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

by Pope Benedict XVI

It follows that Paul received the words of the Last Supper from within the early community in a manner that left him quite certain of their authenticity—quite certain that these were the Lord’s own words.

there is ultimately no significant difference between the two texts.

But what makes the text normative for worship in Paul’s eyes is the very fact that it reproduces the Lord’s testament literally.

it is normative precisely because it is true and authentic.

Mark’s Gospel

presupposes an already established liturgical tradition.

Both strands of tradition set out to transmit the Lord’s testament to us accurately. Between them, they allow us to recognize the depth of the theological implications of the events of that night, and at the same time they highlight what was radically new in Jesus’ action.

something so utterly extraordinary was scarcely compatible with the picture of the friendly rabbi

Neither,

a political revol...

vicarious expiatory death.

the vicarious self-offering of Jesus including the idea of expiation.

From the point of view of historical evidence, nothing could be more authentic than this Last Supper tradition.

But the idea of expiation is incomprehensible to the modern mind.

The real question is: What is expiation?

Is there really a contradiction between the Galilean proclamation of the kingdom of God and Jesus’ final teaching upon arrival in Jerusalem?

Only from the mind of Jesus himself could such an idea have emerged. Only he could so authoritatively weave together the strands of the Law and the Prophets—remaining entirely faithful to Scripture while expressing the radically new quality of his sonship. Only because he himself spoke and acted thus could the Church in her various manifestations “break bread” from the very beginning, as Jesus did on the night he was betrayed.

The words spoken over the chalice, which we must now consider, are of extraordinary theological depth.

First there is Exodus 24:8—the sealing

of the Covenant on Sinai; then there is Jeremiah 31:31—the promise of the New Covenant amid the crisis of the Covenant’s history, a crisis whose clearest manifestations were the destruction of the Temple and the Babylonian exile; finally there is Isaiah 53:12—the mysterious promise of the Suffering Servant, who bears the sins of many and so brings about their salvation.

According

to Mark and Matthew, Jesus said that his blood would be shed “for many”, echoing Isaiah 53, whereas in Paul and Luke we read of the blood being given or poured out “for you”. Recent theology has rightly underlined the use of the word “for” in all four accounts, a word that may be considered the key not only to the Last Supper accounts, but to the figure of Jesus overall.

If we are able to grasp this, then we have truly come close to the mystery of Jesus, and we have understood what discipleship is.

We can see, then, that the infant Church was slowly arriving at a deeper understanding of Jesus’ mission and that the disciples’ “remembering”, under the guidance of God’s Spirit (cf. Jn 14:26), was gradually beginning to grasp the whole of the mystery behind Jesus’ words.

The Church comes into being from the Eucharist. She receives her unity and her mission from the Eucharist. She is derived from the Last Supper, that is to say, from Christ’s death and Resurrection, which he anticipated in the gift of his body and blood.

Yet we may ask: What exactly did the Lord instruct them to repeat?

Even if what happened that evening was not an actual Passover meal according to Jewish law, but Jesus’ last meal on earth before his death, still, that is not what they were told to repeat.

We might say: through these words our “now” is taken up into the hour of Jesus. What Jesus had proclaimed in John 12:32 is here fulfilled: from the Cross he draws all men to himself, into himself.

Augustine offered a perfect explanation of this Christian way of praying the Psalms—a way that evolved very early on—when he said: it is always Christ who is speaking in the Psalms—now as the head, now as the body (for example, cf. En. in Ps. 60:1-2: 61:4; 85:1, 5).

Anyone who spends time here is confronted with one of the most dramatic moments in the mystery of our Savior: it was here that Jesus experienced that final loneliness, the whole anguish of the human condition. Here the abyss of sin and evil penetrated deep within his soul. Here he was to quake with foreboding of his imminent death. Here he was kissed by the betrayer. Here he was abandoned by all the disciples. Here he wrestled with his destiny for my sake.

On beholding the drowsy disciples, so disinclined to rouse themselves, the Lord says: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.”

Alois Stöger says on this subject: “When they were confronted with the power of death, they all prayed kneeling down. Martyrdom can be overcome only by prayer. Jesus is the model of martyrs” (The Gospel according to Saint Luke II, p. 199).

primordial fear of created nature in the face of imminent death,

yet there is more: the particular horror felt by him who is Life itself before the abyss of the full power of destruction, evil, and enmity with God that is now unleashed upon him, that he now takes directly upon himself, or rather into himself, to the point that he is “made to be sin” (cf. 2 Cor 5:21).

Jesus’ fear is far more radical than the fear that everyone experiences in the face of death: it is the collision between light and darkness, between life and death itself—the critical moment of decision in human history.

my own sin was present in that terrifying chalice.

The two parts of Jesus’ prayer are presented as the confrontation between two wills: there is the “natural will” of the man Jesus, which resists the appalling destructiveness of what is happening and wants to plead that the chalice pass from him; and there is the “filial will” that abandons itself totally to the Father’s will. In order to understand this mystery of the “two wills” as much as possible, it is helpful to take a look at John’s version of the prayer. Here, too, we find the same two prayers on Jesus’ lips: “Father, save me from this hour . . . Father, glorify your name” (Jn 12:27-28).

For in this way, God is manifested as he really is: the God who, in the unfathomable depth of his self-giving love, sets the true power of good against all the powers of evil.

Nowhere else in sacred Scripture do we gain so deep an insight into the inner mystery of Jesus as in the prayer on the Mount of Olives.

In Jesus’ natural human will, the sum total of human nature’s resistance to God is, as it were, present within Jesus himself. The obstinacy of us all, the whole of our opposition to God is present, and in his struggle, Jesus elevates our recalcitrant nature to become its real self.

Thus the prayer “not my will, but yours” (Lk 22:42) is truly the Son’s prayer to the Father, through which the natural human will is completely subsumed into the “I” of the Son.

“Abba, Father” (Mk 14:36).

Abba belongs to the language of children—that it is the way a child addresses his father within the family.

For Jesus to venture to take this step was something new and unheard of.

It is therefore quite mistaken on the part of some theologians to suggest that the man Jesus was addressing the Trinitarian God in the prayer on the Mount of Olives. No, it is the Son speaking here, having subsumed the fullness of man’s will into himself and transformed it into the will of the Son.

For these cries and pleas are seen as Jesus’ way of exercising his high priesthood. It is through his cries, his tears, and his prayers that Jesus does what the high priest is meant to do: he holds up to God the anguish of human existence. He brings man before God.

“He offered himself to do the will of the Father”,

through his sufferings Jesus learned obedience and was thus “made perfect” (Heb 5:8-9).

the expression “make perfect” (teleioũn) is used exclusively to mean “consecrate as priest”

So the passage in question tells us that Christ’s obedience, his final “yes” to the Father accomplished on the Mount of Olives, as it were, “consecrated him as a priest”; it tells us that precisely in this act of self-giving, in this bearing-aloft of human existence to God, Christ truly became a prie...