North of the Shire

Holy Thursday.

I have always been a little fuzzy on the chronology of the Last Supper, the Garden of Gethsemane, the betrayal by Judas Iscariot and the trials of Jesus.

Listening to Steve Ray and others on Catholic radio I have been able to put it together because I heard a part of the puzzle that I had not known, or had been once taught and forgotten.  That is that Jesus, after being arrested and hauled before the Sanhedrin, was put into a pit, hung there in the darkness for what remained of the night, until he was pulled out early in the morning before dawn and taken to Pilate.  It seems that the Romans like to conduct business before noon because by the afternoon the cool of the morning was gone and it became unbearably hot.

But the imprisonment in the pit accounted for the time not strictly mentioned in all of the narratives.  So if I have this right Jesus went down into Jerusalem on the Thursday morning and that afternoon instructed the upper room be prepared for the beginning of the Passover, the Jewish day beginning at sundown.  After the Last Supper, which was the institution of the Eucharist, the priesthood and the commandment to love one another clearly taught by Christ in the washing of the feet;

he then went out to the garden where he prayed and the disciples had trouble keeping awake.  And it was here that Judas came with the escort to arrest Jesus.   He was taken then to the high priest and that would have been about midnight.  But it wasn’t until morning that they took him to Pilate.   It was in that intervening period that he was held in the pit.  As Steve Ray points out, we read the following in Psalm 88;

7 You plunged me into the bottom of the pit, into the darkness of the abyss.

8 Your wrath lies heavy upon me; all your waves crash over me. Selah

9 Because of you my friends shun me; you make me loathsome to them; Caged in, I cannot escape;

10 my eyes grow dim from trouble.

This Steve Ray points out is a prophetic forshadowing of the night that Jesus spent under arrest before he was taken to Pilate in the morning.