Luke 22:1–23 sermon on Judas, the Passover, and Jesus as the Lamb of God
Rev Harry Newton preaches on Luke 22:1–23 at SumRed Church, Sumner, New Zealand.
Summary
Rev Harry Newton delivers a sermon on Luke 22:1–23, placing the passage in the context of the final days of Jesus' life as recorded in the Gospel of Luke. He traces the conspiracy between the religious authorities and Judas Iscariot, examines the significance of the Passover festival as the backdrop for Jesus' final meal with his disciples, and argues that Jesus deliberately and secretly arranged that meal to avoid premature arrest. The sermon's central theological argument is that Jesus is the fulfilment of the Passover lamb — the one whose blood, like the lamb's blood on the Israelites' doorposts in Exodus, stands between humanity and divine judgment. Newton draws on Isaiah 53, Paul's letters, and the Gospel of John to argue that Jesus' death was not merely a historical injustice but a deliberate act of atonement, and that communion is a continuing proclamation of that redemptive act.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome and Introduction
Rev Harry Newton: Welcome to church. Good morning. Let's all say good morning. There we go. That's awesome. You remember going to school, and your teacher would always do that to you? Yeah, that's the one. I went to eight schools, and my last school was Wellington College. Mr. Moses would walk into the room and he'd say, "Morning, gentlemen," and we'd all stand at attention: "Morning, sir." I was new and did not know this. I came from a school where you didn't even acknowledge the teacher existed, and I was called out for that. And I've always remembered — every morning we saw Mr. Moses: "Morning, Mr. Moses, sir," and you'd clip your heels together like you're in the military. Anyway, story for another day.
Welcome to church. We're in the final segment of the Gospel of Luke, one of four accounts of Jesus' life, ministry, death, and resurrection. As I've said many times before, my favourite version of the Jesus story. Outside, of course, the Gospel of Thomas, which is a heretical version where the baby Jesus is a complete psychopath — he kills other children by turning them to stone because they bumped into him during a game of tag. All right, so we take that one out of the mix — that was a joke, just for the record. No one laughed. I think it's hilariously bad. But take that one out of the mix, and my favourite version is the Gospel of Luke.
Where We Are in the Story
We're coming to the pointy end of the stick. Up to Chapter 19, Jesus has been on the road. Chapter 19, he's arrived. Chapter 20, he's had some back and forth, as we explored over the last couple of weeks. And now, right where we are, we see Jesus coming down to the final showdown with the powers that be. Because within a few hours of the end of our reading, Jesus will be arrested, he'll be falsely tried, and he will be unjustly executed — nailed to a cross and left to expire in his own bodily fluids. And what allowed all that to happen was old mate Judas.
Now, if you've been with us over the last few weeks, or over the last year as we've broken this into a series of stages for ease of learning, you might recall that at this point in the story Jesus is in Jerusalem, the Jewish holy city. He's teaching crowds in the temple courts. He's engaging in debates with the Jewish authorities. He's undermining their authority, and they don't like him. Part of the reason they don't like him is because he's been having a go at them and undermining their standing. But as we discovered last week, there's another reason. They were trying to get rid of Jesus because they saw him as an existential threat to the Jewish state. The Romans were known for being incredibly cruel, and if someone was seen to be gathering a following around them, there was a fear that the Romans would come and crush that following and, by extension, destroy anybody else who was vaguely associated with it. And so after a hui to discuss this threat that was Jesus, they agreed to kill him in order to protect their people.
Meanwhile, while they're having this hui, Jesus arrives in Jerusalem. He brings a guy called Lazarus back from the dead. He comes into Jerusalem, goes straight to the temple courts. If you know the Jesus story, you might remember that he flipped the tables and chased a whole bunch of people out of the temple and caused a bit of a ruckus. He's there for about a week, teaching and proclaiming the good news, as it says in the scriptures. And it's while he's in the temple preaching that, quote, "keeping a close watch on him, they sent spies who pretended to be sincere. They hoped to catch Jesus in something he said, so they might hand him over to the governor."
