Holy Week

 We are in Holy Week, the week of the Christian liturgical Kalendar that leads up to the annual celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ that is Pascha or Easter depending upon where you live and what language you speak.  The celebration of Pascha/Easter goes back to the very beginning of Christian history.  In the early centuries of persecution before the legalization of Christianity there were disputes as to when and how the Christian Passover – Pascha is the Latinization of Πάσχα which is the Greek transliteration of פֶסַח (Pesach), the Hebrew Passover – was to be celebrated.  The majority regarded the Christian Passover as a celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and held it on the Sunday after the Jewish Passover.  Some, primarily among the churches of Asia Minor to which the book of Revelation was addressed, thought that it should be a commemoration of His death to be held on the date according to the Hebrew calendar on which He died.  Since that date was the fourteenth of Nisan these were called Quartodecimans from the Latin for fourteen. A variation of this, held by a much smaller number of Christians located mostly in Gaul, celebrated on the date He died according to the Roman calendar, which was the twenty-fifth of March.[1]  Settling this controversy was the main non-doctrinal accomplishment of the First Council of Nicaea in 325.[2]  The earliest extent mention of the observance of the entire Holy Week dates to the last half of the century prior to that.[3]  Towards the end of the fourth century, just prior to the second ecumenical Council (the First Council of Constantinople, 383), the Spanish nun Egeria made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and in what is actually a long letter but which also reads as an early example of a travel journal[4] provided a detailed account of the Holy Week services held by the Christians in Jerusalem whose bishop at the time was the important Church Father St. Cyril.  This was the most elaborate celebration of the Holy Week at the time and through accounts such Egeria’s Jerusalem’s practice came to influence other Churches throughout the Christian world.

 

The observation of Holy Week seems like an inevitable development.  The four Evangelists present a much clearer picture of what Jesus said and did in the week of the Crucifixion than of any other period in His earthly ministry.  The week begins with Palm Sunday, remembering Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem in fulfilment of Zechariah 9:9-12.  We might begin it with the eve of Palm Sunday, when the anointing of Jesus by Mary at the supper in Bethany took place.  SS Matthew and Mark tell of this event in the middle of their account of Judas’ pact with Jesus’ enemies to betray Him for thirty-pieces of silver.  By doing so they indicate not when the supper occurred but that Judas’ decision to betray Jesus began with this event.  It is from St. John that we learn that the anointing had taken place a few days earlier than Judas’ deal with the high priests, which took place on the Wednesday of the week of the Passion.  St. John connects the two events in a different way by identifying Judas as the one who had voiced the objection to Mary’s act.

 

St. John also tells us that Jesus had arrived at Bethany six days prior to the Passover.  This was the Saturday before Palm Sunday, six days before the Passover on the Friday on which Jesus was crucified.  Some see a conflict between St. John and the other Evangelists on the day of the Passover but the conflict disappears upon closer examination.  When St. Mark tells us that “the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover, his disciples said unto him, Where wilt thou that we go and prepare that thou mayest eat the Passover” (Mk. 14:12) this does not mean that the Passover lambs were killed on the Thursday before the Crucifixion.  St. Mark, like St. Matthew and even the Gentile doctor St. Luke, used the Jewish method of counting days as starting with the previous evening.  This is rooted in the creation account of the book of Genesis, where of the days of creation it is repeatedly stated “And the evening and morning were the X day.”  We also use this method of reckoning days when it comes to holy days in our sacred Kalendar.  That is why the twenty-fourth of December is called “Christmas Eve” and the thirty-first of October is called “Halloween” (short for All Hallows Eve).  Clement Clark Moore was wrong.  “Christmas Eve” is not “the night before Christmas” but rather the part of Christmas that falls on the evening of the twenty-fourth.  When the Synoptic Evangelists tell us that the disciples prepared the Last Supper on the day when the Passover lambs were killed they are counting the evening of the first Maundy Thursday as part of Good Friday.  In the Hebrew calendar it was already the fourteenth of Nisan.  Jesus died at the ninth hour of daylight - three pm - on the fourteenth of Nisan.  This was the hour the sacrificial Passover lamb was slain.  By the method of reckoning days used by the Synoptic Gospels this was still the same day on which the Last Supper had taken place. 

 

This raises the question of what was going on with the Last Supper. It took place, as the Synoptic Gospels say, on the day the Passover lamb was slain, at the beginning of that day, the evening prior to the slaying.  This would seem to rule out it being a Passover meal proper, since this was eaten on the evening following the slaying of the lamb, the evening that begins the fifteenth of Nisan.  St. Luke, however, seems to clearly identify the Last Supper as a Passover meal.  He calls it such himself (Lk. 22:13).  He records Jesus’ calling it such “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk. 22:15).  He includes details indicative of a Passover meal such as the first cup (the Kiddush) at the beginning of the meal (Lk. 22:17), before the institution of the Eucharist with the breaking of the bread (Lk. 22:19) and the cup after supper which if this was a Passover meal would have been the third of the cups signifying redemption and blessing.  .

