Come to the table

The flame on the oil lamp flickered as a cool breeze pushed the fabric hanging in the doorway to one side. The evening air was refreshing to Peter as he watched the sun disappear behind the western wall of the Temple signaling the beginning of the Passover festival. This was a special Wednesday, High Sabbath, which happened to fall right before their weekly Saturday Sabbath.  

The flame on the oil lamp flickered as a cool breeze pushed the fabric hanging in the doorway to one side. The evening air was refreshing to Peter as he watched the sun disappear behind the western wall of the Temple signaling the beginning of the Passover festival. This was a special Wednesday, High Sabbath, which happened to fall right before their weekly Saturday Sabbath.  

The atmosphere was filled with various aromas from all sorts of street vendors who had set up shop wherever they could find room. Peter busied himself with cleaning up the upper room while the other men shopped for what they needed for tonight’s supper. There was barely enough room to squeeze through the crowd as they made their way up to the apartment where Peter was waiting.  

All the disciples were occupied with tonight’s preparation for the evening meal except for Judas. He had quietly disappeared to the high priests’ house where he was making arrangements to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.  Before leaving he gave the leader of the Temple Guard final instructions on where they would find Jesus later that night. 

In some ways it’s funny that Jesus himself had handpicked these twelve men.  You would have thought the Master would have taken the cream of the crop from one of Jerusalem’s highly esteemed rabbinical schools but as it turned out many were just ordinary uneducated fishermen pulled from their boats while fishing in the Sea of Galilee.  In fact, all of the disciples were uneducated except for Matthew who had been trained in basic math and other accounting skills needed for collecting taxes.  

Our God has a wonderful sense of humor as well as purpose as we observe Jesus giving Judas the responsibility of keeping the fellowships’ moneybox that was akin to allowing a fox to guard the hen house. Judas’ love for money was stronger than his love for the Lord and now the man who would ultimately sell Him out was regularly skimming off the donations he was taking in. 

Jesus knew what was inside each man’s heart and purposely gave them opportunity to struggle with temptations and character flaws that haunted them.  For weeks now Peter, John, James and others had been arguing about who was the greatest disciple in the group.  They daily competed for recognition from Jesus and others He was teaching and ministering to. Soon their pride had swelled to the point where not a single disciple wanted to serve anymore at the front door to wash the feet of guests who were coming in.

Despite all of this, Jesus invited all of his disciples to come to the table and dine with him. He loved them all, even with all their faults and even dirty feet they were still invited to sit at the table with Him and celebrate Passover. This night, however, was going to be very different as the Master was about to change the very center of their religious lives. 

 Jesus was about to make a new covenant with the Jews as the four cups of Passover were being poured. The contract was being modeled after an ancient Hebrew marriage proposal. The four Passover cups were raised each in its proper order and were a very ancient Jewish Seder tradition. They highlight and relate to specific promises God made with the nation of Israel as He delivered them from under the heavy yoke of Egyptian slavery. 

It’s interesting that God commanded the Passover celebration to be an everlasting covenant that would continue into eternity. It was to be an annual celebration to remember what God had already done and what He would do one day yet future.  Even before the Egyptian captivity, as we look back to the days of the Israel’s patriarchs, we can begin to see God’s plan of salvation as He provides a ram as a substitution sacrifice for Isaac and pronounced to Abraham that “I will provide Myself as a sacrifice”. Then thousands of years later, when the world was ready, God fulfilled this promise, as Jesus becomes the Lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world. 

In the Apostle John’s vision of heaven we see that Jesus will bear the wounds from the crucifixion for eternity as a reminder that God indeed provided Himself as the lamb to pay for our sin. For now, while we are in this age, our Creator invites us to come and sit at His table and taste to see that what He has provided is good. He invites us but does not compel us to come, even in spite of our character flaws and dirty feet, where one day Jesus will drink the fourth cup of praise to His everlasting kingdom.