The Pasch of Jesus at Jerusalem

The writing of history must embrace two things together. It must be based on facts; but it must also be a story well told. Well, not merely by stylistic polish, but well told because of a sympathy with the events themselves. Not simply partisan, but understanding the relation between the positive facts which coincide with the purpose, but also with the negative facts: the frustrations and the oppositions which confront the principal actors. If these succeed we have tragedy; if they do not succeed we have heroism. Both need an understanding of the motivations, and the circumstances of the motivations. Then the material must be reviewed for at least a provisional judgement. But so vast is the material for every connected series of events, that selection of material to be included or to be omitted comes also into the picture. There are with the gospel histories even higher factors, because they are inspired. Under the grace of the Holy Spirit, their writers resonated in different ways and to different degrees to the stories which they told.

By the time that the gospels of Matthew Mark and Luke came to be written a considerable time had elapsed since the events took place. The vividness of Peter’s memory in giving his reminiscences to Mark more than makes up for its concision at some points. The two-stage history from an Aramaic version of Matthew, as an expansion, probably a second expansion, of an original collection of proof texts from the Old Testament, retains that original quality in the Greek. But whereas Mark’s gospel is a largely a chain of incidents, Matthew groups them together, piecing together an original Sermon on the Mount, itself interpretable as part of an anti-Jewish polemic, with Our Lord preaching, seated as an authority on his relatively small lake-side mountain. It had entailed more collection of material, and more reflection on the construction. With Luke, one can imagine that he prepared himself by collecting records from many sources, perhaps including sources used for the Greek Matthew, conceivably also fragments deriving from Matthew and Mark, even fragments lying behind Matthew and Mark. The inclusion of so much material together in a single journey to Jerusalem indicates his reaction to the difficulty of arrangement of the rest, but with a justification that all moved towards the arrival of the Hour of Jesus in Jerusalem: not an original manifestation of the Messiah at the beginning, but an implicit manifestation of that and so much more in the hour of his Pasch: that is, of redemptive suffering and death and his resurrection. For John, much later again, whose materials and style are so different, one could imagine that he wrote with a generalised knowledge of the synoptics, but with the intention of adding what he knew from experience to be more accurate, and, from reflection and inspiration, to be more profound.

The chapters in all of them about the events from the entry of Jesus as Messiah into Jerusalem to His resurrection show much more unity, but even there are significant differences where one can suppose, given the fact of some generalised knowledge of the synoptics together, either in sources or texts, the reason was to include what was not yet in an advancing tradition, aural as well as written, whether compiled together or not.

His dying, His death and His Resurrection. Salvation obtained in one continuous action, in different stages. It had the fullness of outward and visible actions from beginning to end. But it lay under the total scrutiny of God as fulfilling before God, and on behalf of men, “all justice” – all justice which men could not effect for themselves. At once a bloody sacrifice, accepted instantaneously by the Godhead: accepted as an act of selfless love, because it was given by the Godhead as an act of selfless love, so that men might regain the original gift of immortality of soul and body in the glory of God: the beginning of all beginnings, the end of all ends. So men would participate in the dying of Christ as a death of all evils in themselves, and participate in the rising of Christ as the gratuitous reception of the goods of eternity into themselves, soul and body.

Like the Pasch of the Israelites following Moses at the Red Sea, the same water and the same waves both engulfed and drowned the Egyptians and saved the fleeing Israelites from them. That Pasch was in time: the beginning of a history of the formation of a chosen people under God, in the desert, and then within the circumstances of Middle Eastern History. But the Pasch of Christ is eternal. Its spiritual essence reuniting men with God in his Triune glory, renewing all things in a renewal of creation, retains an eternal permanence: an Act of worship containing the heavenly reality of all of its parts; the single “Mystery of Christ” containing all of His mysteries: the Mystery of Suffering overcome, even the self-caused suffering for sin, by being contained within the infinite extent of the effects of the Passion; the mystery of fulfilment in joy and Beatitude by being contained within the effects of the Resurrection. But here in one act unrepeatable in itself; but that act is repeated by participation in the liturgical celebration of the Pasch at its anticipation in the Last Supper. The Church is to “do this”: to make the same eternalised act present with the infinitude of its effects. The bread of the Last Supper become the Bread from Heaven, the Body of Jesus Christ. Inseparable from the Blood and yet made present Eucharistically. At the Passion the separation of Blood from Body was a sign of death and sacrifice; in the Eucharist their species are united as a sign of Immortality. The immortality of Christ communicated to us.

It is for the consecrated priest, sharing the unique priesthood of Christ, to do this: to make present the victim who has passed through suffering and death to take up an immortal life in which by intention all men may participate in the infinitude of the action and the infinitude of its effects. It is for all believers to offer the act initiated by the priest and to consume the real Body of Christ within this action as the Bread of Heaven and to “eat His flesh” in order to have “life” at its highest, present in substance as it emerged from the completion of the Pasch, but softened for us under the form of the original bread. In order to live in this action of the Pasch, we follow the actions of the liturgical celebration: allowing our minds and imagination to be invaded by its Reality.