 

The answer to the question is present in the Scriptural texts.  Yes, the Last Supper was a Passover meal, and yes, it was eaten before the Passover lamb was slain, a day before the Jews in general ate the Passover that year.  For the only lamb mentioned as being present at that meal was the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.”  He offered Himself to be eaten at meal in the bread and the cup.  “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me” He said after breaking the bread while giving it to His disciples (Lk. 22:19) “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you” He said over the cup after supper (Lk. 22:20).  Chronologically, it would not be until the following afternoon that His blood would be shed and His body given, but He offered His disciples His body and blood in the first Eucharist the evening before, just as they were eating a Passover meal the evening before the Passover was slain. 

 

There is an important lesson in this.  Although the events in which the salvation of mankind was accomplished, the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, are historical events, events which occurred at a specific place and specific time in the history of the world, at the centre of these events is a Person Who is not bound or limited by space or time.  This Eternal Person Who entered the world of space and time in order to redeem and save, is declared by the Scriptures to be “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8).

 

The Law of Moses specified that the Paschal lamb was to be selected and separated from the rest of the flock on the tenth of Aviv (“Spring”, the original name for the month re-named Nisan in the Babylonian Captivity).  Note how St. Mark concludes his account of the Triumphal Entry: “And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple: and when he had looked round about upon all things, and now the eventide was come, he went out unto Bethany with the twelve.” (Mk. 11:11)  The impression that this verse gives, that after the Triumphal Entry, Jesus had a quick look around and then went back to Bethany is reinforced by His promise to the donkey colt’s owners that “straightway he will send him hither”, (Mk. 11:3) i.e., that He would return the animal immediately, which only St. Mark records. This is the only indicator in any of the Gospels of the time of day of the Triumphal Entry.  It was late on Palm Sunday, as the afternoon was turning into evening, at which time the ninth of Aviv/Nisan was ending and the tenth was beginning. 

 

In sermons the events of Palm Sunday and Good Friday are often contrasted.  The crowds that welcomed Jesus with “Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest” on Palm Sunday became the mob that screamed “Crucify Him!  Give us Barabbas” on Good Friday.  The contrasts are important but the underlying harmony between the two events should not be overlooked.

 

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem that Sunday He publicly presented Himself to Jerusalem, King David’s city, the capital of national Israel, as the Messiah they had been awaiting, the Christ.  He had not hidden His identify before this.  That He is the Christ was the import of His remark in the synagogue of Nazareth at the beginning of His public ministry about the prophecy of Isaiah being fulfilled.  What He said about Himself in His sermons and parables and in His controversies with the Pharisees and scribes would be very strange, to say the least, if He did not claim to be the Christ.  He had identified Himself as Christ to individuals such as the Samaritan woman at the well from before His public ministry even started (the encounter with the woman took place prior to the arrest of John the Baptist and hence prior to His public ministry) and when St. Peter, speaking for the Apostles, confessed Him to be the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” (Matt. 16:15) He praised this as having been divinely revealed (Matt. 16:17).  The Triumphal Entry, however, was His official presentation of Himself to the nation as their Messiah or Christ.  The crowds who met Him with palm branches and shouted Hosanna recognized this, of course.  What they didn’t recognize was that by presenting Himself as the Christ, He was presenting Himself as the true Paschal Lamb.  Neither did His disciples recognize this even though He had begun explaining it to them following St. Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi (Matt. 16:21) and at His anointing at Bethany, intrinsically connected with His official presentation of Himself as the Christ the following day in that it was a literal anointing of the “Anointed One”, He had again made the connection by saying that “against the day of my burying hath she kept this” (Jn. 12:7). 

 

The disciples, like the rest of Israel, were familiar with the prophecies of the Messiah, the Anointed Son of David, Who would deliver Israel, restore David’s throne, and establish it and rule it forever.  Their Scriptures also predicted that He would suffer and die and be raised from the dead.  Isaiah’s account of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah,[5] Daniel’s prophecy of the Messiah being “cut off, but not for himself”[6], the 21^st/22^nd Psalm[7], prophecies of this nature are found throughout the Old Testament, including in the words spoken to the serpent “and thou shalt bruise his heel” in God’s very first promise that He would send a Saviour.[8]  Prior to their fulfilment, of course, it was difficult to see the connection between these prophecies and those of the triumphant Son of David.  The Genesis prophecy was the key connection.  There were no nations when that promise was made.  The promised Saviour was for all mankind.  Israel, in the Messianic prophecies, is the kingdom of priests Exodus 19:6 declares her to be, performing the priestly function of representing the entire world of mankind.  The promised deliverance, is not mere deliverance of the nation from political subjection to empires such as Assyria, Babylon or Rome, but deliverance of mankind from bondage to the enemies that took mankind captive in the Garden of Eden – Satan, sin, and death.

