Between: Jumping past the passion to the crucifixion

A look at the gaps in the lectionary.

This week: the gap between Proper 28C and Proper 29C.

When I started preaching regularly, I found that the Sunday lessons made way more sense when I put them into context. So I like to look between the Sunday lessons to see what the narrative arc of the story is trying to communicate to us.

I started writing about these gaps in public as a personal exercise: as I wrote through all the stuff that was going on, I would better understand what was going on in the lectionary passage. In this way, I generally addressed all the story elements that were left out of the lectionary arc.

This time, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to reflect on the bigger picture more directly. So let’s dive into the narrative jump from the Temple to the Cross.

The Big Picture

If you’re a church nerd, you’re used to hearing the story of the Passion played out every year by just showing up in church for Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. Holy Week tells a big chunk of the story.

If this is you, then you’ve got it pretty well down. At least in the Gospel we call John. You might tell it like this:

Jesus shows up in a Triumphal celebration on Palm Sunday. Then a few days later, he’s eating the Passover with the disciples. And it is from that dinner that one of the twelve betrays him to the Temple authorities. Then they leave to go to the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prays, is arrested, then subject to a kind of mock religious trial, and finally is handed over to Rome to be executed.

This is our liturgical experience of the Passion. But it isn’t the whole narrative arc.

We skip the first half of the week, which involves several confrontations with the authorities and teaching time with the disciples.

It also completely isolates us from the very different experience of reading the Passion in the Synoptic gospels: Mark, Matthew, and Luke.

That alone should give us pause.

But when you read all four narratives, you get a really different picture of events. Not so much in the basic plot elements, but in their scope. In each one, half of the volume of text is absent. It isn’t just that we’re missing a couple of days, it’s that we’re missing huge portions of Jesus’s teaching from our context.

What’s missing?

For a lot of people, including the apostle Paul, the most important part of the story is the death and resurrection of Jesus. This view seems to put a serious thumb on the scale on the part of the story that shows Jesus dying. Liturgically, theologically, and pastorally, we’ve put nearly all of our emphasis there for centuries.

But doesn’t it nag at you that half the text gets left behind?

How many of us go to the film adaptation of a beloved book and bemoan the absence of a small character or when a female character is turned into a male one? It’s irritating, isn’t it? Even when we understand why.

Now think about it this way. We’re adapting a book and leaving half of the story out.

And the part we’re leaving out explains the half we’re keeping. It reveals the motivations of all the characters. Not as backstory, but as central to the story.

These story elements give us more than motivation. They also prevent us from misattributing motivation.

Don’t we ask every year how the crowds which celebrate Jesus’s arrival are suddenly booing him at his crucifixion?

They actually don’t.

We do get an answer when we read all four gospels. These aren’t the same crowds. In none of them are they the same crowds of people. We don’t have a case of everybody loving Jesus and getting tricked into hating him.

The fact that the only gospel account we read during Holy Week is John, with its referring to “The Jews” and the absence of genuine context for the Passion lead to incredible and profound misattribution of the scope and purpose of the Passion.

The Teaching

Many have written about the mistake of focusing on the divinity of Jesus and the metaphysical postulations of the Trinity and the related atonement concerns of the Crucifixion to the exclusion of the teaching. It relegates Jesus to a pawn in a cosmic game, diminishes the very life of Jesus, and declares everything he taught as moot.

Even this description, I believe, makes the very idea that we give a central place to the crucifixion into a legitimate option. It makes it sound like we had a choice and that we made one that served a political context. Therefore, perhaps its time to re-examine it today. Rather than what it is: a profound mutilation of the deep, theological conviction of following the Jesus who spent way more time telling us to take up our cross than he spent on the cross.

Jesus’s teaching in the Temple, to his followers, and at the Last Supper are profoundly about them and their way of life. These are teachings about attuning ourselves to God. And all of them together highlight the many gaps in our relationship to God and one another.

These teachings are then employed in the experience of the Passion.

Most teachers recognize the importance of experiential learning: that students don’t learn very well when they have to sit still for 3 hours and listen to somebody drone on. They learn best through experiments and reflection.

As we approach the climax of the story in the crucifixion, Jesus teaches his followers by confronting the Temple authorities, taking time to pray, telling parables, and eating the Passover meal. So that when they approach the Garden of Gethsemane, they will have grounding for what is about to happen.

The perfect example of this comes in the strange bit of Luke about the swords. As I’ve described before, this passage only makes sense when we’ve listened to Jesus and reflected on what we’ve experienced with him.

The Innocent Man

At this point, I’ve spoken generally about the narrative arc in all of the gospels. This reminder of the swords brings us back to Luke.

In Luke’s narrative arc, a central theme is Jesus’s innocence. Specifically, that in contrast to those crooks he confronts in the Temple who are lying about him and looking to trap him, Jesus has done nothing wrong.

He is the scapegoat, the innocent one who has been wrongly arrested, falsely convicted by religious and Roman authorities, and is then executed by the state.

He is the wrongly convicted; the innocent who is executed.

The innocent man is more than a role he takes on. It reveals the heart of the teachings and the central theme of the gospel. That our relationship to our world is that same contrast: not just how innocent we can be, but how sinful our desire for death, revenge, and possession truly is.

Jesus as the truly innocent one is not about his perfection or his sinlessness as the ideal human or self-improvement guru, but his reflection of God’s desire for all of us and the whole world.

It’s about all of us.

Think about how we use the crucifixion as a personal sacrifice and our individual experience of belief. We make it about whether or not I am saved or how many of us are baptized into the church.

The Innocent Man doesn’t just appear on the cross. Nor does God magically put him there. Roman soldiers put him there. He is executed as a terrorist, an insurrectionist, a revolutionary.

That’s how we get there.

And the story, the whole story, reveals just how much this is about us. All of us. And just how much that Kin-dom dream of God is about following Jesus to the foot of the cross: and to reject the forces which would put any other person onto a cross.