Jesus comes to Jerusalem as Messiah: an Accentuation of the Division among the People

The three synoptic gospels all agree that Jesus stopped at Jericho before passing to Jerusalem over the Mount of Olives, through Bethany and Bethphage. That enables Luke’s gospel to align itself with the other accounts. I take it that the accumulation of divergences was inevitable as, from whatever sources they came, the fragments of the story were assembled. So it will be in living history, even as it would be if it were written under modern conditions. In Matthew two blind men beg for a cure as he leaves the city; in Mark there is just Bartimaeus – vividly recalled by Peter. In Luke Jesus enters the city after curing him, and encounters Zacchaeus. The healing of the blind symbolically stands for the recovery of spiritual insight, which is one purpose of the redemptive passion. With or without the addition of parabolic teaching, a crowd purposefully attaches itself to Jesus on the way to Jerusalem. He had encountered opposition especially from priests and rabbis, from Jerusalem and from local teachers. But at this moment he is moving forward accompanied by unqualified support. Without the adversity which befalls him there, it could very well have been the establishment of the Messiah in Jerusalem. Seated on a colt whose owner seemed sufficiently satisfied with his Messianic credentials he entered the city, as, driven by an irresistible spiritual enthusiasm, the crowds tear down the branches of trees, either to strew them in his way or to hold them in bunches as a sign of triumph. All leading to the final moment of testing. Jesus did not use his divine authority and power, but rather put himself in the hands of His Father so that all should be done correctly. At the moment the situation seemed highly favourable, but the reaction of some would open the way for the fulfilment in complete detail of the prophesies of suffering. This was naturally in the mind of Jesus. It was the moment of human testing as the prophesy of Simeon began to be realised in singular intensity: from contact with him some would rise and some would fall; and the sword of sorrows would pierce through the heart of Mary in her total identity with his mounting sufferings. His opponents in the Jewish establishment could see that he had no physical and armed support: it was a spiritual movement. And they could hardly expect the Roman army to react as clearly a non-violent movement was surging forward, its only weapon enthusiasm, but enlightened enthusiasm: not to rise against the Roman occupants, but to challenge the standing, the teaching and the practice of themselves. Their indecision is evident, and were we present we might have thought that this movement must succeed, though it is not clear in detail what would be effected and how it would be effected. And to crown this non-violent entry and the enthusiasm which accompanied it, Jesus laments for Jerusalem, which must mean for its history and for its institutions and altogether for its faithlessness; and he goes to the Temple and cleanses it: the Temple built by Herod the Great and not long finished, and become a market place, from which religious reverence around where God dwelt on Mount Zion was observed by some, but treated lightly by others.

The key to the events which followed is the expansion of the division, followed by the exhibition of silent submission and humility given by Jesus once a betrayal had put him into their hands, which humanly and indeed Messianically, he did not resist.

It is not the content of the gospels for this period which I wish to bring to your attention: that is difficult to visualise without a Synopsis of the content in parallel columns.[1] I want to point out two things, and their bearing. The incidents listed in Matthew, Mark and Luke – the synoptic writers - have in common not only, to speak in a general way, the identical incidents, but in the same order. The inference must be that they here used a common source which supplemented the probably uncertain memories of Matthew and Peter with Mark, and which Luke treated as a source along with others. There are variations, of which the most evident is the accusations and woes which Jesus levelled against the Pharisees and Scribes in Matthew. As a block it has a similarity with the Sermon on the Mount. The series of elements are of the form of parables and short epithetic teachings reminiscent of his previous teaching in Galilee and in Judea. Synoptic teaching is different in form from Johannine teaching, which is characteristically through discourses: sometimes interrupted, but in the final discourses at the Last Supper, long, meditative and virtually uninterrupted. Yet the two apostle-evangelists, Matthew and Mark, accepted the material which they used as a guide, unquestionably assigning them to this period. Sometimes, and especially in Luke, material from these parallels is attached to previous moments in the gospel – but the whole structure of Luke after the Infancy narrative is a redistribution of incidents in a sequence which uses established points as places to collect and display materials. Is it conceivable then that Jesus fell back into his missioning style sometimes, and at other moments through expositions and meditations, which John seems to have introduced as points which were omitted by the Synoptics, and which he could expand with greater accuracy (like the final disputes in the Temple, and the long discourse at the Last Supper). The consequence is an impression of a man of great intellectual capacities, untiringly passing from the short parable-narratives dense with meaning, to long meditative expositions, and all in an overcharged week: sometimes taking a firm initiative, sometimes reacting to questioning whose answers demanded precision and clarity. A man who knew how to remain silent, as he did during the interrogations. A man whose powers were so simplified in depth and so powerful that the whole content of his human mind could be called on to find an answer immediately: all ready organised and available for instant recall. That quality of mind carried him through the week at the human peak of his form: right to the moment of death, where the content of his human soul was ready to be transferred instantly, not delaying, to his divine habitat. Hence the moments of dying were the shortest, and he departed this world in a flash: “Father into your hands I commend my Spirit” – the whole Spirit raised to the highest unity, not lingering a second with the companion body which had served its ultimate purpose, and which could be taken over again instantly, immortalised, perfectly able to function without delay. A quick clean death followed by a quick clean re-assumption and resurrection of his body into timelessness for which, while functioning with human perfection, it was, with intense total abandonment, precisely ready.

