Our Life in the Lord Part Seven: The Hour
Jesus enters Jerusalem on a borrowed colt, over cloaks and palm branches, to shouts of hosanna. Within the week a crowd in Jerusalem will shout for his crucifixion. In those few days Jesus deliberately mounts two thrones: first the colt, with his disciples praising God aloud, then the cross, with the rulers sneering at him. Jesus plans the entry himself, sending two disciples ahead to untie the colt in the village opposite. The owners of the colt ask the disciples, “Why are you untying this colt?” (Lk 19:33), and the disciples answer, “The Master has need of it” (Lk 19:34). The disciples’ answer applies to everything we clutch in our own lives, both possessions outside ourselves and attachments within. Whatever we clutch, we withhold from the purpose God gave it, so Christ keeps sending his disciples to untie it.
The Week of Processions
Holy Week is a week of processions in the Church’s liturgy: the palms carried in, the oils borne up the aisle at the Chrism Mass, the Blessed Sacrament carried to the altar of repose on Thursday night, the cross carried forward for veneration on Friday, the Paschal Candle carried into a dark church at the Vigil. Each of these processions is a rehearsal for the greatest procession of the Pilgrim Church, the one she makes toward eternity, in which each of us has a place, walking toward the altar of heaven with the gifts God has entrusted to us. The Christian life is made of two gestures: humility, and walking in procession toward the altar.
The Supper as Command
On the night before he died, Jesus gave his disciples three inseparable commands: to do in memory of him what he did with the bread and the cup, to wash one another’s feet as he had washed theirs, and to love one another as he had loved them. He took bread and wine, the gifts the priest-king Melchizedek had once brought out to Abram, a gesture the Church sees as a prefiguring of her own offering (CCC 1333). He gave thanks and said over the bread, “This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me” (Lk 22:19), and over the cup, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you” (Lk 22:20). At every Mass the priest says over the chalice, “this is the chalice of my Blood, the Blood of the new and eternal covenant” (Roman Missal). By commanding his disciples to do this in memory of him, Jesus established a perpetual institution, as God had established the Passover in Egypt. Jesus is the new Passover in his own person; through him eternal death passes over us. He tied a towel around his waist and washed his disciples’ feet, then told them: “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do” (Jn 13:15). The washing of feet and the offering of his Body belong together; when we receive his Body without humbly serving others, or serve others without receiving his Body, we misunderstand both. Later at that supper, hours before his arrest, Jesus said: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (Jn 13:34). To love one another as he has loved us is the primary qualification for his Kingdom.
The Distance Measured
At the Last Supper the Lord of heaven and earth shows how far he goes to bring his people into communion with himself: from the throne of heaven to a towel and basin, from the altar of eternity to a table in an upper room, from needing nothing to giving everything. In each act of the Supper Jesus goes that distance: he offers the sacrifice of thanksgiving, breaks the bread and shares the cup in remembrance, establishes the memorial feast as a perpetual institution, washes his disciples’ feet as their master, and commands that all of it be done again. By going that distance, God restores the friendship with himself that Adam and Eve broke in the garden.
Gethsemane and the Submitted Will
Jesus now enters a garden, Gethsemane, as Adam had once been placed in a garden, Eden. As man, Jesus shrinks from the suffering and death before him, as any of us would, and he prays, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet, not as I will, but as you will” (Mt 26:39). Jesus, true God and true man, suffers this agony over our sins; Luke writes that “his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground” (Lk 22:44). He prays three times, and three times he returns to find Peter, James, and John asleep; then he wakes them and goes to meet Judas and the crowd that has come to arrest him. His human will “does not resist or oppose but rather submits to his divine and almighty will” (CCC 475). By freely submitting his human will to the Father, Jesus begins to undo Adam’s disobedience in Eden.
