A Guide to Holy Week
Vol. 57 No. 18 Palm Sunday (Lent 6) March 29, 2026
Over the course of Holy Week, the Church reads the Passion narratives of all four Gospels in order. It is a great deal to absorb, and these notes are intended to help us follow the story with understanding. We may think of what follows under two headings: first, the theological meaning of the Passion; and second, its practical benefit.
First, the theological meaning. The main theme of the Passion narratives is forensic or judicial, the cross as an act of judgment—of Jesus condemned before earthly judges, the Jewish high priest and the Roman governor, then vindicated by the heavenly judge. And therefore the specific charges on which he is condemned by earthly judges are of the utmost importance, because it is these judgments that are overturned, and these claims that are upheld, when God raises him from the dead. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s accounts of the Jewish trial, the high priest demands that he affirm or deny that he is the Messiah, the Son of God. Jesus’ answer (in Matthew and Luke) is a qualified affirmation: “Thou hast said,” meaning, in effect, “Those are your words.” In the first-century Jewish context, both titles could be misunderstood. “Son of God” was a recognized metaphor for the Messiah’s special relationship with God, and “Messiah” could be interpreted in political and military terms, as a nationalist warrior-king. But Jesus then supplements this response with his own wording: “Ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.” To sit at the right hand of God is to share equally in God’s authority. This is not a claim to an earthly kingdom like David’s or Caesar’s, but to the sovereign authority of God himself, as mediator of judgment and salvation. To his Jewish hearers, such a claim was blasphemy. But to secure a death sentence from the Roman governor, the charge is translated into political language (sedition): “King of the Jews,” a rival to Caesar. Pilate is reluctant to condemn Jesus and recognizes his innocence, but his resistance collapses when mob violence is threatened. In condemning a man he knows to be innocent, Pilate abandons Rome’s claim to impartial justice, and makes himself the tool of the world in its rebellion against God. John’s passion narrative (read on Good Friday) gives a fuller account of Jesus’ interrogation before Pilate. What emerges is Pilate’s growing and uneasy recognition that Jesus is not merely a human agent, but in some sense a divine one—the Son of God in more than a metaphorical sense, whose kingship is not from below, but from above. Though Pilate ultimately yields to pressure and condemns Jesus, he takes a kind of revenge by forcing the chief priests to declare, “We have no king but Caesar,” an implicit denial that God is Israel’s true king. Thus, Israel’s claim to true religion is exposed, along with Rome’s claim to impartial justice. In the world’s judgment of Jesus, it is the world itself—both Jewish and Gentile – that is already judged.
There are also important differences in emphasis among the four Passion accounts. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus is depicted as the suffering servant who bears the alienation of human sin: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” He is forsaken, that we who trust in him might never be forsaken. Luke softens this stark portrait and highlights instead the compassion of Jesus and the conversion he elicits, especially in the penitent thief, who becomes a pattern for our own response to the crucified Christ. In John, the emphasis falls on the sovereign freedom and authority of Jesus, who remains in control of events and brings his work to completion with the triumphant cry, “It is finished.”
In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the vindication of Jesus that is manifested in his resurrection begins immediately after his death, in the confession of the centurion: “Truly this man was the Son of God.” In John, the vindication begins when the soldier pierces Jesus’ side and blood and water flow out—signs of the cleansing and life-giving power of his death.
In broad strokes, this is the theological meaning of the Passion. The Epistle to the Hebrews directs us to the practical benefit of Christ’s Passion, by placing the death of Christ within the framework of priesthood and sacrifice. Christ is both priest and victim: who on our behalf offers himself to God as the perfect sacrifice, atoning for sin and establishing a new covenant of God and man. That is to say, he is our representative, he acts for us, and if we are united to him by faith, if we entrust ourselves wholly to him, his vindication becomes our vindication also. To unite ourselves to him by faith must be our priority in Holy Week—for in him (and only in him) do we pass over from wrath to favor, from sin to righteousness, from death to life.