This unification of all of his human knowing for both instant recall and an instant death at the climax and end of his sufferings relates to the unity extending over his whole life perceived by the Carthusian, Dom Augustin Guillerand: “[from his conception and through his ministry, passion, Eucharistic presence] The same life unites them all. In all of them Jesus is the Son who holds himself turned towards his Father and who lives in that relationship. There we see his living submission which makes him grow at every instant, and one day, when all of the elect are united to him in this same filial relationship, it will lead to the fullness of its development in a perfect age” [Eph. 4,13].[2]

If we turn to John’s Gospel, precisely for its union of history and discourse, we must note that the conflict had lasted long. We have to ask why it lasted so long, what factors developed in such a way as to prolong it, and then, why was the apparent human victory over him won so suddenly in the final outcome.

Before the critical visit of Jesus to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles in chapter 7, John writes that “Jesus was moving through Judea; he could not move around Judea because the Jews wished to kill him” (7, 1). His relations had told him to manifest himself in Judea; but John says that they did not believe in him. Jesus told them to go to the Feast, as his “time had not yet come, but their time was always present”. Apparently with a change of mind, he went to Jerusalem after them. Finally he appeared before a Jerusalem crowd which was divided about him, and there follow his most significant discourses. That God is the origin and the constant authenticator of his teaching – and they conform to it themselves. As they perform the work of circumcision on the Sabbath which ante-dates the Law, why may he not cure on the Sabbath? The Jerusalem crowd speaks openly of the authorities wanting to kill him, but they deny this to his face. They mill around him antagonistically, but cannot arrest him as the Pharisees want. “No man spoke like this.”

The quality of his self-defence is not that of a clever man evading their blows, merely habile as the French say. It is an informed assertiveness, positivity riding over their negativity. As from the Temple itself, He will give the Spirit, overflowing like water. In chapter 8 the feast is over, but he remains at the Temple, where he is in the presence of Himself. The absolution of the adulteress against the accusation of the judges shows the superiority of mercy over even Mosaic justice. No-one dared to arrest him as he began what was an exposition of who he was in himself, and this was simultaneously a mounting meditation as he contemplated in Himself that of which he was speaking, which was accepted by many who were present. But the division opens even wider. Others cannot bear to hear him because He comes from God, which, as he points out, shows that the devil has become their father and guide. He, glorified by the Father, utters a word which will give eternal life, and that had rejoiced the soul of Abraham. And, “before Abraham was, I am”: “I am”, the shortened expression of the name of God, which he had introduced also into the earlier part of the discourse and now comes into full clarity. His antagonists moved to stone him for his supposed blasphemy, and without a process. Their wilful blindness to him is exemplified in their handling of the man born blind and cured by Jesus: they refused the witness of his parents. Their follows his discourse on himself as the Good Shepherd, in which he applies the 22^nd Psalm to himself: “The Lord pastures me”, and he is the Lord who pastures his flock.

He makes a second visit in the winter for the feast of the (Re-)dedication of the Temple. The crowd want him to repeat that he is the Messiah. He answers that His sheep recognise him already as such, but his claim to be “one with the Father” keeps the confrontation at the point where it ended at is previous visit. They cannot accept the testimony of his good works which shows both that he is in the Father and the Father is in him. He then goes over the Jordan, but then re-crosses it to reach the family of Martha and Mary at Bethany on the Mount of Olives. But when he raises the dead Lazarus to life as the greatest possible sign of the truth of what he says, the Priests and Pharisees together decide that he must die. The reason: he will produce an insurrection and the Romans will destroy the whole nation. Caiaphas, the current High Priest, speaking as with grace of state, unconsciously prophesies the Truth that “it is expedient that one many should die for the nation”. But that shows that they had not assembled all the factors in their minds to produce a completely coherent position.

The ultimate motivations for the pursuit of Jesus by the authorities cannot be understood without the reference to this back history. Indeed it goes back further. According to John’s chronology the Pasch before that Feast of Tents saw Jesus teaching and miraculously feeding the crowds in the East bank of Lake Galilee, and on the Pasch before then he had cleansed the Temple of traders, and claimed for his ultimately glorified and resurrected body to be the spiritual replacement for the Temple itself. It provoked the conversion of many, but no strong reaction from the authorities or others. But the discourses on the Feasts of Tabernacles and the Dedication saw the stage set for an eventual confrontation with the threat of his assassination.

