A DIFFERENT KIND OF POST FOR A DIFFERENT KIND OF WEEK

It’s Holy Week, as its name implies, the most sacred week of the Christian year, the week in which we commemorate the three closely related events that are not only the most important events in the life of Jesus and on the Christian calendar but also, to those who take their Christianity seriously, the most momentous events in human history.

Not at all coincidentally, it is also the week of Passover this year. While the two don’t always take place at the same time, they generally do and the reason is obvious: Holy Thursday celebrates Christ’s institution of the Eucharist at what clearly was a Seder meal.

There is just a touch of controversy in the contention that the Holy Thursday meal was indeed a Seder. The gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke state quite clearly that “Jesus desired to eat the Passover with His disciples…” and thus he asked them to prepare the meal in the “upper room, furnished.” John’s gospel, however, takes a different tack, indicating that the Passover took place shortly after the crucifixion of Jesus, stating that the Pharisees, Jesus’s chief accusers, would not enter the praetorium of Pilate for the sentencing of Jesus (which took place after the events of Holy Thursday) because they did not want to be defiled by contact with Gentiles, a condition that would prevent them from celebrating the Passover. This contradiction has puzzled theologians, and just ordinary Christians, for centuries. Indeed, I was prompted to post this piece by an article that just popped up on my ISP’s home page. The article reports on research done by Professor Colin Humphreys at Cambridge who concludes that the contradiction can be explained by John’s use of a different calendar from that employed by Mark, Matthew, and Luke.

While there may be something to Professor Humphrey’s research (I don’t know enough about the relative merits of the lunar calendar and the more the “old-fashioned” Jewish calendar Jesus may have been using, according to Professor Humphrey, to opine on this matter.), the apparent contradiction between the gospels concerning the confluence between Holy Thursday and the Passover Seder can be explained both more simply and more profoundly by understanding the different motivations of the gospel writers.

Mark, Matthew, and Luke wrote what we call the synoptic gospels. They were concerned with reporting the facts of Jesus’s life to those newly converted to His message and to those whom they hoped to convince to convert. These Gospels are both theological tracts and biographies, if you will, of Jesus, with the emphasis slightly on the latter. Mark’s gospel, the first of the four, was especially concerned with the facts of Jesus’s life, and it moves at a nearly breathless pace; I highly recommend as a starting point for those wanting to get acquainted with Jesus. But I digress.

John, on the other hand, as the last chronologically of the Gospels, written when the Christology of the early Church was much more highly developed, was much more concerned with theology, with identifying Jesus as the Son of God and with conveying to the reader that eternal life was to be obtained through faith in Jesus and fealty to His message. While this Gospel, too, can be considered a biography of Jesus, it is much more concerned with theology than facts. Thus, that Holy Thursday’s events were part of a Seder meal was not nearly as important as outlining the theological significance, and the irony, of the Pharisees’ not wanting to defile themselves so that they could celebrate the preliminarily redemptive sacrifice of the lamb of the Passover while they pushed for the ultimately redemptive sacrifice of Jesus.

Maybe I’ll write more of these in the future.

At any rate, blessed Passover and Holy Week, Triduum, and Easter if I don’t write in the next few days.