If Jesus told his disciples to get swords, why does he now tell them not to use them? This is sort of guesswork on the part of your reader, but I like to think that he told them to bring the swords so he could rebuke the use of them. What if Peter and the others thought they could have saved Jesus if they had only been armed? Would they have come back and tried to break him out of prison? Not so in this story. Jesus had the swords brought, and used the occasion to remind the disciples that he did not come to start a military movement, but a Kingdom of another kind.