 

The way the Messiah would defeat these enemies was by meekly submitting to their killing Him.  For the only claims Satan, sin, and death have over mankind arise out of mankind’s voluntary entrance into bondage by sinning in the Garden.  The Messiah is the eternal Son of God, Who when He took human nature to His Own eternal Person in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, became Man but without sin.[9]  He bore the sins of mankind on the Cross, because His death was the true Day of Atonement as well as the true Passover, but He had no sin of His own.  Satan and death, therefore, had no claim on Him, and when He allowed them to take Him anyway they found that they had captured Him over Whom they had no claim and could not hold.  The final day of Holy Week, Holy Saturday, remembers the day when Jesus’ body lay in the grave, the one kingdom of death, while He entered Hell[10], death’s other kingdom, not as captive but as Conqueror.  Note His promise to the repentant thief on the Cross “Today, thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”[11]  While Paradise and Hell are ordinarily thought of as opposite places far removed from each other – think of the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus[12] - at the ninth hour on that fourteenth of Nisan that was the first Good Friday, Paradise invaded Hell.  When on Easter Sunday He rose again from the dead, He left behind Him a Hell the gates of which He had smashed to pieces, and whose captives He had set free.  As Conqueror, He claimed as His spoils, all those that Satan and death had taken captive in the Garden, i.e., mankind.

 

Therefore, while the difference between the Hosannas of Palm Sunday and the demands for crucifixion on Good Friday may illustrate the fickle nature of the whims of the mob, ultimately there is a unity between the two.  By joyously receiving their Messiah on Palm Sunday, the crowds of Jerusalem had selected and separated the true Paschal Lamb, and by demanding His death on Good Friday, they sent Him to the death for which He hand come into the world, by which He accomplished the salvation to which the liberation of the Hebrews from Egypt on the original Passover pointed.

 

Have a blessed Holy Week!

 

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[1] The Crucifixion was one of several events – the first day of Creation and the testing of Abraham with regards to the sacrifice of Isaac are among the others – which ancient Christians, going back to at least the second century, believed to have taken place on the twenty-fifth of March by the Julian calendar.  That the early Christians also regarded this as the date of the Annunciation – and therefore the conception of Jesus Christ, nine months before Christmas, His birth – is believed to be derived from its having been the date of the Crucifixion.  While you won’t find the “integral age” theory spelled out in any Patristic source, that the early Christians were thinking in such terms seems to be a reasonable deduction from the coinciding of the date set for the Annunciation and the date of the Crucifixion.  That the figure through whom God established the Old Covenant, Moses, died on his 120^th birthday, seems to be the implication of Deuteronomy 31:2, and was certainly held to be the meaning of this verse by the ancient rabbis (see Sotah 12b in the Talmud) who held this to be also true of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and King David (see Rosh Hashana 11a in the Talmud) on the basis of a general principle extrapolated from Exodus 23:26 and the example of Moses.  While a direct application of the rabbinic concept to Jesus would have placed Christmas rather than the Annunciation on the twenty-fifth of March, the reason the early Christians would have been thinking in terms of the conception rather than the birth in Jesus’ case is fairly obvious.  The Annunciation and not Christmas was the date the Incarnation took place.  In the early centuries, the Church was challenged by heretics who taught that the union of the divine and human in Jesus took place at some later time.  The most common form of this heresy was to say that it took place at the baptism of Jesus.  The orthodox doctrine, however, is that Jesus’ human nature was united to His Person from the moment of conception, that it was never the human nature of anyone but the Eternal Son of God, that the Incarnation was not the fusion of a human person with a divine person or the possession of a human person by a divine person, but a Divine Person taking a complete human nature that was formed to be His own to His own Person.  Therefore it made more sense to the ancient Christians that the Son of God would die on the day He became Man rather than on His birthday like Moses.  This also lined up better with the Biblical evidence as to the time of His birth.  From the fact that when Gabriel visited Zechariah in the Temple all of Israel was assembled there (that is the significance of “and all the multitude of the people” in Luke 1:10) this had to have been Yom Kippur for no other day in the course of Abihan’s two weeks of duty involved a national assembly (its first week of duty earlier in the year fell on the week after Shavuot, the Hebrew Pentecost) therefore the Annunciation had to have taken place around Passover in March.

[2] The council ruled that Pascha or Easter was to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the twenty-first of March.  This was a translation into the solar calendar of the day when the Resurrection occurred which was the Sunday following the Jewish Passover.  The Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar – a calendar in which the month’s following the lunar cycle takes precedence over the year’s following the solar cycle and so each month begins on the new moon – and Passover occurs in the middle (on what would be called the Ides of the month on the old Roman lunar calendar) of the first month, which is the spring month, ergo the full moon of the month when spring starts.  By the council’s ruling, spring is considered to start on the twenty-first of March, although astronomically the vernal equinox can occur anywhere between the nineteenth and the twenty-first (this year it fell on the twentieth).  

[3] Apostolic Constitutions, 5.13-19.

[4] Peregrinatio Egeriae. There are numerous variations of the title both in Latin and in translation. In some of these there is a “th” instead of a “g” in the nun’s name.  The 1919 SPCK translation by M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe, is an example of this.  It can be read here: The Pilgrimage of Egeria

[5] Is. 53.

[6] Dan. 9:26.

[7] 22^nd by the Hebrew numbering, which our Authorized Bible uses, 21^st by the numbering of the LXX and Latin Vulgate.

[8] Gen. 3:15.

[9] Heb. 4:15.

