St. John's Good Friday Passion Reading will Open Doors You Didn't Know Existed

THERE ARE FOUR GOSPELS AND FOUR PASSION NARRATIVES, NOT JUST ONE
 
Being that this week is Holy Week, and we heard the majestic proclamation of St. Luke’s Passion on Palm Sunday, I got to wondering about the four evangelists—Sts. Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John—and how stunningly different each Gospel is. We tend to think of the four collectively, written together—four accounts of the final year of Jesus’ life—with the consolation that if you’re read one—or even three—Passion accounts, you’ve milked the stories of everything you need to be saved. Mark, Matthew, and Luke, brought us the biography of the Christ with a uniformity we carry in our heads as our “default” story of Jesus. The Gospel writers were not literalists, to be sure, as Sts. Luke and Matthew write their Infancy narratives in separate ways. But nobody wrote like St. John, whose narrative of the Passion is proclaimed annually at the Good Friday Rite [this year, on Friday April 18.]
 
THE WILD CARD KNUCKLEBALL GOSPEL
 
The accepted sequence of the writing of the four Gospels looks something like this.
St. Mark: 60’s A.D., first written, before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
St. Mathew: 80’s A.D. Used Mark and independent Q-source, viewed Jesus as the new Moses.
St. Luke: 80’s A.D. Used Mark and Q-source, viewed Jesus as universal savior.
 
But then we come to St. John, where every page has a twist or a dip that makes us back off home plate and try to figure out what it will take to get a grip on such a pitch. Bob Uecker, the late catcher, humorist, and broadcaster, described catching a knuckleball: "The way to catch a knuckleball is to wait until it stops rolling and pick it up." There is a theological message here. St. John’s Gospel is unconventional, and we need the time to digest the major and the minor differences of this Gospel from its three predecessors. [Note to Good Friday lectors: give us an opportunity to process the nuances.]
 
For starters, we are not sure who, precisely, is the name attached to this brilliant Gospel. For centuries we assumed it was an apostle named John. The Gospel itself refers to “the disciple whom Jesus loved” but without a reference in the text to John. The “John” who is named in the text is referred to as one of the two boanerges, “the sons of thunder” who, along with his mother, lobbied for places to the right and the left of Jesus when he returned in glory at the end times. In the modern era of Biblical scholarship, possibly the best American Biblical scholar of the twentieth century, Father Raymond Brown, wrote ​The Community of the Beloved Disciple [1976] in which he speculated that the church of the late first century was already splintering to a degree over personalities and primitive doctrines, including a sect loyal to “the disciple Jesus loved,” not the successor of St. Peter. [See John 21: 15-23 on the “chain of command” in the Church.]
 
By the time John [and I will continue to use this name throughout] had died, his loyal and gifted disciples compiled his reflections about Jesus’ works and teachings along with his probable thoughts on issues in their time. This is so true of the Last Supper; an episode of John’s Gospel account of that sacred meal is proclaimed during the Holy Thursday Mass. Stop and consider how much history had transpired over seventy years, from Jesus’ Resurrection to   the time this Gospel was written, a period of at least seventy years. Certainly, all the Apostles were dead. The Church had evolved from a small community of Jewish Christians in Jerusalem to a worldwide vision of converting the Gentile world centered in other major cities, notably Rome; Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D.; there were doctrinal errors developing, most notably that Jesus was only divine and not human, a movement call Gnosticism. How would these writers compile their understanding of Jesus and the disciple whom he loved? Clearly it would take some out-of-the-box inspiration to address Christianity as the second century of the Church began. Without sounding irreverent, someone with a handle on a knuckleball.
 
JOHN’S PASSION NARRATIVE
 
The Good Friday narrative for the Catholic Liturgy proclaims Chapters 18 and 19 only, but we will treat the entire Passion here.
 
