Charles Ellicott Commentary Luke 22:15

"And he said unto them, With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer:" — Luke 22:15 (ASV)

With desire I have desired.—The peculiar mode of expressing intensity by the use of a cognate noun with the verb of action, though found sometimes in other languages, is an idiom characteristically Hebrew (compare thou shalt surely die for dying thou shalt die, in Genesis 2:17), and its use here suggests the thought that Saint Luke heard what he reports from someone who repeated the very words which our Lord had spoken in Aramaic.

The whole passage is peculiar to him, and implies that he had sought to fill up the gaps in the current oral teaching which is reproduced in Saint Matthew and Saint Mark.

It was natural that in so doing he might feel some uncertainty as to the precise position of these supplementary incidents, and hence the difficulties, of no great importance, which present themselves on a comparison of the three narratives.

The words now before us obviously bear the impression of having been spoken at the beginning of the Feast. The Master yearned, if we may so speak, for a last Passover with His “friends,” as we yearn for a last Communion with ours; all the more so, we may believe, because it was in His purpose to perfect the former by transfiguring it into the latter.

The words have been thought to confirm the view that our Lord was anticipating by twenty-four hours the strictly legal time of the Passover. It must be admitted, however, that they do not in themselves suggest that thought. All that can be said is that they fall in with it, if proved on independent evidence.