Now, we won't rehash it, but as we discovered over the last couple of weeks — particularly when Rowena shared for us a couple of weeks back — that's sort of what happened in that mix, and they couldn't make anything stick. And so by the time we get to our story this morning, the religious authorities are running out of options, and they're running out of time.
Enter Judas
Enter Judas. We're told he went away. Now, we don't know why. People will come up with lots of different reasons. There's a theory that he was in charge of the common purse and he was a bit greedy and had been dipping into it and stealing. That is implied in Scripture. Some people say he was upset because he was actually a zealot and Jesus wasn't doing what he wanted him to do. Others — as in today's passage in the Gospel of Luke — say the devil came into him. We don't know exactly what his frame of mind was, or what logic led him to make this decision. All we know is that he made the decision to go to the authorities and become complicit in handing Jesus over.
And they must have seen it as an answer to prayer, right? Here's this guy they've been trying to get hold of for the last three years, and finally someone from his inner circle comes and says he'll hand him over for thirty pieces of silver. A decent amount of money, but money well spent if they can get him. So we're told Judas began to look for an opportunity to betray Jesus to them when no crowd was present.
The Day of Unleavened Bread
Then came the Day of Unleavened Bread. Now, the Day of Unleavened Bread is not actually a day. Luke — you might remember, if you were with us back at the beginning of the series — is a Hellenistic Jew. That means he's a Jew who didn't grow up in Jerusalem or Israel. He's a Jew who grew up elsewhere, in the Diaspora, in Rome. And he shows throughout his account, through little details like this, that he doesn't quite understand the context about which he's writing. He never met Jesus. He researched it thoroughly. So, for example, we hear earlier in the Gospels about tiles on a roof — they remove the tiles to break through. No Jewish home would have had tiles, because it was frowned upon to have Hellenistic-style architecture. Jews didn't use tiles; they used mud roofs with thatch. This is another small example of how he got something slightly wrong.
Where he says "the Day of Unleavened Bread," it's actually the Festival of Unleavened Bread, which is part of the Festival of Passover. The day before Passover kicks off, they would go around the house and gather all the bits of leavened bread and burn them, because you weren't allowed to have anything leavened in the house before Passover began. So he's referring to the Day of Unleavened Bread — he's actually revealing something about himself — but he's also telling us this is the day before the Passover festival kicks off. That places us in time, probably early April. We can actually count roughly to what day all of this happened. Really interesting stuff, I personally think.
The Passover Festival
Now, the Passover festival was an incredibly important time — actually a week — in the communal life of what it meant to be an Israelite. Everyone, be they peasant, king, priest, soldier, or homeless person — it didn't matter who you were — everybody celebrated this festival. And this meant that there'd be no crowds out in the streets, because everyone would be indoors engaged in their religious celebrations. You know on Christmas Day when you get up early and walk outside and there's no traffic around? Fantastic, right? I do church on Christmas Eve evening, stay up late watching Die Hard — because you have to, it's Christmas — and then I get up early and go to church again. And usually when I get up on a normal Sunday, there are all the Harry Hardcore types running around doing their fitness early in the morning. Never on Christmas morning. It's crickets. It's awesome. Similar idea here. Everybody's inside doing their thing. What an awesome opportunity to come for Jesus.
Jesus Secretly Plans the Passover Meal
Now, if we skip ahead a few verses, we hear Jesus say, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer," which some people think explains why Jesus organized such a mysterious meal. Their premise being that Jesus made plans in secret for their Passover meal together so that he could avoid his impending arrest, because he knew that Judas was trying to corner him for a time when there was no crowd to protect him. Now, there's no actual hard evidence to back that up — it's just a series of circumstantial things that come together — but it makes sense in light of everything else that's going on.
Because think about it: the plan that Jesus made for that Passover is pretty mysterious. He calls Peter and John to himself and says, "Go prepare the Passover meal for us so we may eat it." To which they answer, "Where? Where do you want us to make preparations?" — which implies this is the first time they've heard of Jesus' plans. And Jesus tells them that when they've entered the city, "a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him into the house he enters, and say to the owner of the house, 'The Teacher asks, where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?' And he will show you a large room upstairs, already furnished."
