It was a borrowed room. Who prepared the Passover dinner? We don’t know. We do know it was the Day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lambs had to be sacrificed to atone for the sins of each family. So many lambs. So much blood. We know that Jesus had asked Peter to go to the entrance to the city and there would be a man carrying a jar of water. “Meet up with him,” Jesus had instructed, “and follow him. When he enters a house, tell the owner of the house that the teacher asks where the guest room is where he may eat the Passover meal with his disciples.” The owner, then, would show Peter a large upper story room, all furnished where Peter could make preparations.
We also know that Jesus began the evening by washing his disciples’ feet, something that servants usually did for guests that had walk the dusty roads in the sandals of the day. Peter had objected to this, since the disciples viewed Jesus as their master teacher. But Jesus had said that if Peter didn’t let him serve him, he would have no place in the Kingdom of God. Evidently, the others didn’t resist. Was it because they understood that they, too, must be servants, or was it because they wanted to ensure that they would have status in what they perceived to be a new earthly kingdom?
We assume that the actual meal followed the traditional ritual that Jewish families had observed since that night Moses helped the children of Israel escape from Egyptian bondage. There were probably four sections of the meal, representing the four expressions of redemption God made to Moses (Exodus 6:2-8): I will take you out, I will deliver you, I will redeem you (buy you back), and I will acquire you (make you my own). With each part of the meal, there was a cup of wine poured to celebrate that completed promise.
Traditionally, there was a fifth cup of wine that referred to an uncompleted promise. It was called Elijah’s cup, and it sat throughout the meal or was poured last, but was never touched. There was also an empty seat at the table for Elijah, for the belief was that Elijah would return and announce that the Messiah had come. Some call the fifth cup the cup of sorrows. We do know that Jesus broke the bread (unleavened bread in remembrance of the haste the bread had to be prepared so the Israelites could flee quickly). He passed the unleavened bread to his disciples and said “Take this and eat. It is my body that is broken for you.”
I believe that it was, then, Elijah’s cup that Jesus picked up. I can just hear those nice Jewish boys suck air, for they would have been slapped if they had touched this cup at their families’ Passover meal. But it was what Jesus said to them that night that makes me believe it was this cup that He picked up now, the cup of sorrows, Elijah’s cup, for Jesus said, “This is my blood that is shed for you. Share this with me and drink all of it, that your joy may be full.”
Didn’t he say that they would grieve and be filled with sorrow, but that the grieving would turn to joy? Didn’t he compare this sorrow to the excruciating pain of childbirth—that it would be temporary and necessary so that there would follow a great joy, a joy that would be permanent like the joy of delivering a perfect new baby?
Talk about a cup of sorrow! He would drink this cup to the dregs in just a few hours in the Garden of Gethsemane where He would see in it all the sins from Eden to Gethsemane and from Gethsemane to the end of time. It would be such a deep, life-threatening labor, this awareness of what was in the cup, that his human body systems were not adequate for this awareness, and his cells would hemorrhage. Yet, he would drink it, all of it. And, yes, so that our joy might be full.
These last moments with the Master were so packed with dots to connect, things to remember, words to comprehend that we are still unpacking them. Like witnesses to an accident or viewers at a happening, each of the disciples afterward remembered and reported different specifics as each wrote their own account later. It took them all to give us an inkling, yet the half has never yet been told.
To Judas, Jesus said, “Hurry up and do what you are going to do.” And to impetuous Peter he said, “You will deny me three times before the rooster announces tomorrow’s dawn.” Aw, but then Jesus follows that sad prediction with these amazing words of mercy: “But let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me.... I go to prepare a place for you and if I go, ... I will come again and receive you unto myself that where I am you will be also.”
As the events of that last night unfolded, the urgency of Jesus’s words became more and more intense. Like a parent running down the driveway as their child leaves with the packed U-Haul headed out for college and the rest of their lives, calling after her, “Drive carefully, and don’t forget, you can always call home....”, so Jesus piles on the instructions and warnings, reminding his own of their experiences together and trying to make them understand what is coming, though they have no experiences, yet, to help them comprehend what the future has in store.
And do we? Even now in the aftermath of the crucifixion and the resurrection, the appearances and the ascension, we still stand looking skyward, not sure what we have experienced these last two and a half millennia. Can we hear the voice saying to us why do you stand here gazing into heaven? This same Jesus who ascended from you will one day come again. Stop gawking in amazement and go! Serve as He served. Forgive as He forgave. Love as He loved. Go and be what He is. Just BE!
