A supper having commenced; or, being then in progress £—without doubt the meal in which our Lord terminated the Old Testament dispensation and introduced the New, and which John discriminates, therefore, from the Passover proper referred to in verse 1.
The evangelist now reverts to the diabolic design which had been injected into the heart of Judas. The devil having already cast into the heart (of Judas) that he—Meyer's suggestion that the devil put this design into his own heart, does not lighten the construction, and encumbers the passage with ideas which are foreign to the Bible—(even) Judas, (the son) of Simon, the Iscariot, should betray him.
£ The idea came from the devil, but the purpose of the devil was not irrevocable. The evangelist looked through his tears of love to the traitor's face as he sat at meat, and felt how the very excess and uttermost and hyperbole of love was reached and scaled by the contact between the treachery of the one and the Divine humiliation of the other.
The contrast between these two mental states is one of the most striking antitheses in the Gospel. But how should John know that Judas had already plotted the betrayal of his Master? Hengstenberg makes the wise suggestion that the fourth evangelist was acquainted with the synoptic tradition of the priority of Judas's bargain with the chief priests.