Failures of Sight
One after another, the people around Jesus look at him and fail to see who he is. Judas trades him for silver. Peter, who had boasted that he would never deny him, denies him in a courtyard when questioned by a servant girl. The crowd before Pilate chooses Barabbas. The rulers sneer at him: “He saved others, let him save himself if he is the chosen one, the Messiah of God” (Lk 23:35). With that sneer the rulers repeat the devil’s temptation in the desert: to use his power for himself to prove who he is (Lk 4:3, 9). Beside him hang two criminals, who show two postures we can take before God. One of them reviles Jesus and demands a rescue: “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us” (Lk 23:39). The other asks as a supplicant: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Lk 23:42). Jesus answers him: “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Lk 23:43).
Priest, Altar, and Lamb
On the cross the Father reconciles the world to himself in his Son. The Father does not demand a victim from his Son to appease his anger: God needs nothing and gains nothing, he never designed that we should die, and he himself supplies the victim. On Moriah, Abraham told Isaac that God would provide the offering; on Calvary God provides it from his own First Fruits. Jesus carries the wood of his own sacrifice up the hill, as Isaac had carried the wood up Moriah. Under the old covenant the priest, the altar, and the victim were separate: a priest offered an animal upon an altar, and the animal died in the sinner’s place. On Calvary Christ is priest, altar, and lamb of sacrifice in one person: he offers the sacrifice, he bears our sins in his body on the cross, and he is the one offered. Because the one who offers himself is both God and man, his sacrifice is at last commensurate with the sins of all people. The martyrs and the innocent are killed; Jesus is killed and is also sacrificed, because he lays down his life freely to reconcile us with the Father (Jn 10:18). That is, killing takes a life; sacrifice offers one. On the cross Christ undergoes death, the penalty our sin had earned, and by dying he destroys our death. The cross, a Roman instrument of torture, becomes the means of our salvation.
Mercy and Justice in One Perfection
Mercy and justice are one simple perfection in God, though we see them from two sides. On the cross God shows both together: he takes sin with complete seriousness, and he loves the sinner all the same. From our side the cross is mercy from beginning to end. In strict justice God, whom we had offended, could have left humanity outside the gate of Eden, yet he chose to pay the price of our reconciliation himself, in the person of his Son.
Worldly victories are fleeting and reversible, like a game won today and lost tomorrow. Jesus wins a permanent victory on the cross because he conquers by suffering everything the devil and death can do to him; once he has suffered all of it, his enemies have nothing left with which to overturn it.
Some homilists, weighing his sufferings, have judged that being betrayed by his own people, whom he had pursued for millennia, caused him more anguish than the nails. Jesus set his face like flint, as Isaiah writes of the Lord’s servant (Is 50:7). Paul describes how far he descended: “he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (Phil 2:7), and “he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:8). From the cross he prays the opening line of the twenty-second psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46). In his time a psalm was known by its first words, so with that line he prays the whole psalm, which begins in abandonment and ends with the promise that “a people yet unborn” will be told of God’s deliverance (Ps 22:32). Then he says, “It is finished” (Jn 19:30), and “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46), and he hands over the spirit.
The Pierced Side and the Torn Veil
A soldier pierces the side of Jesus with a lance, and blood and water flow out (Jn 19:34). As God formed Eve from the side of Adam while he slept, so the Church comes forth from the side of Christ, the new Adam, asleep in death on the cross (CCC 766). St. John Chrysostom taught that the water and the blood signify baptism and the Eucharist, the two sacraments from which the Church is born. Across the city, the veil of the Temple tears from top to bottom (Mt 27:51). God takes away for good the barrier between his people and the mercy seat, because the true veil, the flesh of Jesus, has just been opened for everyone (Heb 10:20).
The Descent to the Dead
Jesus died, and his body lay in a tomb which, John notes, was in a garden: after Eden and Gethsemane, a third garden, where the new Adam lay buried. His soul went down to the realm of the dead, to the just who had waited there from Abel onward. The Apostles’ Creed confesses his descent in a single line, “he descended into hell,” where “hell” means the abode of the dead, which the Catechism distinguishes from the hell of the damned (CCC 633). Entering death as its conqueror, Jesus opened from the inside the gate that had been shut since Eden, so the just who waited in the bosom of Abraham heard his voice and were set free (CCC 633, 637).
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