[10] Hell, when used in this way, should be thought of as “the depository of the souls of the dead” rather than “the place to which the incurably unrepentant will ultimately be consigned” although there is a great deal of overlap between the two concepts.  This is the original meaning attached to the word, although today it is more commonly used of eternal punishment. The Bible brings the two together in Rev. 20:14 when it speaks of Hell, in the original sense of the word, being cast into the Lake of Fire which is Hell in today’s sense of the word, at the Last Judgement.

[11] Lk. 23:43.

[12] Lk. 16:19-31.

Christ is King!

It is Holy Week.  We are entering the Paschal Triduum, which begins with the remembrance of the Last Supper in the evening of Maundy Thursday and ends with the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ on the morning of Easter Sunday.   In between we are taken through the climax and culmination of Jesus Christ’s vicarious redemptive suffering on our behalf in the remembrance of His Crucifixion on Good Friday and through the intermediate period between His Death and Resurrection on Holy Saturday in which to His followers on earth all appeared lost as His body lay in the tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea while in the unseen world His Triumph had begun the moment He commended His Spirit to His Father and entered Death’s realm of Hell not as Death’s captive but as his Conqueror.   Holy Week began, as it always does, with Palm Sunday, in which was commemorated Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey in fulfilment of the prophecy of Zechariah.  In this event Jesus presented Himself openly to Jerusalem and by extension the nation of Israel as the promised Messiah, the Son of David, and He was initially accepted as such by a crowd that was expecting the Messiah to save their nation from its political yoke and was not ready to truly accept a Messiah Who had come to save them and all the other nations of the world as well from their true oppressors – Sin, Death, and the Devil.   By the end of the week the same crowd that had shouted “Hosanna” and “Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord” as He rode into town was crying “Crucify Him” and mocking Him as He carried His cross down the Via Doloroso towards Calvary.

 

A strange controversy started up on Palm Sunday this year over the expression “Christ is King”.   The controversy apparently began among American neoconservatives in connection with the parting of ways of popular commentator Candace Owens and The Daily Wire, the neoconservative media organization founded by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing.  This estrangement seems to have something to do with Mr. Shapiro’s unwillingness to accept anything less than 100% support for everything the state of Israel does from Christians and conservatives.   When I first heard mention of the controversy I paid it little attention as I assumed that it had something to do with American neoconservatism’s obsession with democracy and republicanism and that they were blasphemously demanding that Jesus Christ abdicate His throne at the Father’s right hand and run for the office of President of the Universe in a popular election or some such nonsense.  Later, I learned that when Candace Owens had tweeted, or whatever the term is now that that platform has changed its name, “Christ is King” on Palm Sunday, her former colleagues accused her of sending out an anti-Semitic “dog whistle.”  The reasoning, if it can be called that, behind this accusation, is very similar to that employed by the type of organizations who gave us the expression “dog whistle.”   It goes like this: Person X is a bad person.  Person X said Y.  Therefore everyone who says Y is a bad person like Person X.   This is, of course, an example of what in formal logic is called the association fallacy.   If they were to refrain from using it, groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic), and the Canadian Anti-Hate Network would have very little to say.   Replace “Person X” with “Nick Fuentes” and “Y” with “Christ is King” and you have the substance, as it were, of the accusation against Owens.

 

This controversy quickly grew beyond the confines of the circles in which it originated, as these things tend to do.  Presumably, for many if not most of those who jumped in on the “Christ is King” debate it was little more than a way of voting for who they liked better, Candace Owens or Ben Shapiro.   It was appalling, however, to see how many people considered to be conservative Christian leaders began regurgitating the fallacious reasoning that Owens’ accusers borrowed from the ADL et al., in some cases even if they carefully avoided joining the condemnation of Owens.

 

St. Paul provides us with an example of how to handle a situation where someone is preaching Christian truth for what we suspect to be unworthy motives:

 

Some indeed preach Christ even of envy and strife; and some also of good will:  The one preach Christ of contention, not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my bonds: But the other of love, knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel.  What then? notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence, or in truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.  For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. (Phil. 1:15-19).

 

Christ is King.   Indeed, even if we were talking about the title rather than the Person, this would be true.   Christ is from the Greek word for “anointed”, which translates the Hebrew word that is Anglicized as “Messiah” which also means “anointed”.   This title was bestowed upon Him for Whom ancient Israel looked  because that Person was to be the Promised Son of David, that is, the King Who would inherit the throne of David are rule forever.   That Jesus of Nazareth, the Incarnate Son of God, is that very Promised King, is the confession of St. Peter (Mt. 16:16) that secured from the Lord the promise that upon this rock He would build His Church and it is also the belief to which everlasting life is promised (John 20:31).   This is not a secondary or peripheral doctrine.   It is the central Christian truth.   All true Christians believe and confess this truth.   To deny it, to deny that Jesus is the Christ, the Promised King, to deny that Christ is come in the flesh, is the spirit of what the New Testament calls antichrist. (1 Jn. 2:22)

 

In the second chapter of the same epistle in which St. Paul rejoiced that “whether in pretence, or in truth, Christ is preached” he gives an account of the temporal mission of Jesus Christ from His humiliation to His exaltation:

 

That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;  And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:10-11)

 

Every tongue will one day confess that Jesus Christ is Lord which is another way of saying that Christ is King.   Either one will willingly and joyfully confess this in faith in this transitory life or one will acknowledge it along with his own ruin when he is brought before the Judge he rejected in life and made to give account.