The "already furnished" detail indicates that Jesus had pre-arranged this, because a guest room would be organized depending on the needs of the travelers coming through. Around the time of Passover, they would set these rooms up as communal spaces where a lot of people could celebrate a meal together.
The Mystery of John Mark
There's also a lot going on here that's really unclear. Who is the man carrying the water jar? Why is he carrying a jar and not a water skin? That might sound odd to you, but women carried jars of water, men carried skins of water. It sounds a bit silly to us, but in their culture that was a woman's task — I'm not agreeing with it, just saying that's what they believed. So why is a man carrying a jar? Is it some sort of secret code? And whose house is it?
Tradition states the man is a young guy called John Mark. Peter dictated his version of the Jesus story to John Mark, who wrote it down as what we now know as the Gospel of Mark. Legend has it that Mark was carrying a jar because his mother was unwell and they were too poor to have staff, so he had gone to get the water himself, and Jesus knew he'd be there. He took them back to his house. There are details that don't quite add up — like who is the master of the house referred to in the masculine in the text — but the early church was so convinced about this tradition that when Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD and left dormant for a few hundred years before being re-established as a Roman colony, and Christians were allowed to return before Jews — because Jews weren't permitted to re-enter Jerusalem for a long time — when they came back, they sought out where they believed John Mark's mother's house had been and rebuilt it as a place of worship. To this day, you can still visit the same house. Kind of cool, right? We don't know if that's true.
The point is there's a lot that's unclear. Luke spent years traveling the region, interviewing people, and gathering all the details to make what he called an orderly and accurate account of the Jesus story, and he doesn't bother to tell us these details. Why not? He doesn't think they matter. What is clear is that Jesus had secretly organized a meal for Passover without telling his mates, and the reason may or may not have been Judas. All we know is that when Peter and John arrived, they found everything as he had told them. And so when the hour came, Jesus took his place at the table and the apostles with him.
What Is Passover?
And he said to them, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer." Which begs the question: what's Passover?
When I was in youth group growing up, I remember asking my youth leader what various things meant, and he'd say, "Oh, it's in the Bible somewhere. Go read it." In church, we often assume everyone understands what a word means. So — what is the Passover festival?
The very first Passover occurs in the book of Exodus in the Old Testament. It's when God instructed the Israelites to mark their doorposts with blood. Some of you know this story. They mark them with blood so that the angel of death, as it's called, will pass over the household during the tenth and final plague — the death of the firstborn male in every household. This plague is the climax of a series of plagues sent to persuade Pharaoh to release the Israelites from slavery. That night, every firstborn in a household not marked by this blood died, including Pharaoh's son. And in light of that, Pharaoh finally agreed to free the Israelites. So Passover, to this day, commemorates the ancient Israelites' deliverance and the beginning of their journey to freedom through what we now know as the Exodus.
To share Passover was an incredibly poignant spiritual act for a first-century Jew. But for Jesus, there's more to it than that. Something else is going on that makes it all the more significant. And he tells us why. He says, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer." He knows what's about to happen. He knows he's about to be arrested, unjustly treated, and executed. And he understands why. He understands that his impending suffering isn't just an awful betrayal at the hands of a close friend, but a deliberate and necessary part of God's redemptive plan for the world.
Jesus as the Passover Lamb
Just as the blood of the lamb once marked the doors of the Israelites' homes, shielding them from death and leading them to freedom, Jesus was now presenting himself as the ultimate lamb, whose blood would bring not just physical deliverance but eternal salvation.
We miss this often as twenty-first century Kiwis — that the Jesus story is deeply rooted in Jewish culture, because Jesus was Jewish. This is really important to understand. And this is why Paul, an early leader in the church, wrote in his letter to the church in Corinth that "Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed." He's saying Jesus is essentially the new Passover lamb. In the same way the original lamb spared the Israelites, Jesus as the new lamb spares you.
