Holy Week

 

The shadow of the cross falls across the whole of Holy Week.

At the start of the week, Jesus visits the temple, and there, with the words of the prophet Jeremiah on his lips, he clears the space, upturning tables, driving out animals, sending the daily mechanisms of the sacrificial system into exile. Jeremiah had called the people in his own day to repentance, accusing them of trusting in the temple itself rather than in living rightly before God, pleading with them, could they not see? Had the house that bore God’s name not been turned into a den of thieves in their eyes—as in Jeremiah’s eyes, as in God’s eyes—a people who acted with shameful impunity?

In these days, Jesus will claim the temple as symbol of his own body, that would be torn down and rebuilt in three days—by which he was speaking of his resurrection—and also predict that the temple buildings themselves would be thrown down—the Romans would accomplish this in 70 AD/CE. And in the temple, Jesus enacts the consequence of misplaced confidence.

On the Monday of Holy Week, the cross is the instrument by which the temple will be destroyed.

The next day, Jesus returned and seeing a fig tree, looked for fruit. But it bore him none, and he cursed the tree, an action that puzzled his apprentices.

Three things to note, two concerning biblical imagination and one concerning botany: curses are temporary restrictions, in contrast to blessings; trees symbolise a person or people; and a fig is a kind of inverted flower that is pollinated by a fig wasp that dies in the process—and which also hosts parasitoid wasps that do not pollinate.

The fig tree represents the nation of Israel. They have not proved fruitful. But if a fig tree bears no fruit, it is pollinators that are missing. The (parasitoid) leaders of the nation have not been willing to lay down their lives for the common good. In contrast, Jesus will die for the people, but not before he has pollinated the fig tree. From the cross, he will cry, ‘Father, forgive,’ and cancel the curse, transforming it into blessing.

On the Tuesday of Holy Week, the cross is the fig tree, the curse that will become a blessing through the actions of the fig wasp. It is also the pole on which Moses hung a bronze serpent, that anyone who had been bitten by a poisonous serpent might gaze upon it and be healed, foreshadowing the seed of Eve who would crush the serpent’s head and have his heel bitten.

Throughout this week, Jesus is staying with his friends Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, in Bethany, just outside Jerusalem. At some point in the week, they host a dinner in his honour. At that dinner, Mary of Bethany takes a rare and expensive perfume and anoints Jesus with it in preparing for his burial. One of Jesus’ apprentices, Judas Iscariot, the one who would betray him, took offence. He blurts out that the perfume could have been sold for 300 denarii and the money given to the poor. He did so, not because he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, helping himself from the common purse that was his to steward. No one would notice, if he were to take ten percent for himself. It is Jesus’ defence of Mary that appears to seal Judas’ decision, and he gets his ten percent cut elsewhere, betraying Jesus’ whereabouts to those who sought to arrest him privately, away from the crowds, for thirty silver coins.

On the Wednesday of Holy Week, the cross is the common purse, reading the thoughts of our hearts and inviting us to share in the common good, to love our neighbour as ourselves.

On Thursday, Jesus instructs two of his apprentices to prepare the Passover meal they will eat together in the rooftop guest (upper) room of the home of a secret ally. This meal is known to us as the Last Supper. With a large group of his apprentices and friends, Jesus commemorated the night on which their ancestors had fled from Egypt. They had been instructed to make unleavened bread, for there would not be time to let the dough rise. This was to be their last supper under the oppressive reign of death embodied by the pharaoh. Each year as they joined themselves to the past, they hoped that they, too, would eat a last supper under Roman rule. Perhaps this would be the year. Certainly, there were many who hoped that Jesus would lead an uprising and overthrow the Romans.

They ate bread; and they ate roast lamb, recalling how the god of death—the jackal Anubis—had been unleashed to roam across the land, to carry off each firstborn male, whether human or animal; but was tricked at the door to each Hebrew home by the blood of a lamb smeared on the doorposts and lintel. Only the children of the oppressor—the sons of death—died; and so, death symbolically destroyed itself.

On the Thursday of Holy Week, the cross is the doorposts and lintel of the house of Israel, the outsmarting of death through the wisdom of God.

The shadow of the cross falls across the whole of Holy Week.