On the one side there is Jesus humanly unified in his mind and in his actions, turned to God continuously, thinking, seeking, judging - to put himself at the disposition of the Father with love, intensity, and selflessness. The characteristic of all three divine persons is their selflessness as all three empty themselves in love and praise to the others. Their power works everything in this world, in minds and matter, uniting their unextended omnipresent force over the extended world, bringing and keeping all together into an identity of unity and universality within their power. With unlimited unity the divine Will functions with the dynamism of liberty, and through its redundance of mutual reciprocal love it displays the divine mode from which human homeliness and social friendliness derive. These characteristics seem so fragile when they are displayed amidst their detractors. This functioning has only one way: having no need to justify itself by reason, it has only to display itself as the model of all that is good. It can expect itself to be heard, understood and obeyed within the functioning of human liberty. Expressed through the living human voice of Jesus, the divine will at its source can expect itself to be heard as it continually converts created wills to itself. The hearers must not presume that in the last resort they may judge over it as a mere possibility which human liberty may choose, especially when it demonstrates inconveniences for its listeners. Their sense of the greatness of God should predispose them to listen and, in the fullest liberty, to obey in order to enjoy full ease of soul. But furthermore, their own tradition had predisposed them to look forward to a Messiah, a prophet like a second Moses, who would inspire them under the gifts of the Holy Spirit which he Himself had received. No longer to be a people only dutifully following the law which their tradition had passed on to them. Rather, to be fully alive and at ease to enjoy the condition of the prophet Daniel of a union of prophesy and wisdom. He had also symbolically shown the limitations of Mosaic justice when it was administered by men without spirit, as in his settlement of the case of Susanna.

But how to do this? By confrontation and further regulation, which was the way of the Pharisees? The divine nature revealed itself as unwilling to make further impositions, but to open a way which corresponded to its own nature, which was that of love – with the sure knowledge that love would finally triumph. The final task of the Son of God on earth was to show how it would triumph when its all-powerful love, its consistency and its elevation, and, under the prophetic urge to further revelation, confronted the confused legalism and tradition of the Priests and Pharisees. This when the length of the confrontation made them the more determined: at first helpless, and then helped by a timely betrayal.

But this did not fall outside the divine providence, which had spoken through the prophets and the psalms of the details of the final struggle in which the Servant-Messiah triumphed through suffering out of love. Let us follow out the active eternal resolution of this struggle between the force of the Divine mind in unity and power against the misery of obduracy at the heights of malice in the creature. For the consolation of mankind: at its most virulent, that malice was exposed and destroyed in its foundations, and human history becomes the story of its final disappearance.

We return to the Messianic entry into Jerusalem. The movement which follows is direct, unified under its details. Jesus is turned to the Father with total concentration, in total unity of will. He is recollected: his intention, his memories in all of their embrace of time and their universal embrace of space collected together with mounting intensity. The moments which pass, with only the variations of the movements of a lever about a pivot. We follow them not as the series of synoptic anecdotes but as preserved in the memory of John, and produced to fill in the gaps left by them

At Bethany Mary had anointed him with scent-laden nard – for his burial. Even his words to the curious Greeks were of the wheat grain which must die to pass life on, in which his disciples must imitate him. The voice of the Father gave the testimony his enemies had wanted: “I have glorified [your name] and I will glorify it again”. “Sentence is being passed on this world … I will draw all men to myself … What the Father has told me is what I speak.” The Last Supper with its discourses; John leaves the inauguration of the sacrament-sacrifice of “his flesh given for the life of the world” to the accounts of the synoptics. Like Moses washing Aaron and His Sons as part of their priestly consecration, he washes them with the water of humility and priestly consecration together, so that, as new Levites, they may “have a part” in Him. Judas departs into the night, so commanded to “betray him … quickly”. His Paschal movement is beginning, not through a Red Sea but a sea of red Blood. Yet all under the keynote of love. They must all follow him as “Way, Truth and Life”, helped by the Paraclete – and forged into a unity in Him, and together in the Father in unity. That is true peace: as fruitful branches growing in the vine, and living in mutual love. All under the enlightenment of the Paraclete. A process of childbirth which once begun cannot be stopped. But this is a childbirth of life which will conquer the world. And this he turns into a prayer: turning to the Father, he does not leave them but unites himself to them in unbreakable love.

The thrust of this movement continues into the Passion. Judas identifies his presence to the soldiers with a perverted kiss. The movement does not lose for a second its pace or its direction, binding it all into a unity. He is taken first to Annas, the power-broker who can formulate no sentence; Caiaphas, the high priest, neither. He sends him to Pilate. “Judge him yourselves!”. The Romans had withdrawn from the Sanhedrin the power of life and death. Pilate temporises and has him scourged. Even then: “I find no cause in him”. The Jews, collectively, make stridently two different accusations. They see that Pilate cannot condemn him for claiming to be God. So they add: “he has admitted he is a King: if you ignore that you are not loyal to Caesar!” And he capitulates, cynically mocking them by writing “King of the Jews” on the piece of wood to be attached to the Cross.

