Holy Week

Holy Week

There are many events included in what Christians call Holy Week. The Entry into Jesusalem, Jesus overthrowing the tables of the Temple money-changers, his soulful prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane asking the Father to spare him crucifixion if it be His will, having a Last Supper with his disciples, betrayal and arrest, appearing before the Jewish High Council, appearing before Pilate, all of this culminating in his crucifixion and resurrection. As one might expect, there is a great variety of opinion about the historicity and meaning of these “events”, due, no doubt, to the nature of our sources, which include at least three layers in the traditions of the first century. If we limit ourselves to Mark, the first of the Synoptic gospels, put in final form shortly after the Roman army totally destroyed rebellious Jerusalem and Judaea in 70 ce, we find these three layers: a) remembrances of Jesus, his words and acts, b) commentary on and combining of those sources by the early churches, and c) Mark’s own editing to make the story not only flow but also to make it more palatable to Rome, where he likely lived. 2000 years of ecclesiastical warfare have created and hardened differing interpretations of these “scriptures”, casting a veil of confusion and uncertainty over the actual events. Even modern scholarship, with all the tools of current literary and archaeological science, arrives at differing conclusions. Deciding who is right invites critique no matter what, and so we must always be open to changing our understanding. With this caveat, I offer a picture of “Holy Week” that makes sense to me.

The chronology of the week is where the difficulty originates. Most Christians believe that first Jesus was crucified, and then he rose from the dead. The reality is that first came the resurrection and then the crucifixion.  This is crucial.  

Being the charismatic person he was, Jesus impacted quite a few people. Some had their lives changed, continuing on their life’s journey with a new sense of purpose, meaning, and faith. We have documents from two such groups, the Gospel of Thomas and a source called Q, so we are reasonably certain that there were at least a few such communities. They lived with the assurance that, although they had physically left Jesus in Galilee, his Spirit lived in their midst. Not just a memory, but a new type of reality beyond human comprehension. For those mover-on disciples, Jesus was really with them, even though he was still walking around with those disciples who stayed with him. And for the stay-behind disciples, the same Spirit of Jesus was with them, both while he was alive and also after he was crucified. In the case of no disciple, stayer or mover on, was the crucifixion essential to their new faith and life. It was the Spirit, with them wherever they were, that emboldened and enlivened the community of disciples, but Spirit understood as a reality that cannot be analyzed by the rational mind, transcending human comprehension. That was resurrection.

It was common practice for Rome to execute trouble-makers- by the tens of thousands-, and the preferred method was crucifixion. Except in rare circumstances, the body was left hanging, striking terror into the imaginations of potential would-be rebels. We’ll never know if that was the fate of Jesus or if he was granted burial. But what we do know is that removal and burial was not a prerequisite for his resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus was, in the experience of the disciples, totally independent of what happened to his earthly body. We need to shift our attention away from the captivating image of an empty tomb and focus on the Spirit.

What then of all the events of this “Holy Week”? Did they really happen? and where did they come from? Let’s start with what is called Palm Sunday, a commemoration celebrating Jesus’ “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem. There is no doubt that Jesusarrived at Jerusalem, most likely with at least some of the disciples who stayed with him. He had become somewhat suspect as a teacher, but had there been the adoring crowds we read about in the gospels, Jesus would have been arrested right then and there. Jerusalem was a powderkeg at Passover, when untold numbers of Jews gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate their escape from Pharaoh, and Pilate, ever seeking Caesar’s approval, was prepared to stop any rebellion before it got started and quite probably had standing orders to arrest and crucify anyone like Jesus. If this is the case, then all the rest of the week’s story concerning Jesus, did not happen.

But suppose Jesus entered the city, not with a vast adoring crowd, but with disciples and some others. It is crucial to understand that none of the events of Holy Week, if they happened, change the fact of the resurrection, precisely because it had already happened. But we can take a closer look and ask about the probability that certain of these events happened. And we can look at another dimension of the situation, and that other dimension is this. A cadre of the rich and powerful controlled the economy of Israel, and Jesus threatened their monopoly of the patronage system, a situation presented in my book How the Rich Stole Jesus. They tried to exterminate the threat by crucifying the Leader, but the movement only grew, so as the century wore on, they both infiltrated the leadership of the church and altered the theology. That alteration was especially obvious in the crucifixion/resurrection narrative, with which we shall end, but also appears in other parts of the Holy Week story, as we shall now see, item by item.

A  Jesus might have entered the Temple. His whole life was a critique of the oppressive economy, and the Temple cult was the center of power. The High Priest was appointed by Caesar, all Jews were supposed to offer sacrifice and pay tax in the Temple, the whole scene representing the corruption of the economic system encased in religious garb. Jesus’ scathing critique of the whole system was too obvious for the rich to deny, but perhaps the critique could be shifted a bit, so that the target was not the Temple rich and powerful, but the money changers. They had the rather mundane job of changing foreign money into Jewish money because foreign money was forbidden in the temple. In other words, they performed a task essential to the operation of the system, and Jesus’ target was not them, but the system itself. The wealthy saw that if they  could transfer Jesus’ anger away from themselves and to the minor employees just doing their job, well, they could protect the system.