That idea of Jesus being the Passover lamb — and I appreciate this language might sound a bit strange to us sitting here in Sumner — but this is the language of first-century Jewish thought. And it wasn't something new. It wasn't something Jesus made up, or that someone like Paul sat down a few years later and thought, "Oh, that kind of makes sense now, let's write it down." It was actually foretold in the Jewish scriptures. There's a guy called Isaiah, a prophet, who once described a "suffering servant who would be like a lamb led to the slaughter." That's in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah.
This vision from Isaiah wasn't random. It was deeply rooted in Israel's own history and collective memory. But to fully grasp its significance, we have to go back to that first defining moment of Jewish deliverance — the very first Passover.
The First Passover in Detail
When the Israelites painted their doorposts with the blood of a lamb, they then got dressed. It tells us in Exodus that they girded their loins. Men wore a garment called a galabiyya — I wore one when I went to school in Egypt. It's like a dress for men. They would gather it up and tie it around their groin to make it like underpants. The idea is that you are girded — you can move quickly, you won't trip on it. They were to gird their loins, gather their small, measly possessions into a little satchel, and cook the lamb. But they weren't to gut it. They were to cook everything, including its organs — every single part of the lamb was to be eaten. It's a bit gross, isn't it? Every part. And anything that couldn't be eaten, they were to burn. The reason they were told to be ready to move was because Moses warned them they needed to be ready at a moment's notice, because Pharaoh might change his mind.
I've always wondered what it was like for people with young children, trying to explain to little Johnny that he has to eat his dinner. "Hurry up, your father's not going to eat the whole meal by himself." It would have been pretty fearful, I imagine, as they prepared for that first Passover meal and dabbed blood across their door frames. We like to think of ancient people as being a bit strange and superstitious, but I think they would have found the whole thing just as strange as we would. Just as much as if I came to you today and said, "When you get home, you've got to go buy a lamb, slit its throat, and dab your window frames and door frames with blood." You would look at me and think, "That's a bit strange, I'm going to find a new church." They were the same.
The Theological Meaning
Now, this whole marking-your-doorway-with-the-blood-of-the-lamb thing was not just a strange spiritual ritual. It was literally a matter of life and death, because the blood marked them as those under God's protection. Without it, they would face the same judgment as the Egyptians — the death of every firstborn male in every household.
But — and this is the most crucial part to understand from the story — the ancient Israelites did not save themselves. They were saved because they trusted in something outside of themselves that stood between them and judgment.
Now, this story from the book of Exodus isn't just relevant to the ancient Israelites, and it's not just relevant to a twenty-first century Jewish person. The first Passover sets the stage for something greater, something the New Testament picks up on and applies in a far more personal way.
According to the Bible, you and I are in our own form of Egypt. You might not be living under the thumb of a pharaoh. I've heard some people tell me they think we live under a dictatorship. No, we don't. Trust me — I've lived in dictatorships as a child. We don't. We have a lot of freedom. Life is pretty good. And yet we are in a form of Egypt. What do I mean by that? We might not be under the thumb of a dictator or a king, but we are under the weight of something just as oppressive: sin.
That word is pretty old-fashioned and can sound pretty religious — dark and judgy. And if you're not a church person, I appreciate it could carry some baggage for you, and I want to acknowledge that, because that's completely fair. But here's the thing: what sin means is simply that we are not who we are meant to be. And regardless of your spiritual orientation, you know this to be true. We all fail to live perfectly even by our own standards, don't we? I'm not going to ask who's ever bought a gym membership and not gone, but I'll put my hand up — that was me. We all fail in various different ways. I know I do.
People often assume that because I'm a pastor, I've got everything together. My wife's smiling at me because she knows that's not true. It's a weird thing, but people genuinely put me on a little bit of a pedestal. Here's the thing though: I'm often selfish when I should be generous. I withhold forgiveness when I should extend it. I am slow to forgive at times, just like everybody else. I drop the ball in various different ways in my own life. And so do you — not meaning that judgmentally. We all do. Why? Because we're human. We're all human, and we're broken, and we can't fix ourselves. That's why Paul wrote to the early church in Rome that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." He was trying to sum up this reality.