And so the Cross-carrying, the unclothing, the final swift commendation of John and Mary to each other. The painful nailing through the nerve at the wrists to the cross-beam; its raising to the top of the stand; the nailing of the feet together. “I thirst”. Death accompanies “It is accomplished”, and the head sags. No need to break the legs. The lance-probe releases blood and pericardial water-like fluid. The unswerving movement comes to an end: in Him, every action had worked for our salvation; in Him the unity was complete, able to become timeless. Timelessly extended and united with the resurrection and ascension of his glorified body, and able to become the co-present Mystery at the Last Supper which anticipated it, and in that form able to be sacramentally and sacrificially commemorated in flawless identity.

The whole a single Pasch; in its direction a perfect theandric[3] action, by which the human soul of Christ entered eternity directly and instantaneously in conscious unity with itself, and in total unity with His divine Person.

The whole life of Christ had its unity through the perfection of each action, yet with the growing perfection of a living man. Each stage had been perfect in itself; each element had been perfect in itself. Each element was an act of perfect liberty, with a perfection of divinity at its heart, even when the mode was human. I have in mind a philosophical conception which I do not use in its original sense. In itself this was an element in a process which was speculative and intellectual, but it must be used as extended to morality of all grades. Can we imagine a state of a soul in which it is strongly and perfectly free? Especially in the sense that there were no hidden or half-hidden memories, or associations liable to be awoken, which would clutch at the elevations of the soul and prevent it from rising? As he died offering the human passion and the human death of the Roman Cross, not in itself an altar of sacrifice but become the world’s universal and once-for-all altar of sacrifice, offering the world’s greatest ever sacrifice: Incarnate God offering from his divine Person his assumed human nature, really and intensely suffering: recapitulating His own life, recapitulating by comprehending in his mind all past history, recapitulating the sacrifices of the Patriarchs and the Jewish people, and all of the pagan sacrifices to their degree of rectitude, anticipating the whole future of mankind until He would come again in the divine glory and judge it. Uniting it especially with the unity of the action which began with his arrest after betrayal. Personal and yet universal, underpinning all the imperfect actions of believers, and unbelievers also according to whatever traces of divine rectitude accompanied them. Underpinning them in life, but underpinning them also in death. A total recapitulation of humanity’s commerce with God, whether heroic or unheroic and tainted with failure and flawed. Recapitulating it as he assumed, with perfect freedom, the extreme of human pain, the whole burden of mankind in every one of its members. Taking it into Himself with the cleanness of His own death as one great act of timeless intensity, and in the cleanness of His own dying. Taking it with him into the element connatural to him, as he shed his body with its excruciating and death-dealing pain.

Then by recollection one can see the wisdom of that most pregnant summary of Saint Augustine: he the One priest who sacrificed Himself, he was One with the Father to whom the sacrifice was offered, and One with all those for and with whom He offered Himself. And not just as a state but a timeless perpetuation of that act in the timelessness of Heaven it remains as an act, realised Eucharistically and extra-Eucharistically. Yet one act offered in His Body as a timeless Temple established among us, with all of the spiritual Eucharistic commerce to which the Old Sacrifices had looked forward.

For that body now, a Sabbath of rest, after which, dead but living fully in mind and soul, He will assume His body as instantaneously as he left it, among the men and women whom he knew. Publicly, not privately and continuously as Lazarus, but discontinuously according to His own divine will. Now knowing everything simultaneously as he re-entered in his human nature fully into the Divine government of the cosmos, and especially of its earthly ecumene.

For the final narrative we turn to Saint John, with its incomparable richness and depth; it is also sublimely homely, consoling, engendering hope, promoting heroic labours. The synoptic writers told the story of those days, all under divine inspiration, with the resurrected life in their usual style: a chain of stories each in a kind of isolation, and some of them not entirely from their own memories but from existing sources which they slightly adapted after making their selection. But John dilates, and writes from the fullness of his own knowledge, knowing full well how much more there would be to write if the inspiration came again – and already he had added one later chapter to his final draft. “If all were written down, the world, itself, would not hold all the books that would have to be written.” Gratefully we can draw on this source, knowing that the thoughts remained in his own mind, and that his reflection on them had been matured in the presence and the discussions which he must have had with the Mother of the Incarnate God, who had finally entrusted each of them to each other.

The number of personages who are encountered in John’s gospel is few, but each is presented deeply, and in the particular relationship which each takes up to Jesus and in the personal relationship which Jesus takes up to him or to her. They appear as persons confronted with a divine light which exhibits their hesitancies, with a desire to talk at odds with a desire to remain silent. They come forward a little awkwardly, and feeling their way, knowing that the situation is unusual. One feels them testing Jesus: will they find here understanding which they have not felt elsewhere? This is true of Nicodemus who took a risk in visiting Jesus by night. The Samaritan woman with an irregular life: pert, slightly mocking at first, but at the end we sympathise with her when she appears brushed aside by the others.