 

There is no room for anyone to say “Yes, Christ is King, but it is bad when you say it” much less to say “Yes, Christ is King, but it is bad when so-and-so says it, and when you say it I suspect you are saying it like so-and-so.”   Christ is King, He is Sovereign over all the Universe, and we are to rejoice whenever this is proclaimed regardless of what we think of the person who says it or suspect about that person’s motives.   Otherwise, we would be saying that we consider whatever we find objectionable in this person to be more important than the truth that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.   The other truths confessed in the ancient Creeds are just as important, but nobody is taking exception to “Christ is King” over anything having to do with any of these.  

 

Indeed, it is even worse than a case of idolatrously elevating a lesser matter above the central truth of Christ’s Kingship.   Those who claim “Christ is King” to be an anti-Semitic dog whistle – remember, that if you hear dog whistles that makes you the dog – are in effect allowing a religion to which rejection of Jesus as Christ is fundamental to tell Christians that we are not allowed to confess a central tenet of our faith, the very tenet that divides Christiana from Jews, because it is offensive to them and their religion.   Such dictates cannot be submitted to without betraying the faith and the Lord and Saviour Who purchased us with His own Blood.

 

I wish you all a most blessed and holy Paschal Triduum.

 

Christ is King!

 

The Anointed One

 

Today is the day before Palm Sunday.   Palm Sunday is the first day of Holy Week, the week that ends with the Paschal Triduum – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, in commemoration of the Last Supper/Betrayal, the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, and the Entombment/Harrowing of Hell respectively – leading up to the Christian Passover, the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday.   The Sunday prior to these events was the day in which Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey while the crowds strewed the path before Him with palm branches – hence “Palm Sunday” – and cried “Hosanna, Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord.”   The traditional name for this – the Triumphal Entry – strikes the modern ear as ironic considering the timing of the events of Holy Week but that is not the intent behind the name.   A triumph was when a general or emperor returned from war and entered the city with much pomp and ceremony, parading his troops and the spoils of war before the populace.   While obviously not the exact equivalent, a triumph was the closest analogy in the terminology of earthly cities and kingdoms for what was going on that first Palm Sunday as the King of Kings entered the City of David.   This was the fulfilment of the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9.   This was Jesus publicly and officially presenting Himself to national Israel as the Promised Redeemer – the Christ, the Messiah, or, to render both of these words by their literal English meaning, the Anointed One.   

 

That Jesus was the Christ was not news to His disciples.   Some of these had heard this from John the Baptist before Jesus’ ministry had even begun.   He had been teaching them since St. Peter’s confession that He was “the Christ, the Son of the Living God” that His upcoming Death and Resurrection were essential to His being the Messiah although this did not really sink in until after they encountered the Risen Lord.   Indeed, “The Kingdom of God is at hand”, the Gospel He had been preaching throughout His earthly Ministry, was another way of saying that He was the Christ.   The Promised Kingdom was at hand, that is, present, here, among you right now, because He, the Christ, had come.   By entering the city in this way, however, as Zechariah had long ago foretold, He confronted Israel as a collective whole, with His claims as their Anointed One.

 

It is what took place the day before the Triumphal Entry, however, that makes this a particularly appropriate time for a discussion of what it meant for Jesus to be the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One.   For on that day Jesus was anointed in the literal sense of the word.    This was the day when Jesus, Who had been living in Ephraim since a conspiracy against Him had arisen following the raising of Lazarus, and Who having set out for Jerusalem, telling His disciples that the journey would end in His Death and Resurrection and having passed through Jericho where He had opened the eyes of the blind men and supped with the repentant tax collector Zacchaeus, arrived at Bethany.   A supper was held in His honour.   SS Matthew and Mark tell us that it was held at the home of one Simon the Leper.    St. John tells us that Lazarus sat at the table with Jesus, possibly indicating that either he and Simon the Leper were one and the same or that they were closely related, and that a large crowd showed up to see both Jesus and Lazarus.   St. John also tells us that Lazarus’ sister Martha served the meal, and his other sister Mary was the one who anointed Jesus.   She took an alabaster box containing a pound of very expensive ointment made from the perfume spikenard, broke the box (St. Mark), poured it on His head (SS Matthew and Mark) and feet (St. John) and wiped His feet with her hair.   This provoked an angry reaction from Judas Iscariot, who, along with at least one other disciple (SS Matthew and Mark) asked why the ointment had not been sold and the money given to the poor.   St. John, who is the only Evangelist to identify Judas by name as the disciple who complained, also gives an explanation for this odd expression of indignation, that Judas was the treasurer and a thief.   Jesus’ response was to say “Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this.  For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always” (John 12:7-8).   SS Matthew and Mark add His proclamation that “Wheresover this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her”. (Matt. 26:13)

