Fearing the People

Jesus spent the last days before His arrest and crucifixion teaching daily in the temple, as Luke 21:37 reports. While many people went to hear His teaching (v. 38), not everyone was happy with His ministry. As we see in today’s passage, “the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to put him to death” (22:1–2).

All this happened as “the Feast of Unleavened Bread drew near,” a festival also “called the Passover” (v. 1). Originally, Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were two separate celebrations held to remember the exodus of Israel from Egypt under the leadership of Moses (Ex. 12:1–20; 12:43–51; 13:3–10). By the first century, however, the Jews had come to regard them as a single festival because the seven days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread immediately followed Passover and because the Jews ate unleavened bread during both feasts. The setting of the last week of Jesus’ life during the week of Passover forms the theological context for understanding the purpose of our Lord’s crucifixion. On the day of the very first Passover, the Israelites sacrificed lambs and spread the blood on their doors so that God would not execute the judgment on Israel that He executed on Egypt when He killed the Egyptians’ firstborn sons. This act of judgment set the Israelites free from slavery to Pharaoh, and they went forth in liberty. Jesus later died during the Passover as the perfect Lamb of God. His death constituted a propitiatory (wrath-averting) sacrifice; our Creator executed His wrath against our sin in the person of Jesus Christ, passing over us because we are marked by the blood of Jesus through faith in His person and atoning death. This death freed us from bondage to the power of sin, enabling us to enjoy true liberty, the freedom to do what pleases God. Thus, the New Testament calls Jesus our Passover and refers to His death as a propitiation (1 Cor. 5:7; 1 John 2:2; see also Rom. 6:22).

Luke 22:2 indicates that the Jewish religious authorities wanted to put Jesus to death because “they feared the people.” The Passover was a time of heightened tension between the Jews and the Romans because the Jews were remembering God’s promises of freedom, so they were tempted to revolt against their Roman overlords. The Jewish authorities wanted to put down any revolt before it happened, and they knew that crowds gathering around a popular figure such as Jesus might instigate trouble with Rome.