Traditionally Christians consider the Passion as beginning with the Last Supper. Right from the beginning John rethinks this narrative outside the box. He states in the very opening line of 13:1 that the disciples’ Last Supper was “before the feast of Passover;” the laws of fasting and cleanness in preparation for the Passover meal do not, in John’s narrative, begin until the next day. Thus, on Good Friday we find in 18:28 that “[the Sanhedrin itself] did not enter the praetorium in order not to be defiled so that they could eat the Passover that night, i.e., Friday]. John has a greater reason for moving the Passover back one day—a brilliant gambit we will unpack further down the narrative.
 
John is the only evangelist who does not describe Jesus’ designation of the bread and wine as his Body and Blood. Instead, he substitutes the washing of the disciples’ feet, a major staple of the Holy Thursday Evening Mass. [John 13: 1-20] John may be drawing from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians the theme of receiving the Eucharist unworthily. This would make sense because after the washing of the feet John records Jesus as “deeply troubled” and saying “Amen, Amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” [John 13:21] This scene reminds us, too, of how deeply painful to the early Christians was betrayal of the Way of the Messiah. We don’t talk about that much in today’s Church, i.e., betraying the good of our neighbor. But one of the most haunting musical pieces of Church music was composed in 1585 as Catholics were abandoning the faith and moving to Protestant worship and belief. The song, written originally as a response to the First Reading for the Holy Thursday Mass, is called Judas Mercator Pessimus or “Judas, Most Wicked Merchant.” [You can hear it sung, with the English translation, here.]
 
John uses sun positions in the sky as theological clues. Bright sun and closeness to noon are symbols of God’s intense presence. After Judas has been singled out by Jesus’ handing him the morsel, “He took the morsel and left at once. And it was night.” [John 13:30] If you think back a moment, Jesus encountered the Samaritan woman at the well at noon in John 4, but Peter’s eventual threefold betrayal occurred in the dead of the night. Pilate’s exclamation of Jesus at the end of the trial, Ecce Homo, or “Behold the man!” took place at noon on our Good Friday. [John 19:14]
 
Having washed the feet of his disciples and dismissed his betrayer, Jesus delivers a five-chapter sermon to the eleven that summarizes his law of love and his prayer to the Father that all may be one. Likely, this sermon is a combination of teachings that Jesus delivered during his intimate moments with his chosen ones; the authors/editors wisely put this lengthy reflection on the heels of the Crucifixion as something of an explanation of Jesus’ coming self-giving upon the cross. I can’t do justice to the sermon text in its entirety, but it is important to recall that Jesus talked about the coming of the Holy Spirit [or “Spirit” in the text]. Hold that thought as we move into the next day.
 
As we move to the post-supper arrest and subsequent events [John, Chapters 18 and 19] we will notice that despite his predicament, Jesus oversees everything [John 18:4]. This is a long way from the Crucifixion scene in Mark’s Gospel forty years earlier where Jesus cries, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me”? What was happening at the time of John’s composition [c. 100 A.D.] was the early Church’s developing sense of what we call today, “The Holy Trinity,” though it would take 200 to 400 years to find the right creed words to profess our belief in God’s trinitarian being at Mass, i.e., the Nicene Creed [325 A.D.] John’s Gospel lays out the nature of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
 
This newfound wisdom of the Johannine Gospel’s authors explains why the garden scene in the Kidron Valley is absent all the internal anguish expressed by Jesus in the other Gospels—no report of sweat “like drops of blood” as St. Luke put it in his Palm Sunday Gospel last weekend. Jesus is ready to reveal his Father and the Spirit to Pilate, the Sanhedrin, his Jewish brethren, and eventually to the four corners of the earth. When the soldiers approach and ask if he is Jesus of Nazareth, he replies “I AM”—the same name God used to introduce himself to Moses…and the soldiers fell to the ground, just as Moses had been overcome. [John 18: 6-8]
When Jesus is arrested, he is followed from a distance by Peter and “another disciple,” usually identified as the disciple whom Jesus loved. This unnamed disciple knew his way around; the text states that he was “an acquaintance of the high priest.” [John 18:16] I have to say, this is a peculiar report, that the beloved disciple is an acquaintance of the man seeking Jesus’ death. It is also worth noting that Jesus is first interrogated by Annas, and then by Caiphas. And while the audience with Annas is remembered for Jesus’ mistreatment during the interrogation, it should also be noted that Jesus replied with dignity in defense of the truth. [John 18:23] in stark contrast to Pilate’s later cynicism “What is truth?” [John 18:38]
 