 

Interestingly, this was the second time that Jesus was anointed in this way.   The seventh chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel ends with an account of Jesus having been invited to supper at the home of a Pharisee named Simon.   A woman who is described as a “sinner” – this is generally taken to mean prostitute here – comes to the house and weeps, washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair, before anointing His feet with ointment, here too from an alabaster box.   This results in a conversation of an entirely different sort.   Jesus gives Simon, who had thought to himself “This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him: for she is a sinner”, a parable explaining that the more one is forgiven, the greater one’s love for the forgiver.   He concludes the episode by telling the woman “Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace”.   There are some who think that St. Luke was describing the same event as the other Evangelists but this is as implausible as the interpretation of those who think that SS Matthew and Mark were recounting a third anointing different from that told by St. John. (1)  The first verse of the eighth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel makes it clear that the anointing he had just described occurred very early in Jesus’ ministry, two to three years before the anointing described by the other Evangelists, and almost certainly took place in Galilee.  (2)   (3)

 

Those who hold the implausible interpretation that SS Matthew and Mark were describing a different anointing from St. John, one that took place in the same town and with the same following conversation, four days later, often do so for a theological reason.   As the Christ – the Anointed One – Jesus was the prophesied descendant of David Who would inherit his kingdom and rule it forever.   When Saul was chosen by God for the kingship of Israel, Samuel informed him of the fact by taking a vial of oil, pouring it upon his head, and saying “Is it not because the LORD hath anointed thee to be captain over his inheritance” (1 Sam 10:1).   Later, when God rejects Saul because of his disobedience, and chooses David, Samuel similarly anointed him (1 Sam 16:13).   The title Messiah or Christ is primarily a reference to Jesus’ Kingship.   It was not just kings that were traditionally anointed with oil, however.   Priests were also inducted into their office with an anointment by oil (Ex. 40:13, 15) as were the Tabernacle/Temple in which they ministered and all the holy objects found within (Ex 40:9-11).     Elijah was also instructed to anoint Elisha, his successor, as a prophet. (4) Jesus, as the Messiah, is Prophet, Priest, and King in One, which many see as reason for believing that He was anointed three times.

 

As it so happens, they are right about Jesus having been anointed thrice, once for each Office, but there is no need to separate the anointing recounted by SS Matthew and Mark from that told by St. John to find these three anointings.   St. Peter in his sermon to Cornelius the centurion in mentions another:

 

How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.   (Acts 10:38)

 

While St. Peter could have had an eternal anointing outside of time and history in mind, (5) the reference to the baptism of John immediately prior to this verse makes it more likely that he was speaking about what had happened when John had baptized Jesus, when the Holy Spirit visibly descended upon Him.   

 

If we take that to be the right interpretation of St. Peter’s words then the Gospels do indeed record three anointings of Jesus and this is the only one that is mentioned in all four Gospels, being narrated by the Evangelists themselves in the case of the Synoptics, and by John the Baptist to his disciples in the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel.

 

If, furthermore, we take the three anointings to correspond to the three Offices of the Christ, then this one is clearly the anointing that pertains to the Office of Prophet.      A prophet is someone who speaks the Word of God.   Jesus exercised the duties of this Office from the onset of His public ministry in Galilee, a ministry of proclaiming the Gospel that the Kingdom was at hand, and calling on the people to repent and believe, which He accompanied and complemented by the healings and other miracles He performed exactly as St. Peter said.  As the Christ Jesus was more than just a prophet, He was The Prophet, that is, the One of Whom Moses said “The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken” (Deut. 18:15).   St. Peter and St. Stephen the martyred deacon, both make this identification in Acts 3 and 7 respectively.    Moses, as a prophet, had given to Israel the Old Covenant, the Law.   Jesus, as Prophet, brought the New Covenant.   The first four chapters of St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews, about the superior revelation God has given in His Son, to that which He gave through the prophets of old, comparing Him to Moses specifically in the third chapter, are an extended discussion of just this very truth.

 

At the end of the fourth chapter of Hebrews, St. Paul switches to a discussion of Jesus as Priest which goes on into the tenth chapter of the epistle.  This would be the Office most logically to be related to the anointing of the seventh chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke.   A priest is someone who, by contrast with a king whose vocation pertains to civil government, a farmer, who obtains his living from the land, or the butcher, baker and candlestick maker the work of each of which is oriented towards the market, serves in things which are considered holy or sacred, words which basically mean separated unto God from all of those secular or mundane matters to which everyone else attends.   The primary duty of a priest is to offer sacrifices to God on behalf of the people for the forgiveness of their sins.   The woman who anoints Jesus’ feet in St. Luke’s Gospel is identified as a sinful woman.  Before anointing His feet she weeps over Him – a sign of repentance.   The conversation that follows is all about the forgiveness of sin, and the account concludes with Jesus proclaiming her forgiveness, or, to put it in priestly terminology, pronounces her Absolution.   This is an exercise of His Priestly Office.   St. Paul in Hebrews goes into great length about Jesus’ priesthood.   He contrasts it with the Aaronic priesthood established for Israel in the Mosaic Covenant.  The priests of the latter had to offer sacrifices for their own sins as well as those of the people, the blood of bulls and goats which they offered could not actually take sins away, and the priests had to be continually replaced because they continually died.   Jesus, however, is a High Priest “after the order of Melchisedec”, i.e., the mysterious priest-king of Salem in the Book of Genesis.   It is not the earthly Tabernacle that He entered as High Priest, but the heavenly one upon which the earthly was patterned.   Having died and risen again, He lives forever and continues in the Office of Priest forever.   He is without sin Himself, although having undergone temptation he can sympathize with sinners.   He entered the heavenly Tabernacle once with one offering – His own blood – which effectively takes away all sins once and for all and secures the salvation of all who come to God through Him in faith.