So also with the risen Jesus, though now he does not have to dissemble his Godhead, or his human wounds: the hole in his side in which a whole hand could be placed, and the finer holes in his wrists and his feet. The wonder is that all of the disciples can take those manifestations of the passion for granted and converse with him as hitherto.

Peter is given much attention in the course of the last two chapters. When they rush to the tomb which Mary Magdalene has reported to be empty, he is slower than John himself, but he pushes past John as he is meditating at the entrance to the tomb, and picks up the shroud from the floor and notices the head cloth apart: the first apparently thrown aside, the second more tidily rolled. John says of himself what he did not say of Peter, that, seeing all of these things, he believed. Though he means more than believes: he means that his own reactions were not just tactile, but that they were elevations of his soul to God, and enjoying him through his nearness to the wearer, who had departed, as yet he knew not where. So he wondered … Eventually they return home, taught by the absence of Jesus to remain expectant.

But Mary Magdalene stays at the tomb. The combination of her going there first in the dark, finding the tomb empty, rushing back to Peter and the others, and her return with them would be, were we in the realm of secular writing of any kind, the more dramatic by its combination of an economy of words and a transparent intensity of action, dramatic in the highest. But we must not descend to the level of the dramatic in order to interpret it.

Far deeper than that John is portraying the void of loss in her soul. She had been admitted to the innermost group of disciples, along with Mary and the other women. She was at the foot of the Cross as Jesus suffered and died: with Mary, her sister (either Salome the mother of the sons of Zebedee, or the wife of Clopas[4]). There, estranged from most of the surrounding crowd, the love of her soul, with the sympathy of the other women supporting that of each other, extended itself in the intensest sympathy to the moment of Jesus’ “It is accomplished” before it fell into the deepest of instant grief. Here it was drawn into the same elevation of soul of Jesus Himself: direct, intense, and regardless of anything else, to the finality of his own Paschal course. Where the body of Jesus was wracked with finally unsupportable bodily pain until the consummation came in its death, as His human soul recapitulated in itself under his divine knowledge all the alienation of the whole human race from Eve and Adam to the future end of all, all in one act in one transient instant, fully and without any exception, that moment of death left her fully extended in heart and soul, but still alive and with a grief only exceeded by that of Mary herself. Even Mary, with her greater grief and pain (and for this reason co-redemptrix), would have had not only felt the fulfilment of Simeon’s prophesy, but some premonition of the ultimate end of it all. The signs are that Mary Magdalene felt pure grief without that awareness of the frame of triumph into which it would all be placed.

There at the tomb, so concentrated on Jesus in the distension of her soul, she became oblivious of all else but the presence which she had lost. Her soul one great ache dissolving into a rush of ceaseless tears, yet showing its inner strength in the coherent articulation of words. And Jesus, risen from the dead, aware of all of this, appears. It would be surprising if in the whole religious literature of the world there might be some comparable history, so far is it from the capacity of human invention. Its uniqueness in substance and intensity is a proof of its veracity, especially when in the light of such a supernatural exchange, the two characters preserve their homeliness and humanity, even though these modalities are infinitely far removed from their normal condition.

With Our Lord, the purity and intensity of his drive in the highest of pain and the greatest of liberty, ending with the clean moment of death at the separation of his human soul from his suffering body. Mary Magdalene who had followed this trajectory to its end, but was there left in grief at the totality of her loss. She had followed his suffering with the fullness of the most exquisite sympathy in a trajectory which clung to his own.

And John follows the trajectory of both, selflessly, as he puts this Paschal trajectory into timeless and essentially simple words. All so that we can follow it too, and unite our own weight of suffering including the suffering of our own voids, through her’s with his. In view of the intensity of her love as a penitent still, that there should be the story that she spent the last thirty years of her life, again a penitent, in a cave at La Sainte-Baume in Provence, fifteen miles from Marseilles, is not out of character given the intensity of her love and sorrow. (Of this cave a chaplain of the present retreat built there has said: “Whether she was actually here in the past I do not know, but I do know that she is here now …”).

In the few words of dialogue, the silence which underlies the words of Jesus contains all the fullness of the recapitulation of all in his passage into the glorious light of his connatural element. Contrasted with that silence we can feel her heart-searing pain of loss, and the union of Jesus’ outgoing love with her instant release of a love commensurate with her pain. “Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you looking for?” “Sir, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and remove him.” For a second or two they remain in the complementarity of the relationship of the perfection of a life-thrust in perfect liberty, as a recapitulation and a clean union of human soul with divinity in the fixity of eternity and the deliberated re-assumption of the body into their unity, but now within the permanence of an unbreakable unity on the one hand, and on the other an intense life-thrust ending with the death of the object of love and the acutest sense of loss. Consciousness of the first will be translated into total consolation in the other, and an exceptional bonding in love.

