For Part One, go here.
Tuesday
Jesus is teaching and moving through and around the city almost constantly on Monday and Tuesday. Looked at using today’s slang, he was keeping his social media updated constantly, and news of his movements and teaching was doubtless going viral. He’s in and out of the temple, he evades an attempt on his life, he teaches at the Mount of Olives, it’s wall-to-wall.
By the end of Tuesday, word on the street had to be reaching a fever pitch. And on Tuesday night, as the leaders of the Sanhedrin meet, they get a very intriguing visitor.
He’s Judas Iscariot. He’s one of Jesus’ apostles. And he offers to set Jesus up for capture.
Why?
Well, we don’t really know, and I dislike the common interpretation that Judas was just a dirtbag (see stipulation three back on the first post). Since it’s hard to learn from a pure villainy villain, let’s consider some other possibilities that actually teach things:
Maybe, despite whatever led him to apostolic office in the first place, he thinks it’s going to go wrong, and is looking to secure himself against that possibility.
Maybe he thinks it has gone wrong, and Jesus has gone too far. Remember, Judas was the money-man for the apostles (the “holder of the bag”). He may have viewed the cleansing of the temple as an act of hubris on Jesus’ part, not understanding the greater lesson. It wouldn’t be the first time that an apostle completely missed a lesson Jesus was teaching (stipulation one). The four Gospels are filled with such moments.
If we want to go way out on a limb, maybe he actually thinks he’s helping. Martyrs are a big deal. Maybe he thinks Jesus’ fame has reached such a fever pitch that for him to die now would only cement the mythology and increase the power of the movement. So he’s acting independently to secure Jesus’ fame, not bring him down.
What do all those have in common, though? Judas thought he knew better what was going on, and what to do about it. He was not exercising faith in Christ—he was leaning to his own understanding. That gets us in trouble every time.
Wednesday
On Wednesday, Jesus goes quiet. He and his posse return to Bethany and probably stay with Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. The next day is going to be Passover, so everybody rests up, and with Lazarus being a local, Bethany was probably a stronghold of support for Jesus. Some of the apostles doubtless work quietly in Jerusalem securing a room and supplies for their passover feast, but everybody keeps their heads down today.
So it’s quiet. The deep breath before the plunge back into Jerusalem.
It’s worth noting here that this day’s existence means there’s about a 48 hour gap between Judas’ meeting with the Sanhedrin and his direct betrayal of Jesus. During that time, he is surely associating with them. We know he’ll be with them for the Passover feast. So he’s made his deal, but continues to hang around with the group.
I wonder if that gnawed at him. Secrets can be hard to keep, and this one was undoubtedly so. Guilt is brutal. We’ve all felt it. It’s a great motivator to stay away from doing things that make us feel that way.
Maundy Thursday
“Maundy” comes from the Latin word mandatum (command/commandment), reflecting Jesus’ words “I give you a new commandment.” It’s associated with the washing of feet that happens during this fateful Passover observance.
From here things go into motion really fast, though once again the apostles didn’t fully grasp the enormity of what was now beginning.
Gethsemane is a word now that we use as a synonym for a place or time of personal suffering. It’s the garden Jesus heads to privately Thursday evening, and it’s here that he encounters the reality of the Atonement, and what it means for him personally. Words cannot describe this encounter. It’s outside our comprehension. The gospels do as good a job as can be done describing the pain and anguish of this, and the touch of hesitation Jesus himself feels as he grapples with the task.
But by the time he emerges from the garden, he is completely next-level. He accepts everything that happens to him from that point with no complaint and no judgement, and things happen pretty fast.
That starts with him getting arrested, betrayed by Judas. Let’s talk about a set of very human interactions here that we can sometimes lose sight of.
Is it any wonder Peter’s ready to fight? He was told to bring a sword, after all. And now not only are there soldiers there to take Jesus away, Judas is with them to identify Jesus (there’s a “they all look alike” joke in here, but it’s way too crass). Judas is a clear traitor. Would any of us react differently in Peter’s place?
Peter’s ready to lead the group in fighting their way clear, but Jesus stops him. He’s ready for what’s coming, and he knows it’s what must be done. Peter, on the other hand, does not know what’s coming, and that’s going to be a problem for him tomorrow.
And much like Judas’s own misplaced logic in selling Jesus out, this is Peter’s turn to not rely on the Lord, but instead think he knows better and try to grope forward with his own understanding.
So Christ gets hauled off. And Peter, James, John, and Judas are standing there in the garden. Imagine …
Imagine for a moment the look, and maybe the words, that may have passed between Judas standing with the soldiers, and Peter, James, and John, as Jesus was being led away. How dark must that moment have been, even if it was a small moment in the face of the larger, incomprehensible thing in motion?
Can you imagine Peter being held back by James and John as he lunges at Judas, shouting “What did you do?! What did you do?!” I sure can.
