Mark 14:26 Commentary and Bible Study

After they had sung an hymn, or as the original more precisely says, ‘after they had hymned’, because they probably saying three psalms; after they had psalmed – three psalms associated with the passover – ‘they went out into the mount of Olives.’What is the time? Probably it is 11:00 at night. The Lord’s Supper had been followed by a long discourse by the Lord. You find it all recorded in John’s Gospel chapter 14, 15, 16, culminating in the great high-priestly prayer of John’s Gospel in chapter 17. All these things took a long time. You can’t imagine it would be much before 11 at night, before they went out and headed off to the Mount of Olives.‘They sung an hymn,’ that was the end. Possibly it was the same hymn that you would have sung at the end of the passover, if it hadn’t changed into the Lord’s Supper. That included Psalm 118. If you look particularly at the latter verses, verses 18-29, you see what an appropriate hymn it was for them to sing. How descriptive it is of Christ and his offering and what he has done, but you can only see it there with hindsight. Now that we are at the Lord’s Supper we sing explicitly of the body and blood of the Lord and what he has done. We sing New Testament hymns, as it were, just as they do in Revelation 5. When you are told about the words of the hymn, which the angelic hosts sang and all sang with them, the four-and-twenty elders and the church of Christ, Old Testament and New Testament, what are they singing in heaven? Says Revelation 5, they are singing explicitly about the blood of the Lamb, the priesthood of all believers, the wonderful things that Christ has done and we must sing the same and we do. So they sang a hymn and they went out into the night.