“Mary!” – we cannot reproduce the tenderness of that word, the tones annealed but gold-softened in the intensity of his Pasch and radiating his totally selfless love. “Rabbuni” – Master – irradiated by her reception of his word as she pronounces hers, now stabilised into the height of His eternity. But her soul drives her arms to embrace his feet, legs or body – the body with that great side-wound, not horrifying now but itself radiating love which catches her instantly into the ambit of the body, the body which at the same moment is the Body of the Church. That close unity which this has with his Pasch is shown by the task she is given to inform the disciples, of whose presence at the tomb he was aware though he chose to appear first to her, that “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”. Some Church Fathers seek to represent this by naming her “Apostle to the Apostles”, though she is an apostle in an accomodated sense.

The appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene may have been the appearance of predilection, and it was followed by the two appearances to the apostles, the first being a double appearance. After Jesus has communicated to them the gift of peace, which transforms their fear into spiritual joy, he begins with formal words of sending, “I am sending you”, to place it in continuity with previous missions of sending; but now from his immortal and glorified nature, previously from his humanity. It is put in the same Divine and Trinitarian context as the sending of Himself as Messiah with the consecration of his humanity by the Holy Spirit and the words of the Heavenly Father: “Hear him!”: “As the Father sent me, so am I sending you”. But the Holy Spirit is also present, communicated by Himself, as it was communicated directly by the Father at His baptism to his “Beloved Son”, so that his listeners would be enlightened by him, but here with the power of judging over and forgiving sins”: He breathed on them. Their apostolic task is in view: “Receive the Holy Spirit” – to forgive and to retain sins. The Divinity is the One-in-Trinity initiator.

But John is aware that among the apostolic college that unity which was intended in their consecration together, and is entailed for the unity of the branches in the vine, itself has to be brought and kept in this unity. His contemplative reflection moves with such freedom and depth among the revealed realities, not only on the continued light of revelation, but also as brought down to earth now in an immortal mode – in the humanity of Christ now passed to immortality – is complementary to the synoptic mode of the practical furnishing of a definitive text, its practical liturgical use, and a relationship to structuring and government in a mode appropriate to them. The story of Thomas’s confrontation with the Risen Christ at his second coming on the day after the Sabbath (Sunday - the Lord’s day) a week later is therefore highly significant.

If the characteristic of an apostle is to bear witness to the life of Christ and to the resurrection in particular, the condition which Thomas places on his acceptance of it is in effect not to accepting witness of the other apostles. How therefore could the apostolic college function with unanimity? We may feel uncomfortable at the forwardness of Thomas in placing his objection, but it makes his ultimate acceptance an exercise in unconditioned liberty. That he feels free to express his doubts to the other apostles (John himself included) can also be interpreted as an expression of the depth of their intimacy with each other.

Jesus again appears within the room with the doors closed. Again the Paschal greeting: Jesus exists now in the timeless Pasch one of whose characteristics is unbreakable and eternal peace, so “Peace be with you!” He takes Thomas’s objections at his word, of which he was aware in His divine omnipresence and omniscience: “Yes, probe my finger wounds, and put your whole hand in my side.” This must have been rendered glorious. And with his own hand he guides the hesitant Thomas to place his hand in the hole made by the jab of the clumsy lance, letting the pericardial liquid and the blood flow freely: the workers of redemption in a sacrificial mode, where the blood of animals had flowed on the altar, and had sometimes been sprinkled on the people, sanctifying all that it physically touched; but this contact was unlimited. “Doubt no longer, but believe”; “My Lord and my God”. This is to aid others to come to believe: “You can believe because you see me. Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe.

But John also recalls, after what seems a provisional conclusion, a long incident involving particularly Peter, with its ecclesial significance. He had accepted the priority of the now long dead Peter, just as He stood aside to let him pass before him into the Tomb. More involved in practical tasks, with less time than John to experience and write down long meditations, John must have been all compassion for Peter. So had he been in the Court of the High Priest, where He Himself was known and was allowed to enter (18,15-16), but where Peter was challenged and denied Christ (18,17). John himself was not subject to this fluctuation, and remained in the background.

From the synoptic tradition we know that the women were told by an angel to go to Galilee (Mt 28,7 10 16, Mk 16,7), and here John thinks it necessary to relate an appearance of the risen Jesus there which they did not record.

Energy was returning to them after the first appearance of Jesus, and in Galilee they were not fearful. Fishermen always remain fisherman at heart. Peter thought that a night’s fishing would absorb his restlessness. John himself was there with his brother James, and is the best witness and interpreter. Also Thomas and Nathaniel and two others. The boat must have been larger than the boat of the same period found buried in the lakeside mud a few years ago. There was the half-light of dawn from the east as the sun rose, though not yet into full view. With the beginnings of sunlight an additional supernatural light begins to play over them, bathing them with a welcoming light of immortality and with love, filling them therefore with heart ease, but also expectancy.