Peter’s three denials are hung out for all to see; his betrayals meet the scholarly rule of multiple attestation: events reported in all four Gospels are considered to have a high historical probability. Given the timing of this fourth Gospel, there was some risk in highlighting Peter’s vulnerability, given one of the text’s purposes of restoring and maintaining good order and the authority of community leaders. It is quite possible that John 21: 15-19 was inserted as a counterweight to Peter’s previous betrayal, where Jesus asks Peter three times if Peter loved him. Again, the authors are trying to bring the disciples of the beloved into a peaceable communion with the whole church and the succession line from Peter.
 
Pilate has the unenviable task of passing judgment on Jesus. There is one piece of historical data that often gets overlooked: the trial and crucifixion of Jesus took place during the time of Passover. In Anthony Saldarini’s excellent text, Jesus and Passover [1984], the author describes what Passover in Jerusalem would have been like in Jesus’ day: there is one statistic that stands out. In normal times the population of Jerusalem was 10,000 people. During Passover, it swelled to 100,000. Not that this figure excuses shoddy neglect of due process, but it does assist us in understanding Pilate’s dilemma.
 
Another factor here is a strong opinion among scholars that there is a subtle but real strain of antisemitism in John’s Gospel and some other New Testament texts. See Matthew 27:25, “And the whole people said in reply, “His blood be upon us and upon our children.” Pilate may have felt his hands tied in condemning Jesus, but he was not happy about it. This is evident in his reaction to Jewish leaders who demanded that the sign on the cross, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” be amended. Pilate’s retort will last forever in history, Quod scripsi, scripsi. “What I have written, I have written.” [John 19: 21-22]
 
The authors of John record that Jesus carried his cross alone to Calvary. [No Simon of Cyrene.] Once the crosses were erected, we come upon events that, like a knuckleball, will scramble your “comfortable stance of knowledge” about the meaning of the crucifixion forever. This Gospel records who is standing at the foot of the cross as Jesus lingered between life and death: four women and the beloved disciple. One of the women is Mary, Jesus’ mother. John’s Gospel is the only one to identify Mary at the Calvary scene, and there is a reason. We are familiar with how Jesus—in command despite of his rapid decline to death—constitutes a new family among those beneath him.
 
Jesus has selected the time for his wine: when he is “aware that everything was now finished [John 19:28], he asks for wine. But why now? Probably to fulfill a promise found in St. Matthew’s text: “But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom. [Matthew 26:29] The time had come. Having offered himself in perfect love as man and God, Jesus has ushered into time the new Kingdom of God. The Gospel text states that having finished the wine, Jesus declares: “It is finished…
 
…and bowing his head, he handed over the spirit.” [19:30] This is the Pentecost moment in John’s Gospel, the fulfillment of sending the Spirit upon the earth. Now consider what is happening in the Temple simultaneously. The Temple had closed around noontime so that the priests could slaughter lambs throughout the afternoon for each family in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover meal that evening. As the Passover lambs are being cut, a soldier on Calvary pierces the side of Jesus…John’s Gospel had been laid out timewise that these two events would occur simultaneously! The marriage of the old and the new. And when the soldier pierced Jesus’ side, “immediately blood and water flowed out.” [19:34] In the early Church, blood and water were symbols for the Eucharist and Baptism. The new community of God’s Kingdom was constituted at the foot of the cross.
 
Everything came together on Good Friday afternoon. In a sense, God saved his best Gospel inspiration till the end. A new community constituted by the outpouring of the Spirit took wings. If you attend Good Friday Service in your church or read/reflect upon the Johannine Passion narrative at home, let the power of this narrative stir your soul to gratitude, joy, and hope. Follow the sun.