Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection

by Pope Benedict XVI

The Temple remained a venerable place of prayer and proclamation. Its sacrifices, though, were no longer relevant for Christians. But how exactly is this to be understood? In the New Testament literature there are various attempts to explain Christ’s Cross as the new worship, the true atonement and the true purification of this corrupted world. We have spoken a number of times already of the fundamental text in Romans 3:25, where Paul, evidently drawing upon a tradition of the earliest Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem, refers to the crucified Jesus as “hilastērion”. This, as we have seen, was the name given to the covering of the Ark of the Covenant, on which the expiatory blood was sprinkled on the great Day of Atonement during the expiatory sacrifice. Let us explain straightaway how the Christians now interpreted this archaic ritual: it is not through the blood of animals touching a holy object that God and man are reconciled. In Jesus’ Passion, all the filth of the world touches the infinitely pure one, the soul of Jesus Christ and, hence, the Son of God himself. While it is usually the case that anything unclean touching something clean renders it unclean, here it is the other way around: when the world, with all the injustice and cruelty that make it unclean, comes into contact with the infinitely pure one—then he, the pure one, is the stronger. Through this contact,