fear to be defiled witli the toucli of Pilate's pavement ? Doth so small a gnat stick in your throats, while ye swallow such a camel of flagitious wickedness ? Go out of Jerusalem, ye false disbelievers, if ye would not be unclean ! Pilate hath more cause to fear, lest his walls should be defiled with the presence of such prodigious monsters of iniquity."
Poole remarks, " Nothing is more common than for persons over zealous about rituals to be remiss about morals."
\^That...eat...passox)eri\ This sentence contains an undeniable difficulty. How could the Jews eat the passover now, when our Lord and His disciples had eaten it the evening before ? That our Lord would eat the passover at the right time we may assume as a matter of course, and that time was Thurs- day evening. WTiat then can be meant by the chief priests, and elders, and leaders of the Jews, eating the passover on Friday? This is a question which has received various an- swers.
{a) Some think that in our Lord's time the whole Jewish Church had fallen into such disorder, and had so fallen away from original purity, that the passover was not kept strictly according to the primary institution, and might be eaten on al- most any day within the passover feast.
(&) Some think that it was considered allowable to eat the passover at any time between sunset one day and sunset the next day, so long as it was eaten within the twenty- four hours.
(c) Some think that the passover eating here mentioned was not the eating of the passover lamb, but the eating of the pass- over feast, called " chagigah," which took place every day dur- ing the passover week. — This is Lightfoot's view.
{d) Some think that as there is no law without an exception, and even the law of the passover admitted of alteration in case of necessity (see Num. ix. 11), so the chief priests persuaded themselves that as they had been occupied by duty — the duty (forsooth !) of apprehending our blessed Lord — throughout the night when they ought to have kept the passover, they were justified in deferring it till the ne^t day.
All these, it must be confessed, are only conjectures. There is probably some explanation which, at this distance of time, we are unable to supply. For the present the third and fourth suggestions seem to me the most reasonable.
Chrysostom observes, " Either John calls the whole feast the passover, or means that they were then keeping the passover ; while Jesus delivered it to His followers one day sooner, reserv- ing His own sacrifice for His preparation day, when also of old His passion was celebrated."'
One thing at any rate is very plain and noteworthy. The chief priests and their party made much ado about eating the