With the beginning of Holy Week, we begin to focus intently on the heart of the mystery of salvation. It’s the mystery of dying and rising, the mystery of humiliation and exultation, the mystery of suffering and glorification, the mystery of death in order to live eternally, the mystery of defeat which is crowned with victory.
It’s a story of the fickleness of the crowd that we hear shout “Hosanna” at the beginning of the week and “Crucify him” at its close. It’s a story in which agony and ecstasy are combined. A story that begins on a day of contradiction. To call the first day of Holy Week “Passion Sunday,” for example, emphasizes suffering and eath, while the words “Palm Sunday” emphasize glory and victory. To the extent that the word “Passion” might imply that Jesus was a passive victim, the word is a misnomer: Jesus was a willing and active partner with his heavenly Father in the work of salvation.
In the Passion narrative found in the gospel according to Matthew (26:14-27:66), whose account is probably the most authentic representation of what happened, we find the story of a man whose loneliness and being misunderstood lasted to the end of his life. At the Last Supper, for instance, the self-seeking Judas, who loved money, joined the other apostles. Unlike the others, who addressed Jesus as “Lord,” Judas used the title normally used in Matthew’s gospel by the faithless: “Rabbi”.
To Judas’s inquiry about whether he would be the one to betray Jesus, Jesus replied with studied reserve: “You have said so” (26:25). Jesus has accused Judas of nothing, but Judas, and only Judas knew what he meant. Caiaphas the high preist ordered Jesus to tell under oath whether he was the Messiah, the Son of God. Caiaphas, who was mad for power and hence blindly eager to please the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, had weakened the power of the Sanhedrin by removing them from the Temple Mount, and had strengthened his control of trade by encouraging the moneychangers and the sellers of animals to enter the main court of the Temple.
In Jerusalem he was powerful enough to protect Jesus successfully from death if that were politically expedient for him. But Caiaphas saw in Jesus a danger for the Romans, for the Jews, and for his rule. What he did was not one of the noblest acts of history, but – for a man of his caliber – understandable.
The Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish judicial body, knowing that the charge of blasphemy (26:65ff.) would be meaningless to the Roman authority like Pilate couldn’t ignore: (1) that Jesus was a revolutionary, (2) that he urged the people not to pay taxes, and (3) that he claimed to be king. Pilate didn’t like the Jews, and they knew it. Unlike his more diplomatic predecessors, he had offended their sensibilities by a blatant display of the Roman eagle and images of the emperor. Although he had a much-needed aqueduct built, his plundering of the Temple treasury to meet its cost was a gross violation of the Jews’ rights. And the fact that he was always subject to Jewish report to Rome made him feel insecure. Conflicts were inevitable.
This wary representative of Roman domination suspected a hidden agenda at the Jews’ presentation of Jesus: it could well be Jewish intrigue to lead him into a trap and disgrace him in Rome. He checked things out up front by blatantly asking Jesus if he were the king of the Jews. Again Jesus quietly answered with his enigmatic turning the question back to Pilate (27:11). Pilate’s magnanimous offer to release a prisoner in honour of the Jewish national holiday was more to escape a possible trap than an effort to save Jesus. He tried to load the deck by presenting what he considered the least welcome alternative to Jesus: a notorious prisoner. That backfired. The mob, driven wild by their leaders, rejected Jesus and chose for release the villainous Barabbas. Evil had one of its moments of triumph as the incited crowd persisted in crying for Jesus’ crucifixion (27:22ff.).
Pilate, to signify that he was innocent of Jesus’ blood (v.24), accommodated himself to a Jewish custom by washing his hands. His plea was a futile gesture of unloading his personal responsibility, a gesture that many of us indulge in: “It’s none of my business!” But it is our business to be involved in the Passion of Jesus, our brother, wherever it’s happening today, and “washing our hands” of responsibility won’t cleanse out guilt.
The scourging to appease the crowd and excite pity was indicative of the injustice of thw whole trial. A man was declared innocent and then lashed on his bare back with a thing of bone and lead until his flesh was raw. The horseplay of the ignorant and barbarous conscript-soldiers who mocked him added to the physical torment of the scourging and crowning with thorns.
Jerusalem was at that time an excited and oriental city on the eve of the great festival. People were arriving by the hundreds. Hawkers were shouting their wares to earn for themselves months of earnings in a short time. The festival would soon begin, so everyone was in a hurry. In this milieu Jesus was compelled to carry the cross to the execution grounds. There were no police keeping order: the mounted centurion at the head of the procession had to make the pathetic group’s way with the point of his lance through the crowds of revelers. Jesus frequently fell on the unseen steps in the terraced street.
Crucifixion was so horrible that the Romans wouldn’t permit it for a Roman citizen. They adopted it from crueler nations, for the lowest type of criminal: runaway slaves, bandits, rebels. The crucified usually hung on the cross to die slowly in excruciating pain as life ebbed from them.
The inscription over Jesus (v.37) read, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.” It was written in Greek, the language of culture; Latin, the language of the government; and in Hebrew, the language of the country. While Jesus hung between heaven and earth, darkness came over the whole land (v.45). As a symbol of the power of darkness, this was fitting: as heavenly light had shown upon his cradle, darkness should characterize his terrible death.
Look at Jesus at this point. As if the grotesque scene wasn’t enough punishment, his desperate feeling of loneliness and desertion was worse. Toward mid-afternoon, Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (v.46) If it were a cry of despair, it would be understandable: He had after all been rejected by his country’s leaders as a blasphemer, handed over to strangers, had a revolutionary preferred over him for freedom, was treated by the Romans as a criminal, spurned by his own people, jeered at by a brigand, and forsaken by his friends. Abandonment by his Father, if that were to happen, would be the deepest pain of all.
When it was Jesus’ time to surrender his spirit to his Father, he died – the world’s most celebrated case of capital punishment. Then the soldiers divided his garments by casting lots (v.35), while they kept watch over him (v.36) to ensure that no one rescued him. His agonizing death was as the “Servant of God” who had emptied himself at the service of his heavenly Father and of us his brothers and sisters.
Accompanying Jesus’ death were many hard-to-understand phenomena: his cry in a loud voice (v.51), the earthquake splitting the rock of Golgotha (v.52). After his resurrection many of those who had been buried were coming forth from their tombs (v.53) – not only symbolizing Jesus’ victory over death, but prefiguring the resurrection of all people, the final cosmic event of human history. Perhaps the greatest wonder is that even a hard-bitten Roman soldier was terror-stricken at it all to the point of confessing that this was truly the Son of God! (v.54)
Jesus’ passion is as we said in the beginning, a paradox. It’s the suffering servant who at the same time is a royal figure – a story of both servant hood and glory. If we emphasize one at the expense of the other, we misinterpret the story.
Each of us stands alone before Jesus. Like Judas, Pilate, Caiaphas, Simon of Cyrenean, the Roman centurion, and all the others who had a role in the drama of the passion and death of Jesus, each of us must declare where we stand by our attitudes and actions. The best test of that is whether we’re faithful to Christian principles: principles of justice, of peace, of married life, of human existence. Jesus didn’t suffer and die to exempt others from suffering and dying, but to redeem us and to show us how to suffer and die.