The disciples prepared the Passover

Mark 14:16

And the disciples went out and came to the city and found it just as He had told them; and they prepared the Passover. And when it was evening, He came with the twelve.

Nine plagues had passed: water turning to blood, frogs, lice, flies, livestock pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, and darkness (Exodus 7:14-10:27).

Still the descendants of Israel were enslaved by the Egyptians. Pharaoh refused to let them go.

The ruler was stubborn with a “hardened heart.” He could not escape his cultural perspective and the sense of societal balance that his gods decreed. He had no obligation to respond to the demands of slaves from the lowest class of Egyptian society. The very idea was absurd. These people were also the low-cost manpower that sustained the Egyptian economy. Pharaoh was influenced by the same reasoning that has enslaved and resigned people to poverty throughout history. It was the natural order of things.

 
And so, Yahweh sent one more plague (Exodus 11).
Passover (Hebrew peh'-sakh) was a remembrance the last of the terrible, tragic plagues: the death of every firstborn in Egypt “from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the first born of the slave-girl” (Exodus 11:5). The people were to sacrifice a lamb for each household, take some of the blood and put it on the doorposts and lintel of their houses. They were to eat the meal with the unleavened bread of haste with their loins girded, sandals on their feet, and staffs in their hands. “It is the Lord’s Passover… For when I see the blood I will pass over you and no plague shall befall you” (Exodus 12:11-13).

 
Pharaoh was convinced. “Get out from among my people. Take your flocks and herds as you have said and go” (Exodus 12:31).

The people left as they had prepared: in haste.

This story was in the minds of Jesus’ disciples as they prepared the Passover dinner. They remembered the deliverance of their ancestors from Egypt, when “They cried out to the Lord, the God of our fathers and the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction and our toil and our oppression and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” (Deuteronomy 26:7,8).

 
Judea had been under Roman rule for nearly a century. Before the Romans it was the Greeks, the Persians, Babylonians and Assyrians, each empire in succession rising and falling with the people of Israel under the oppressive reign of foreign kings and emperors. The Babylonian captivity had never really ended. They had never since been free. That history and the weight of continued Roman occupation was never far from the people’s minds.

 
But the Passover that Peter and John were preparing was different. There would be one more death of a Firstborn Son. Once more unbridled suffering, grief and death would take an innocent life.

 
The American general Douglas Macarthur of the last century said that a good leader is expected to look backward as well as forward.

But he must think only forward.

 
His disciples couldn’t see it yet. They likely still hoped for revolution.

But Jesus’ could. He was thinking forward.

He was about to unleash a different revolution.