CONTENTS.
We enter here upon the History of CHRIST's Passion. The Chief Priests conspire against him. A woman anoints the LORD. Judas selleth CHRIST, and betrayeth him. Peter denieth him.
AFTER two days was the feast of the passover and of unleavened bread: and the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might take him by craft, and put him to death, (2) But they said, Not on the feast day, lest there he an uproar of the people.
In addition to the observations made on the subject of the Passover, Matthew 26:2-20. etc. to which I refer the Reader, I beg to remark that Mark takes notice also, of the feast of unleavened bread. It may be not amiss to consider, that those feasts were always together; in fact they were one and the same. See Exodus 12:8, etc. The Passover was finished in the first evening's solemnity, but the feast of unleavened bread continued seven days. But what an awful picture is here given of the Chief Priests and Scribes! That at a season so holy and sanctified for celebrating that great mercy of GOD to the Church, in delivering the people from Egyptian bondage; those men should then, of all other seasons, contrive the death of JESUS. They indeed postponed their intentions for the moment, in carrying them into execution, not out of tenderness to JESUS, not lest their solemn services should be interrupted, but from the great affection the common people had to the person of JESUS, lest the LORD should be rescued from them. Reader! pause over this part of the subject, and behold in those men, the awful depravity of the human heart! True, indeed, it was necessary that CHRIST our passover should be then sacrificed; and they literally did that, and no more in the crucifying the LORD of life and glory, which GOD had before determined to be done. Acts 4:27-28. But though the LORD's ordination was in all, yet the deed itself, and the malice of the deed, was all their own; and the chapter in the opening of it, gives us an awful representation of the heart of man.