B  The image of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane while his three chosen disciples sleep is very powerful, evoking a deep sense of sympathy for and identification with the Savior. Jesus asks that this cup of suffering might be removed if it is the will of the Father, but suffer he must. For various reasons, scholars believe the event is not historical. After all, who would have heard Jesus’ prayer? But if your intent is to divert attention away from the fact that Jesus was crucified as a revolutionary, what better way than to promote the idea that his death was the key part in God’s plan of salvation? He had to die! The wealthy saw, again, that if they could turn attention away from his opposition to the economic oppression and to the personal salvation effected by his gruesome death, well, that would help preserve the oppressive system.

C  It is highly unlikely that Jesus was brought before the High Council of the Jews, charged and beaten, and then taken to Pilate for examination and probable execution. The story is just not consonant with the historical facts. There is no historical record of Roman crowds being offered a choice about which prisoner would be released and which crucified. That the crowd clamored for the execution of Jesus and not Barabbas puts all the blame on the Jews and exonerates Rome in the person of Pilate. It is most likely an editorial addition by the writer, Mark, given that he lived in Rome and wrote after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce, when anti-Jewish sentiment was high. By that time, the temple aristocracy, center of power and wealth, had been destroyed and replaced by a Jewish diaspora that spread across the empire. The “trial” of Jesus, seems, therefore, to be not a creation of the rich and powerful, but a redaction introduced by Mark.

D  The first mention of what has come to be called “The Last Supper” is found in Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, a reference tucked into his discussion of the “common meal” celebrated in the first Christian gatherings. There were both rich and poor in the church, and with a vision of equality each person brought what they had for a common meal. Unfortunately, the meal had degenerated to the point where the rich came early, ate the food and drank all the wine, leaving everyone to fend for themselves. Paul was not happy. Importantly, the conjoined mention of the Lord’s Supper and the common meal tells us that in the decades after the crucifixion, both were being celebrated. Obviously, the sacramental Supper has survived to this day while the actual sharing of food and drink has not. A suspicious mind might suspect that, once again, the rich and powerful were only too happy to promote the one and not the other, to promote the personal communion between the believer and their God and forget a meal that involved actual sharing.

In addition to that background, the description of the Last Supper as presented in Mark has a ritualistic ring to it. Combining that with the earlier reference in 1 Corinthians, leads to the conclusion that there evolved a ritual narrative in the first decades after Jesus’ crucifixion, and Mark included this narrative in his gospel. But here’s the point: Jesus and his disciples certainly had a final meal together, either in Jerusalem or on the way. That would be a given. But the fact that the narrative references sacrificial death [my body, broken for you, my blood, shed for you] tells us that somewhere a decision has been made that makes the crucifixion central to salvation. This, I have argued, is a false conclusion. All the disciples, stayers and movers-on, experienced the new life in the power of the Spirit. That’s the resurrection experience, and had nothing to do with a horrible death that was a sacrifice to appease an angry God. Where might this narrative about the Last Supper have originated? The rich and powerful had the motive, and as time moved on, they had the means.

E  There is no doubt that Jesus was crucified. We don’t know if that happened before he entered Jerusalem or after. But we can be quite sure that he was murdered because he posed a threat to the elite establishment.  The details of the threat are outlined in How the Rich Stole Jesus. The problem for the rich was that getting rid of the leader did not solve the problem. There is no evidence that the church grew fast, but it did grow. The core belief that the Spirit of Jesus continued to lead the nascent church was a very threatening concept, and so the rich and powerful worked to undermine that faith. That Jesus was crucified because he was a revolutionary was transformed into the concept that his death was the key element in God’s plan of salvation. His sacrificial death saves you from your sins. And his resurrection is not a living Spirit that leads the community forward, but a walking out of a tomb on a specific, now past day. The focus of the church was transferred from transforming society to awaiting a return of the Lord some day in the future. 

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Emerging from the available sources are two primary assertions that are the core of all that we have looked at. First and foremost, the resurrection of Jesus cannot be seen as a walking out of an empty tomb. It is, rather, to be understood as a Spirit that empowered the first disciples to continue in the new life of love and peace. That Spirit is a form of being that the disciples could experience but not comprehend. Correspondingly, the crucifixion was not God’s plan. It was the result of the inability of human greed to comprehend and accept Jesus’ message that love is the quintessence of all that is. Had the early church followed that message, and had the rich and powerful not been successful in their coup, the history of Western civilization might have taken a different direction.