A Dark Night
April 1st. A day when many are pulling pranks on friends and family while others are reflecting on the night Jesus and the disciples shared before He was crucified. Maybe your day has included a little of both.
I can only imagine what Jesus must have felt like eating with His disciples, full of heaviness concerning what the next morning would bring while His disciples were totally oblivious. It wasn’t that He hadn’t tried to prepare them. He had. But there was no way that they could grasp the gravity of the situation.
Maybe they thought that He was being overly dramatic. Maybe God in His mercy kept them from understanding what was about to take place until they absolutely had to know. Regardless, His words about dying and leaving them seemed to go through twelve ears and out the others. Jesus must have felt so alone sitting at supper that night.
More amazing than anything was the fact that, when they asked Jesus who it was that was going to betray Him, He told them, and they totally missed that too.
A while later, He and eleven of His disciples went out to Gethsemane. He allowed Peter, James, and John to go with Him a little further and asked them to watch and pray with Him. I expect that they still didn’t grasp what was happening or they probably couldn’t have slept. Here Jesus was surrounded by His closest friends, but He was functionally alone during His greatest trial. He woke them up a couple of times and then finally let them sleep, knowing they would need their rest to get through the days ahead.
I can only imagine the terror they felt when they were rudely awakened by an angry mob wielding swords and torches. Peter sprang into action, taking his own sword and cutting off a soldier’s ear. He no doubt thought this was when Jesus would rise up and overthrow the Roman government, with some help from His followers of course. But He could not have been more mistaken. Instead, Jesus told Peter to put his sword away. Then He healed the soldier’s ear!
Later that evening, as Peter was in the distance, trying to see what would become of Jesus, he denied three times that he had known the One that he had once called Lord. After hearing the rooster crow, Peter’s heart smote him, and he wept in remorse. Judas, on the other hand, realizing that he had made a grave mistake, went out and hung himself. Jesus would have graciously forgiven Judas, but instead of asking, Judas ended his life.
Scripture doesn’t record where most of the other disciples were at this point. I expect they had gone into hiding. And who could blame them? The Romans were not a people that one would want to spar with. If they arrested Jesus, it wouldn’t be long before they would go after His followers.
And so the evening ends. Jesus is on trial, His followers are scattered. One disciple is dead, and one is full of remorse. Surely, things can’t get any worse. Or can they?
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