A Guide to Holy Week
Over the course of Holy Week the Church reads the Passion narratives of all four gospels in order. It is a lot to absorb, and these notes are intended to assist us in doing so. It is the ancient lessons for Passion Sunday (the 5th in Lent), which introduce two key themes of these narratives, one that is forensic or judicial (the cross as an act of judgment), and the other liturgical (the cross as an act of worship, and specifically of sacrifice).
The forensic or judicial aspect is obvious: the passion narratives record the trial, condemnation, and punishment of Jesus by earthly judges, before the Jewish high priest, and before the Roman governor. The specific charges on which he is found guilty are of the utmost importance, because when God raises him from the dead, he is overturning these judgments and vindicating Jesus on these particular claims. In the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), in his Jewish trial, the high priest puts Jesus under oath to affirm or deny that he is the Messiah, the Son of God. Jesus’ answer (in Matthew and Luke’s account) is a qualified affirmation – “thou hast said”, which means something like “those are your words”. In the first-century Jewish context both are potentially misleading. The title “Son of God” was a standard metaphor for the Messiah’s special relationship with God, and the title “Messiah” could be interpreted in earthly political-military terms as a kind of Jewish nationalist warrior-king. But Jesus then provides a response in his own unambiguous terms: “ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power” – that is, of God – “and coming in the clouds of heaven”. To sit on the right hand of God is to take the place of shared and equal authority with him, as the Mediator of his kingdom. It is thus no claim to an earthly kingdom like David’s or Caesar’s, but rather to the sovereign authority of God as Lord. To advance this claim for a human being, was to his Jewish hearers simple blasphemy; but to obtain a capital sentence for it from the Roman governor, they translate it into political terms, as “king of the Jews”, with its implicit challenge to Roman power. Though Pilate is unwilling to do the bidding of the Jewish authorities, his resistance crumples when mob violence is threatened, and in condemning to shameful death a man he acknowledges is innocent he abandons the Roman pretentions to impartial justice.
In John’s passion, in line with his usual practice of omitting material that the synoptics have covered, he skips the account of the trial before the high priest and provides an account of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. What comes out of this interrogation is Pilate’s fearful recognition that Jesus is in some sense a divine agent, the “Son of God” not merely in a metaphorical sense. Though Pilate succumbs to the pressure of the chief priests and elders to condemn Jesus, he extracts from them the avowal, “we have no king but Caesar”, an implicit denial that God is Israel’s true king. Thus Israel’s claims to religion are exposed, along with Rome’s pretentions to justice. In the world’s judgment of Jesus, God’s judgment is already underway.
There are other differences in the four passions. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus is depicted as the suffering servant of the Lord, who makes the alienation of human sin his own. He is forsaken of God, that we might never be forsaken of God, who put our trust in him (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:26). Luke softens the starkness of this portrait, and highlights the active compassion of Jesus, and the conversion he elicits, especially in the penitent thief, who is a template for our own response to the crucifixion (23:39-43 cf. 23:48). In John the accent is on the sovereign freedom of Jesus, who acts with divine authority right up to his triumphant proclamation of mission accomplished, “it is finished”. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the vindication of Jesus begins immediately after Christ’s death, in the confession of the centurion, “truly this man was the Son of God”. In John’s account, the vindication follows the centurion’s piercing the side of the dead body of Jesus with a lance, when blood and water stream forth, the signs of the cleansing and lifegiving power of his death.
The teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews (read on Wednesday and Friday) places the death of Christ in the liturgical frame of the priestly offering of a sacrifice that unites sinners to God in in a new covenant. As such, both in his condemnation and vindication Jesus is our representative before God, with the result that his vindication is also ours, who trust in him. In him we pass over from wrath to favor, from sin to righteousness, from death to life.