The Gospel for TUESDAY, June 21, 2005
Luke 21:37-22:13
All day long he would be in the Temple teaching, but would spend the night in the open on the hill called the Mount of Olives. And from early morning the people thronged to him in the Temple to listen to him. The feast of Unleavened Bread, called the Passover, was now drawing near, and the chief priests and the scribes were looking for some way of doing away with him, because they were afraid of the people. Then Satan entered into Judas, surnamed Iscariot, who was one of the Twelve. He approached the chief priests and the officers of the guard to discuss some way of handing Jesus over to them. They were delighted and agreed to give him money. He accepted and began to look for an opportunity to betray him to them without people knowing about it. The day of Unleavened Bread came round, on which the Passover had to be sacrificed, and he sent Peter and John, saying, ‘Go and make the preparations for us to eat the Passover.’ They asked him, ‘Where do you want us to prepare it?’ He said to them, ‘Look, as you go into the city you will meet a man carrying a pitcher of water. Follow him into the house he enters and tell the owner of the house, “The Master says this to you: Where is the room for me to eat the Passover with my disciples?” The man will show you a large upper room furnished with couches. Make the preparations there.’ They set off and found everything as he had told them and prepared the Passover. -- The New Jerusalem Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1995, c1985
Therefore Let Us Keep the Feast
Jesus, a devoutly observant Jew, had made prior arrangement to ensure that He and his friends could eat the Passover meal inside the city, in an appropriate place.
A Reflection
And while Jesus was so occupied, Judas Iscariot was also busy.
Scholars and academics widely disagree as to how much Jesus the man knew about this particular subplot of betrayal. Luke's writers play it up because it was necessary to show that Jesus was so popular with the crowds that taking him by force in the open could have started the very riots that the religious elite were trying to prevent.
Jesus acted out His part completely in the open in this sequence of events. Indeed, he had nothing to hide. Taking his twelve (plus the women, more than likely) to the private home could have been His way to have a last few hours alone, just with them. Or, as some suggest, it could also be a post-Easter retrojection to show the importance of the twelve and to hold up "apostolic succession" to establish their indisputable right to be the keepers of the "accurate" story.
Jesus the radical surely knew that His life could, then, be measured in hours. After disrupting the trade of the temple hangers-on, He had become a marked man. In taking on the religious elite using their temple positions to extract wealth from the already-oppressed peasant class (over 90% of the population!), Jesus faced economic power with social and religious truth.
The sad thing for the religious elite is that they thought they had "won." For them, but also for us, the succeeding events brought joy. We who won the Victory fare much better than those who won only a minor contest, as they saw it. They lost an opponent.
We gained the Savior.
The Collect
Lord Jesus, as you were faithful to YHWH in observing Israel's history, let us be faithful in carrying out your commands to love the Father and one another. Amen
3:19:36 PM 
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