And if you’re Judas, now what? You’ve just betrayed the son of God to people you know full well want to murder him. You took money for it. You had to look three of your friends in the eye after you did it and try and explain it to them.
We all have this moment. The moment when we realize that all our wisdom, all our planning, all our certainty in our course, it was all wrong; we stopped making it about God, and made it about us, and now it’s a disaster, and we’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves. Facing that truth can be devastating.
Good Friday
It is generally agreed by scholars of this timeline that Judas actually realized the horror of what he had done, and goes and hangs himself early Friday morning. He’s probably dead by the time Jesus starts carrying his cross to Calvary.
The sequence of events regarding Jesus’ death sentence is a sequence we know: Condemnation by the Sanhedrin, Pilate, Pilate’s wife, Herod, Pilate again, the screaming crowd, Pilate washing his hands of it to try and preserve order. We know the story.
But let’s focus now on those non-evil Sanhedrin members again.
What is the image before them of Jesus?
He’s a rabble-rouser. He may have done some good things, but this whole Lazarus story is just too much. And the crowds of people with the palm leaves. And the temple brawl. Remember that for the Sanhedrin those are the three biggest stories.
And he was renounced by one of his closest henchmen, that Judas character. If someone from the inner circle walked away like that, can he be legitimate? No, he’s a charismatic cult leader. He’s a nut.
Couldn’t they have stopped this? No. He’s either telling the truth, or a dangerous lunatic.
If the latter, then getting rid of him is the best way to preserve the comfortable status quo.
If the former, it’s too much work to figure out what to do about that. And it’s not like he makes it easy. He won’t budge off his position that the Jewish leaders are whited sepulchres and barren trees. Maybe he’s kind-of got a point, but he’s just unpleasantly blunt. Whichever way, Jesus being right is too much to contemplate.
And that’s the big one, isn’t it? Contemplating the truth just takes us too far out of our comfort zones. How easy is it for us to wander our way logically into justifying stupid and dangerous and awful things?
All too easy. So condemned Jesus was, and to death he went.
Let’s circle back to Peter. We know this story, too. Three times Peter denies his relationship with Jesus. Why?
Fear is the easy one. Peter wasn’t willing to take on the mob. But he was willing to fight it out in the garden the night before. What changed? What might have changed? Put yourself in Peter’s shoes. Think the unthinkable. What might have changed?
What if Peter himself starts to doubt Jesus, given what’s happening? It wouldn’t be the first time Peter jumped the moment Jesus told him to, only to start second guessing. Remember the walking on water thing?
It’s one thing to be ready to go down swinging, it’s another to meekly accept death. Could Jesus’ surrender have been seen by Peter as some sort of betrayal? Peter doesn’t have our perspective. All he’s seen is that Jesus started fighting (in the temple), told him to be ready to fight, and when it was time to really fight Jesus stood down and let himself be taken. If that’s the landscape before Peter, can we really blame him for being uncertain in this particular set of moments? I don’t think so. But with our perspective as readers, what can we learn from it in our own lives?
Trust in the Lord. Lean not to your own understanding.
By mid afternoon Jesus was dead. By the evening his body had been laid in a tomb. As night fell on Friday, The realization set in among the disciples and apostles. Jesus was gone.
Let’s talk for a second about the name of this day in the mainline Christian calendar.
In German-speaking countries, Friday is sometimes called Karfreitag or Stiller Freitag, where Kar derives from bewail, grieve, or mourn, and Stiller means Silent. That seems suited to the tone of the day, given its events. After all, at the end of Friday Jesus was dead. As he died, so too was the threat to the Sanhedrin lifted. As he died, so too was his challenge to the Pharisees ended. With his death, so passed away the headache for Herod and Pilate. Sad and Tragic death.
So why “Good Friday?” Well, coming out of the old English, the word Good gets used in the sense of something being Holy or Righteous. That’s much more hopeful, I think.
And it’s more accurate. Because Jesus’ death, while a tough moment, meant so much more than the end of his mortal body’s life.
With his death, so too snapped the chains of hell. As he died, so too did fear. As he died, so too did hopelessness. So too did loneliness. So too did abandonment. So too did pain.
That’s righteous. That’s holy. That’s good.
We know the sequence of events that happened next.
I’ll leave this series here. There will be lots of things posted about Easter come Sunday. So I’ll let you read a variety of those instead. If that seems a little abrupt, or leaves you a little unsettled, consider for a moment how the disciples felt through Friday and Saturday, wondering at everything that had just happened and wondering what was supposed to happen next.
I’ll conclude simply with this, and give you this one last thing to ponder through to the weekend. The story of Holy Week is a story about men. It fascinates me that the entrance of a woman to the story heralds the arrival of Easter Sunday.
Think about THAT.
And Happy Easter.