And as they sat and did eat.
The company makes the feast
The ingredients of this meal were few and simple, but the presence of Christ made it more than royal. It is not what men have to eat, but the company that makes a meal delightful. Agassiz, when a young man travelling in Germany, visited Oken, the eminent zoologist. “After I had delivered to him my letter of introduction,” he says, “Oken asked me to dine with him. The dinner consisted only of potatoes boiled and roasted, but it was the best dinner I ever ate, for there was Oken. The mind of the man seemed to enter into what we ate socially together, and I devoured his intellect while eating his potatoes.” So the presence of Christ as the realized embodiment of the Passover, and His Divine discourse, made that Paschal meal the most memorable ever eaten. It is a feast, moreover, whose solemn delight is a perpetual heritage of the Christian Church. Christ made it so by erecting upon it the sacrament of His supper, the equivalent in the new kingdom of God to the Passover in the old, and making its recurring celebration, there enjoined, the means of preserving the memory of all that then transpired. (A. H. Currier.)
The bad among the good
1. In the holiest society on earth, the unholy may have a place.
2. The highest goodness may fail to win to the obedience of faith.
3. There may be moral wrong without present consciousness.
4. The knowledge and appointment of God do not hinder the freedom and responsibility of man. (J. H. Godwin.)
The treachery of Judas foretold
I. A fearful announcement. Christ had already more than once predicted that He would be betrayed; but now He adds to the intimation the terrible news that it would be by one of themselves. A little of the horror of thick darkness which His words spread over them still pervades our hearts. The fact is more than anything else, suggestive of all that is dark and pitiful in human nature. It shows-
1. How measureless may be the evil a man may reach by simply giving way to wrong.
2. No privileges, no light, no opportunity, can bless a man without his own cooperation.
3. Privileges, if unimproved, injure the soul.
4. Without self-surrender to God, every other religious quality and tendency is insufficient to save the soul. Judas only lacked this one thing.
5. As the existence of a pure soul is itself a proof and a prediction of heaven, so such a soul seems to prove and predict a hell.
II. Christ’s reasons for making this fearful announcement.
1. Perhaps to cure the pride of the disciples. The announcement that one of them will betray will help to abate their vehemence in seeking to know “who shall be greatest.”
2. To give Judas a glimpse of the perdition before him, and thus awake repentance.
3. To intimate to him that, though the Saviour might die by his craft, it was with His own knowledge and consent. (R. Glover.)