 

This leaves for the anointing at Bethany the Office of King.   This makes perfect sense as it took place on the eve of the Triumphal Entry.   Here is Zechariah’s prophecy of that event:

 

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass. (Zech. 9:9)

 

In His Triumphal Entry, Jesus presented Himself to the nation as the promised King of this verse and the first thing He is recorded doing upon entering the city in the Synoptic Gospels is to exercise His Kingly authority by driving the merchants and moneychangers out of the Temple.    His Kingdom is a prominent theme of His teachings for the rest of that week.   The mid-week Discourse given at the Mount of Olives, for example, is about both the siege of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple as a judgement upon Israel for rejecting their King and about His Coming in judgement on the whole world at the end of time (see especially Matt. 25:31-46, where He first refers to Himself as the Son of Man, then for the remainder of the account of the Final Judgement as “the King”).   By the end of the week the chief priests and Pharisees who have captured Him with Judas’ help, condemned Him at an illegal and rigged Sanhedrin trial, and brought Him before Roman Governor Pontius Pilate are able to persuade the crowd to turn on Him, demand His Crucifixion, and the release of Barabbas instead.    Neither these, nor even at the time His own closest disciples to whom He had been explaining it ever since St. Peter’s confession of Him as the Christ, understood that the road to His Kingdom passed through the Cross.   To Pilate, however, He explained that His Kingdom was not of this world and Pilate, on the superscription over the Cross declared Him to be “the King of the Jews”.

 

These three anointed Offices, each of which can be associated with one of the three anointings of Jesus mentioned in the New Testament, is an indispensable part of what it means for Jesus to be the Christ, the Anointed One.    Were He not the Prophet Who proclaimed the grace of God as Moses had delivered the Law, the High Priest Who offered Himself up as the Sacrifice that took away the sins of the world before entering the Heavenly Tabernacle with His Own Blood, and the King Who will judge the world, both the quick and the dead, and rule eternally, He would not have been able to say to Martha:

 

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.   (Jn. 11:25-26)

 

Jesus asked Martha whether she believed this and in response received her confession of the same truth which when confessed by St. Peter, prompted His declaration that “upon this rock I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18) and which St. John declares to be the faith that brings everlasting life (Jn. 20:31):

 

Yea Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world. (Jn. 11:27).

 

If anyone does not believe this going in to Holy Week, let us pray that they come to believe it by the end of Week that they may fully enter into the joy of the Resurrection of the Anointed One on Easter Sunday.

 

(1)   Those who think that SS Matthew and Mark are describing a third anointing do so because both of these Evangelists recount the anointing immediately after talking about a meeting of the chief priests at Caiaphas’ palace where they conspired to put Jesus to death by craft.   This meeting took place two days before the Passover.   The Evangelists do not say that the supper at Bethany took place later that day.   Immediately after they tell about the supper at Bethany, they tell about Judas going to the conspiring chief priests and striking his deal to betray Jesus into their hands for thirty pieces of silver.   Since the account of Judas’ betrayal is obviously part of the same episode in the Evangelists’ narrative as the account of the meeting of the chief priests, the placing of the account of the supper in between the two includes it as well within the same episode, which only makes sense if it is being done to explain Judas’ betrayal.    This further identifies the supper with the one recounted by St. John, in which Judas is named as the disciple who receives Jesus’ rebuke, although the anointing being followed by an identical exchange in all three Evangelists, an exchange the nature of which makes it extremely unlikely to have occurred more than once, let alone twice in four days, ought to make it sufficiently clear that SS Matthew, Mark, and John all record the same incident.

(2)   Those who think that St. Luke was talking about the same incident as the other Evangelists despite his placing it two to three years earlier, think it too much of a coincidence that that women in both occurrences bring the ointment in alabaster boxes, and that the host of both suppers was named Simon.   Neither of these is a particularly unlikely coincidence.  Perfume and ointment containers in this time and region were typically made of calcite alabaster also called Egyptian alabaster.   As for the two Simons, this was the most popular name in Judea at the time.  It was the Hellenized form of Simeon, the name of one of Jacob’s sons and the tribe of Israel that he begat.   The twelve Apostles had two Simons among them, just as they had two Jameses and two Judases, these names also being those of Israel’s patriarchs (James is the Latinized form of Jacob, Israel’s original name, and Judas or Jude is a form of Judah).   In the Book of Acts, St. Peter – a Simon – confronts another Simon, Simon Magus in Samaria in the eight chapter, then at the end of the next chapter lodges with another Simon, Simon the Tanner, in Joppa.

