Good Friday
After Judas left the room where Jesus and the other disciples were finishing their supper, John says Jesus took advantage of their last, fleeting, sociable moments together to teach more truths: “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you, so should you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34–35).
“And when they had sung a hymn, they went out into the Mount of Olives,” Matthew says. The mood is tired and drowsy after the supper, and the disciples' voices are clear but seem distant or ethereal as they walk in the dark out of the city to the place called Gethsemane. Holy Land geographers describe Gethsemane as an area in “the Kidron gully,” a narrow valley or arroyo (as they are called in the American southwest, Spanish for “dry creek”) that runs adjacent to the Mount of Olives and continues out of the city all the way to the Dead Sea.
factum
Gethsemane is now the site of many Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cemeteries. Perhaps there were burial grounds there then, too, which may be the origin of the place being called “the garden of Gethsemane,” even though it is barren, rocky, and desert-like. But there were also olive trees, including some that botanists believe were already a thousand years old by the first Good Friday.
Though it was still Thursday night when they left the room where the Last Supper took place (as the Jewish calendar reckons one day to the next from sunset to sunset), it was already Good Friday. And though the Passion of the Christ is mainly thought of in terms of his trial before Pilate in the morning, along with the whippings by the Roman arresting officers, and Jesus carrying his own cross out to Golgotha, another view is that the real Passion was the final hours he spent that night with his disciples praying in Gethsemane.
