Jesus has become fashionable. A couple of years back, Mel Gibson's film, The Passion, hit our cinema screens. Last year, it was Dan Brown's book, The Da Vinci Code, which drew more readers than ever crammed into St Ursula's on a Sunday morning. And from time to time, the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the so-called Gospel of Thomas find their way into the popular newspapers. People lap up news of them - people who would never pass through our doors. An insatiable thirst seems to exist for such stories, whether they are true or fanciful.
The filmgoers, the book-buyers, the newspaper readers are eager to have a new angle on "how it really happened". They come from various standpoints - from faith, from disbelief, from scepticism. They come with their own presuppositions and prejudices, and they find what they want to find.
Unfortunately, in the first century, people were less interested in "how it really happened" than in "what it really meant" for them and for their neighbours. We know even less about how the Gospels were put together and set down than we do about Jesus' life, but it is clear that their writers (and we only have tradition's word as to who those writers were!) chose their material in such a way that it illustrated their message.
So, while Matthew and Mark tell two stories of miraculous feeding, of five thousand and of four thousand people, Luke and John tell only one. While Matthew, Mark and Luke tell the story of the cleansing of the Temple at the end of their account of Jesus' ministry, John recounts it at the beginning.
The four accounts of Good Friday are another case where we can never know exactly "how it really happened". Each writer wants to emphasize particular topics, and mixing the stories together and creating a description of Jesus' last hours out of them destroys the point of the individual narratives. John tells us of Jesus washing the disciples' feet because this fits in with what he sees as significant, and Matthew tells us of Pilate washing his hands because this fits his own theme. Yet clearly there are some themes which appear in all the gospel narratives.
One of the threads which run through all four accounts is that of the Passover. For the first three Gospels, the Passover emphasis is on the supper which Jesus ate with the twelve disciples. This was the meal described in Exodus 12, the meal eaten by the families of Israel in the safety of their homes, safe in the knowledge that "the Lord will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you down". It was the meal which led directly to their liberation from the land of slavery, their crossing of the Red Sea, and the start of their journey to a land flowing with milk and honey.
In the same way, immediately after their final meal, Jesus and the disciples set off for Gethsemane, for Jesus' arrest, trial and crucifixion, his passing not through the Red Sea, but through death itself, and emerging triumphant after his resurrection, in another garden.
For John the connection with the Passover is even closer. John takes it for granted that his readers recall the Last Supper, eating the bread of life and sharing the life of the True Vine. Like the writers of the three other gospels, John sees the breaking and eating of bread, and the drinking of wine, as echoes of the sacrifice to take place on the Friday afternoon - for John, Jesus is himself the true Passover lamb (Paul also takes up this theme at 1 Cor 5:7). Just as at the Exodus, the father of each household sacrificed a lamb to ensure the safety of his family, so now God had given the world Jesus as a lamb - the Lamb of God, as John the Baptist proclaimed him (John 1:29) to ensure the safety of us all, God's household. And so for John it is Jesus' death which marks the Passover (John 18:28, 19:14), while for Matthew, Mark and Luke the Passover is marked by the bread and wine that show that death forth. We can only guess at the exact timing of the events, but the gospels (and Paul as well) are unanimous about their significance - a new Passover had taken place.
But Jesus was not only the lamb sacrificed at Passover. He was, in the John the Baptist's words, "the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world", the servant described in Isaiah 53 who "will make many people righteous and bear their iniquities." No matter how often we think of the events of that Passover two thousand years ago, there is always some new facet, some new insight into God's love for us - a love that went as far as the ultimate sacrifice, yet which bears us triumphantly beyond this earth-bound life to the life of the Resurrection.
HD