(3)   The Church of Rome, in what looks like a failed attempt to simplify matters that instead complicated them much further, has traditionally followed Pope Gregory the Great in maintaining that all four Gospel accounts, whether they describe one anointing or two, involved the same woman, and that this woman was Mary Magdalene.    The Eastern Church has followed the Greek Fathers in maintaining that Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany were two different women and that the sinful woman of St. Luke’s Gospel was a third.   While the Roman interpretation is not impossible, the Eastern tradition seems to fit the Scriptural texts better.   The surname of Mary Magdalene suggests that Magdala, on the Sea of Galilee was her home town.    While this might make it easier to identify her with the sinful woman in St. Luke’s Gospel, as the most natural understanding of the text is that she was from the same community as Simon the Pharisee which appears to have been in Galilee, it makes it unlikely that she is the same person as Mary of Bethany, who lived with her brother and sister in Bethany, a town in Judaea that was a short distance from Jerusalem.    Mary Magdalen is mentioned in all four Gospels – in St. Luke’s she is mentioned by name two verses after the account of Jesus’ anointing by the sinful woman in Galilee – which, while they don’t tell us a whole lot about her, tell us that Jesus cast seven devils out of her, that she was one of the women who followed Jesus with the Apostles’ and ministered to Him, that she was a witness to the Crucifixion and Burial, and that she was the first to encounter the Risen Christ.   Mary of Bethany, like her two siblings, is mentioned by name only in the Gospels of SS Luke and John.   Both Evangelists depict her at home with her sister Martha with Jesus dropping in to see them, which is almost the opposite of how Mary Magdalen is depicted.   It is possible, of course, that the East and West have each latched on to half of the right interpretation and that Mary Magdalen was the woman in St. Luke’s account – his not identifying her despite mentioning her by name immediately after being, perhaps, explained by the rather delicate nature of what is said about her in the account of the anointing – and Mary of Bethany the woman in the other anointing in the three other Gospels.   The coincidence of both women being Marys is no more unusual than both hosts being Simons, note 2, vide supra.   Mary, derived from Miriam (Moses’ sister), was as common a name as Simon.

(4)   There are no general instructions for anointing prophets as there are for anointing priests, and Elisha is the only specific example given of such a practice by contrast with the kings for whom anointing upon accession was the standard practice.   This is only to be expected, however.   Priest and king were ordinary offices of the established civil order.   Prophet – at least with regards to the named prophets whose words are recorded, the schools of prophets mentioned in the books of Samuel and Kings may have operated differently - was an extraordinary office to which God directly called the individual.

(5)   This interpretation better first the anointing mentioned in the Forty-Fifth Psalm and quoted by St. Paul in Hebrews 1:9.   Such an eternal anointing should not be counted with the others as a fourth, but would rather be The Anointing, to which the title Christ and the three temporal anointings associated with His Offices all point.    

The Queen Has Spoken

On this Palm Sunday, as Holy Week begins, our Sovereign Lady, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, has addressed the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, regarding the dark times in which we live. She thanked, on behalf of us all, all those, especially the health workers, who are struggling to get us through this crisis. When speaking of the difficulty of the isolation measures, her words and the tone in which she spoke them, contained nothing of the shrill, hubristic, authoritarian, bossiness of the arrogant politicians whom we, her subjects, the citizens of her realms have foolishly chosen to be her unworthy government ministers, but were rather calm and sober, ending on a note of inspiration, assurance and hope. It was exactly what we have come to expect from her, a lady of deep and devout faith, and true public spirit.

While Her Majesty's speech spoke to the coronavirus pandemic and the hardships directly arising from it, it was indirectly inspirational to those, such as this writer, who have been far less concerned about the virus itself, than about the threat to our basic rights and liberties posed by a populace in panic that is demanding that government protect them from the virus, and governments that take a "nothing is off the table" approach to what they are prepared to do to give the frightened populace what it wants.

It was inspirational in this regard because of who the Queen is and what she stands for. In each of her realms, the Queen is the one who represents the country as a whole - not just those who live there at the moment, but those who have gone before, and those who will come after, which is something only a hereditary head of state can do. As such, she is also a symbol of the heritage of rights and freedoms that have come down to us from a past that included such significant events as the Magna Carta Libertatum, which we hope to pass down to future generations.

The Queen's role in our day and age has been likened to that of the king on a chessboard. The king, who never moves more than one space at a time, is not an offensive piece, but as long as he holds his space against all that would take it from him, the game is not over. Similarly, as long as the Queen and her heirs are on the throne reigning over us and our descendants, the flame of freedom cannot be extinguished entirely. In this day of arrogant, power-grabbing politicians, and physician bureaucrats who often give the impression that they want to trade the serpentine staff of Asclepius for Orwell's grim image of a boot stomping on a human face forever, this is more important than ever. For in Canada, the United Kingdom, and throughout the Commonwealth, "freedom", as the title of John Farthing's book puts it, "wears a crown."

God save the Queen!