The last supper MAT 26:26

Jesus shared the Passover meal with his disciples in a borrowed upper room in Jerusalem. He took the bread that the meal had always used to recall the exodus from Egypt, broke it, and said it was his body; then he gave them a cup and called it the new covenant in his blood. Before this he had washed their feet and told them that one of them would betray him.

Washing feet was ordinary work left to the lowest servant in a household, not to a teacher or master. By doing it himself, Jesus acted out, before the meal even began, the kind of lowering he would speak of at the table. It was a deliberate reversal of roles, not simply a courtesy or a matter of cleanliness.

For fifteen centuries the Passover meal had looked back to God's rescue of Israel from Egypt; Jesus takes that same meal and turns it to point forward, sealed now by his own blood. Christians read this differently: some understand Christ as truly present in the bread and cup, others see it as a memorial or spiritual sign, and Matthew records Jesus' words without settling that question. What the text gives is the statement itself, not an explanation of how it works.

The passage gives no indication that Judas left before the bread and cup were shared; Jesus speaks of the betrayal in the same scene where he gives his body and blood to all of them. A common misreading imagines Judas already set apart or excluded by this point, but the text simply says Jesus knew and announced it while still sharing the meal with the whole group. Nothing in the account describes anyone reacting with anger toward him.