But the crucial thing to remember is that sin is not just about moral imperfection. What sin leads to is spiritual separation from God. God is holy and pure — without blemish or imperfection — which means God can't ignore sin. He can't brush aside wrongdoing. If he did, he would no longer be good and holy, and therefore he would cease to be God. And so that puts us in an impossible situation. How can God forgive anyone if that's the case? How can he extend mercy without compromising his own character? And therein lies the mystery and the beauty of the Christian faith.
Atonement and the Cross
Just as the Israelites were spared on that first Passover through the blood of the lamb, you and I are redeemed through the blood of Jesus, the ultimate Lamb of God. That's why in another version of the Jesus story — the Gospel of John — Jesus is introduced to us as "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." If you've ever heard that phrase and not understood what it's talking about, it's referring back to the Passover.
Jesus is the lamb who — to quote Tim Keller, who's a bit of a hero of mine — lived the life we should have lived and died the death we deserved. Jesus steps into our place. He absorbs the judgment that we earn, and he offers us redemption and acceptance from God in return. And this is what we mean in theological circles by the word atonement.
Jesus doesn't just sympathize with us. Anyone can sympathize — "Oh, I'm so sorry that terrible thing happened to you. Doesn't it suck that you did X, Y, and Z? I appreciate you're really sorry. That's really awful." But that's not enough. Jesus doesn't sympathize. He saves. He takes on our guilt, bears our righteous punishment, and restores our broken relationship to God.
And the betrayal of Judas — who sat at the table with Jesus that night and shared a meal with him, sipped from the same cup and dipped bread in the same bowl — his betrayal adds an incredibly sobering depth to this reality. Because his betrayal reminds us that judgment is real, that turning away from God carries consequences. That is not a very comfortable thing to say out loud. But here's the thing: Judas shows us that, because it didn't end well for him.
The Invitation: No One Is Beyond Redemption
And yet — and this is a strange dichotomy we hold in the Christian faith — at the heart of the Christian message is the belief that no one, not even someone like Judas, is beyond redemption. As Peter, another leader in the early church, boldly proclaimed in his first sermon to a crowd in Jerusalem: "Everyone who calls on the name of Jesus shall be saved." Not just the religious. Not just the conservative or the liberal or fill-in-the-blank virtuous person. Not just the good. Everyone.
That is the good news of the Christian faith: that you are not acceptable to God because of yourself, but in spite of yourself. There is nothing you can do to earn God's favour. Your acceptance before God is not earned — it's given. And that frees you from having to live a life where you're always feeling guilty and trying to be a better person to earn God's forgiveness and acceptance. That's the good news of Christianity: you are not acceptable to God because of who you are, but in spite of who you are.
Communion as Proclamation
And this is part of what gives communion so much power. When Jesus' followers gather to share bread and the cup — just like Jesus did at that final Passover with his mates — when we gather to share bread and wine just like they did, we're not just reminding ourselves of an ancient event. We're entering again into the event itself. So when Jesus said, "Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me," he's offering us an invitation to remember him and his sacrifice. And in the act of sharing communion, we are declaring that our hope does not rest on ourselves or on what we have done, but on what Jesus has done for us at the cross.
As Paul wrote to the early church: "For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes."
Communion isn't just about remembrance. It's a proclamation. Communion tells the world — and reminds us — that Jesus died for us, that his redemption is still available, and that he will one day return to make all things new. And in that simple, sacred act, we are retelling the truth about ourselves: that we are more broken than we dare admit, and we are more loved than we could ever imagine.
So what we're going to do now is come forward and share in some prayers, and then we're going to have communion together, just the way Jesus told us to. And as we do so, my invitation to you is to remember that your hope does not rest on yourself. Your hope doesn't rest on your actions, or on how moral or how good you are. Your hope rests in Jesus Christ alone — that through his sacrifice on the cross, you are acceptable in the eyes of God, simply because of him. And when we take communion, we're reminding ourselves of this amazing, good truth.