful cadence the

pathetic regrets and confessions of the eighty-first Psalm. Then the great ceremonial of the Passover itself commenced. A long blast of silver trumpets proclaimed that the lambs provided for the feast were being slain. Each worshipper slew his own lamb, and after making the offering to the priests, prescribed by the Mosaic law, took the lamb away, that he might eat it in his own house with his relations and friends. While the blood of the lamb which the priests had publicly slain was poured into a golden bowl, the supplicating strains of another Psalm filled the air; it was that very Psalm which the children had chanted in the Temple on the day when Jesus entered it in triumph :

"Save now, I beseech Thee, O Lord;

O Lord, I beseech Thee, send now prosperity!

Blessed be He that cometh in the name of the Lord!"

Amid such scenes Judas moved, with the two disciples whom he most detested, on that memorable afternoon. Through the crowded street the three men would then pass, bearing the slain lamb to that upper chamber where the feast would be consummated. A little later, in the waning afternoon, Jesus left Bethany, and entered the city which was to be His altar and His tomb.

It must be recollected that the Paschal Supper was not a public but a family festival. It was also in a sense a New Year's celebration. The Mosaic law ordained that the month of the Passover should be "the beginning of months," and that the people should "take to them every man a lamb, according to the house of their fathers, a lamb for an house." We cannot doubt that Jesus recollected these familiar facts, and they now gave peculiar significance to His action. For in this hour He heard the first stroke, not of a New Year, but of a new Era. He felt that the old was passing, giving

place to new. And also in the act itself His relation to His disciples has undergone a subtle alteration. He is no longer the Master only; He is the Head of a family. Henceforth a bond more affectionate than that of friendship is to unite Him with them. In the act of eating the Passover together they have become a household, the children of a common birth and destiny, of whom Jesus is the Head. It is thus that the apostles speak of Christ as the Head, and of the little bands of converts as members of the family of God, and of the household of Faith.

Among all the closing acts of Christ there is none so suggestive, and none so important, as this, because it really describes the institution of the Church. On the eve of His departure from the world He acts in such a way as to make his disciples feel that henceforth they are indissolubly joined with Him, in a relation much more intimate and sacred than they had ever known before. All the words of Christ, both immediately before and at this Paschal Feast, reveal the growth of this idea. St. Luke reports Christ as saying to His disciples, "With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you." But why should this desire be strong in Him? Jesus had not celebrated the Passover with His disciples hitherto; or, if He had, we do not know it. Perhaps in the course of His active ministry He had felt Himself so far a recusant from Jewish faith and practice that He had abstained from all participation in the Passover celebrations; although this is unlikely when we recollect His habitual appreciation of all that was best in Judaism. But, at all events, He had never gathered His disciples round Him as members of a household bound together by the sweet solemnity of common sacrifice. He desires to do so now, because by such an act He affirms their unity with each other and with Him. His last discourses are expositions of this unity. He con