The night’s catch was precisely nothing. So listless were they that they were prepared to follow the directions of an observer from the shore. “Throw the net out on the other side … .” Some quality in his voice told them not to ignore it. Only a hundred yards away: perhaps he could see something. The best fishers can almost smell the presence of fish, and his voice moved them to obey. Then the net became so heavy with fish that they could not haul it aboard. The others were not reflecting, but the sharp eyes of John identified the man in the half-light as Jesus. Again Peter overhauled John in the speed of his reaction, and went straight to Jesus. What looks they must have exchanged: Jesus contemplating the scene with complete calm; Peter gazing and gaping before him, his soul absorbed, confirming what the eyes of John had identified. Behind Peter one or two of the apostles were paddling the boat, whilst the others were holding the net full of fish close to the boat which towed it. They secured the net to the boat and clambered over the side and went to the land through the water. Jesus had prepared bread and fish at a charcoal fire: the food eaten by the crowd on the eastern side of the lake, but this was fresh and warm. Jesus saw that what he had prepared was not enough so he sent Peter to bring some more out of the net. Peter first dragged the unbroken net full of fish (153 in all) to the shore. Unlike at the desert feeding, Jesus was the cook and the server. They were so surprised by this occasion of his appearing that they remained silent. “Come and have breakfast”, and he served them with both bread and fish.

As they rested, seated on the ground, and found energy from the fish from the sea and from the bread from they knew not where, their puzzlement and timidity eased. Conversation began and love suffused them with ease. What scholastics call their ‘obediential potency’ was totally raised to the immortalised mind and body of Jesus. And the slightest movement of his mind and its expression was followed like in them like the disturbances among flickkery fish-forms, catching the steady light of the now mounting sun. They were living in the eternal permanence of the term of his Pasch, which only John from among them had been left unscathed. From this came the invisible light which bathed them, visible in its effects on skin and eyes and bearing, and being sensed as ever easing more their depths.

John picks up the words of Jesus to Peter, impressionistic or rather prophetic, testing him. Only long reflection would allow him to untangle the threads of allusion. Intimacy regained, but yet three times: “Do you love me?” A correspondence is no doubt intended with the reference in Matthew’s and Luke’s account of before the Passion: “before the cock crows you will deny me thrice”.[5] Peter can now follow the thrust from within this light, and has assured himself of the Lord’s forgiveness: “You know that I love you!”, but the light also illuminates a residual impatience with the question which indicates that he is not finally attuned to his calling. And at the end he will not be finally reconciled to it in his feelings, but only by an act of will, which is an act of faith: “somebody else will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go.” John understood that this had referred to his process and crucifixion in Rome.

But if John has contemplated, judging but only to record, it was not to condemn the residual instability of Peter. There had later been a conversation between Jesus and Peter as they were walking together, and walking behind within hearing distance John had heard it all.

His heard also the words that followed - about himself: “What about him Lord?” Peter had not altogether accepted the emerging position of John. The Lord made no secret of his love for him, but never wavered in his choice of the totally different Peter as the bearer of the charism of primacy among the apostles: how were these two preferences to be reconciled?

The words of Jesus are attested to by the virtual unanimity of the manuscripts, and are easily translated: “If I want him to remain until I come, what is this to you? Follow me”. Jesus detects the same residual impatience, and directs Peter to consider only his own vocation as a matter of obedience, just as he would expect the obedience of those in the Church. The other apostles who heard the words missed the condition and the hyperbole, which was a Hebrew trait: “If I were to show him my favour to the extent of preserving him alive until the end of time, what does that matter to you? You are to follow me.”

The ultimate horizon is however literally far more glorious, when all human differences will be resolved, when men, in the words of Saint Paul, will “put on” immortality for ever. And so through these appearances after his resurrection, Jesus gives for the collective consolation and enlightenment of all men, quite apart from the individual purposes behind each appearance, a demonstration of the nature of immortality as men will come finally to share in the same glory of God, normally portrayed as a supernatural light giving power in the delicacy of their relations with God and with all other men: become immortal in union with Christ and on the model of Christ, easeful and ecstatic as the final end of all. Here the apostles were enjoying a collective anticipation of that state, as they were bathed in the supernatural light which so delicately filled the whole scene.

By the lakeside from where they had come, as the sun was rising in the east, and the dawn-light was turning into day.

[1] This can be found on the web at http://www.utoronto.ca/religion/synopsis/meta-4g.htm. This web-site also includes the apocryphal gospel of Saint Thomas, which also follows out the same sequence. The little book-icons in the text have the same colours for the other gospels as at the heads of the columns; the colour for the book-icon of this apocryphal gospel is brown.

[2] v. Vivantes Clartés (Rome 1964) pp.41-2.

[3] “theandric” – an old Greek compound word made up of “theos”: God, and “andros”: man. An action of Christ’s person which was simultaneously divine and human.

[4] So the editors of the Jerusalem Bible.

[5] v. Mt 26,34 and 75, Lk 22,34 and 61. Perhaps Peter’s memory is more exact: “crows twice” (two occasions or a double crow?) Mk 14,30 72.