submitting Himself to the Will and Hand of His Father, and so fulfilling all types, from
that of Isaac's sacrifice on Mount Moriah to the Paschal Lamb in the Temple; and
bringing the reality of all prophecy, from that of the Woman's Seed that would crush the
Serpent's head to that of the Kingdom of God in its fullness, when its golden gates
would be flung open to all men, and Heaven's own light flow out to them as they sought
its way of peace. Only two days more, as the Jews reckoned them2 - that Wednesday
and Thursday - and at its Even the Paschal supper! And Jesus knew it well, and He
passed that day of rest and preparation in quiet retirement with His disciples - perhaps
in some hollow of the Mount of Olives, near the home of Bethany - speaking to them of
His Crucifixion on the near Passover. They sorely needed His words; they, rather than
He, needed to be prepared for what was coming. But what Divine calm, what willing
obedience, and also what outgoing of love to them, with full consciousness of what was
before Him, to think and speak of this only on that day! So would not a Messiah of
Jewish conception have acted; nay, He would not have been placed in such
circumstances. So would not a Messiah of ambitious aims or of Jewish Nationalist
aspirations have acted; He would have done what the Sanhedrin feared, and raised a
'tumult of the people,' prepared for it as the multitude was, which had so lately raised
the Hosanna -cry in street and Temple. So would a disillusioned enthusiast not have
acted; he would have withdrawn from the impending fate. But Jesus knew it all - far
more the agony of shame and suffering, even the unfathomable agony of soul. And the
while He thought only of them in it all. Such thinking and speaking is not that of Man - it
is that of the Incarnate Son of God, the Christ of the Gospels.
2. An attempt has been lately made, with great ingenuity, by the Rev. B. S. Clarke of
Boxted, to show that only the weekly Sabbath and the Day of Atonement, but not the
other festive, nor yet the natural days, began with the evening. The admission in regard
to Sabbaths and the Day of Atonement is, in the absence of any qualifying remark in
regard to them, a primâ facie argument against the theory. But there is more than this. In
Chull. 83 a it is noted, in connection with offerings, that as in the history of the Creation
the day always belonged to the previous night ('one day'), it was always to be reckoned in
the same manner. Again, in Pes. 2 a it is stated that the day lasted till three stars became
visible. Lastly, and most important in regard to the Passover, it is distinctly stated (Jer.
Pes. 27 c, below), that it began with the darkness on the 14th Nisan.
He had, indeed, before that, sought gradually to prepare them for what was to happen
on the morrow's night. He had pointed to it in dim figure at the very opening of His
Ministry, on the first occasion that he had taught in the Temple,3 as well as to
Nicodemus.4 He had hinted it, when He spoke of the deep sorrow when the Bridegroom
would be taken from them,5 of the need of taking up His cross,6 of the fulfilment in Him
of the Jonah-type,7 of His Flesh which He would give for the life of the world,8 as well as
in what might have seemed the Parabolic teaching about the Good Shepherd, Who laid
down His life for the Sheep,9 and the Heir Whom the evil husbandmen cast out and
killed.10 But He had also spoken of it quite directly - and this, let us specially notice,
always when some highpoint in His History had been reached, and the disciples might
have been carried away into Messianic expectations of an exaltation witho ut humiliation,
a triumph not a sacrifice. We remember, that the first occasion on which He spoke thus
clearly was immediately after that confession of Peter, which laid the foundation of the
Church, against which the gates of hell should not prevail;11 the next, after descending