As we enter the story of the Passion in St Luke’s Gospel, the tension is building. A number of factions among the Jews were anxious to silence Jesus, each one of them anxious to defend their rights and privileges, and scared to rock a boat captained by the Romans. The Pharisees with their emphasis on purity under the Law were scandalised that Jesus was happy to meet with people who were obvious sinners, even to party with them on occasion. He was undermining everything they stood for, and cheapening the Law of Moses, that’s how they saw it. The supporters of Herod, the dubiously Jewish tetrarch of Galilee, knew that if the Romans were ever to decide Herod was no longer able to keep order, he’d be out of power straight away. And the chief priests in the Temple needed to protect the fragile status quo of their city so as to make sure the Temple remained intact.
There were enemies on every side, but now also an enemy among Jesus’ own followers. Satan entered Judas Iscariot, John tells us. There are many theories about what motivated Judas. John’s Gospel presents him as a bad sort who stole from the common purse. But in that case why did Jesus tolerate him? Why had he called him in the first place? So had Judas had lost faith in Jesus, having presumed him to be what probably they all expected - a Messiah whose impact on Jerusalem would be political and military: a Messiah to remove the Romans and the Herods too, and restore the Kingdom of David. So why was nothing happening? Did Judas decide it was better to do a deal and then look elsewhere?
Or did he have a slightly different motive? Maybe it wasn’t that he’d lost faith in Jesus, but that he’d decided he needed to do something that would provoke Jesus into action; something to start the ball rolling. What better than to stage an attempt to arrest Jesus? Surely that would force him to fight back. That might explain his suicide. When the fight he’d hoped to provoke didn’t happen, Judas realised, too late, who Jesus really was.
We can’t know, we can only speculate. But when Jesus said of Judas, “It would be better for that man had he never been born” I don’t think he meant that in a condemnatory way; I believe his words were spoken with a huge depth of sadness. Jesus knew that when he came to his senses Judas would be loaded with a greater weight of grief than anyone could ever bear. And so it was.
With or without Judas, the forces of darkness were drawing ever closer. A feature of the Passiontide stories is the sense of arrangements being made in which the disciples themselves have no part. So who was arranging things, then? Who made sure people knew beforehand that a donkey was needed for the journey into the Holy City? Who made sure a room was made ready for the Passover supper to be prepared?
I have a theory. I think it was Mary and Martha. They lived just outside Jerusalem at Bethany and presumably knew people there. The disciples wouldn’t have, being Galileans. Mary and Martha were clearly very close to Jesus, added to which women might well attract less attention than men when arranging these things at a tense and dangerous time.
The story rings very true, anyway. The authorities wanted Jesus in custody, but they knew they’d no chance of making an arrest while Jesus was surrounded by crowds of people in the streets and squares of the city. They needed him to be in some quiet place, where there were as few supporters as possible to cause trouble or raise a hue and cry. Jesus himself chose that place, as we will see as we read the rest of the passion story. But in tonight’s reading Jesus needs a different quiet place, one his enemies won’t find, so that he can do this special thing - eat with his disciples the supper at which he’ll break bread and share wine using special and provocative words. words that join them and us to the cross. The disciples must look for a man carrying a water jar. That’s women’s work, not something you’d find a man doing. But he’s there and they follow him.
And when they enter the house he’s entered, they’re expected. They speak to the householder, who directs them to the room that’s been made ready. We don’t know who any these people were. Not the owners of the Palm Sunday donkey, nor the householder. People like to speculate: was the owner of the house Joseph of Arimathea, for example? But maybe it’s no-one we’ve heard of. What all of this does suggest is that, while most of the followers of Jesus were from Galilee, there was a Jerusalem network too. And surely one vital link was Mary and Martha.
When you read Luke’s account of the passion - or any of the others - what strikes you (what strikes me, anyway) is the amount of careful planning that’s gone into it all, in which Jesus is working closely with some trusted allies. They may not have known quite why they were doing what they did, and the disciples themselves seem almost blissfully unaware until the last moment: but Jesus himself was very deliberately poking a stick into the hornet’s nest of his enemies, forcing their hand almost - backing them into a corner from which they were pretty much bound to take the course of action they eventually did.
This is what he knew he must do, and the timing of it all was all as he arranged it. In other words, this is a deliberate act of sacrifice, not the sabotaging of his plans by others. Jesus knew by now what Judas was going to do, and he knew that the garden was the place where he would be taken. But before that he needed to do this vital and special thing that would connect his disciples in - connect us in too - to that sacrifice. A Passover meal, a celebration of God’s deliverance - at which he will say, “This is my body, do this in remembrance of me.” Only he can do this work, but he chooses to join us to what he alone can do. Soon the disciples will see their master a broken man, hauled away by unbeatable powers. Except that what really happened was the exact opposite of that. What we really see is Jesus choosing to do what he alone can do, while his enemies are mere pawns in that play.
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