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 21st/22nd 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!
[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 120th 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] 22nd by the Hebrew numbering, which
our Authorized Bible uses, 21st 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.
