by James Martin
According to some Gospel narratives, on Tuesday Jesus preaches in Jerusalem. At this point in various Gospels, we find Jesus preaching the parables of the Rejected Stone, the Wedding Feast, the Talents, and the Sheep and the Goats; Jesus also answers questions about his ultimate authority. On the same day Judas Iscariot, one of the apostles, bargains with some Jewish authorities to betray Jesus. Wednesday seems to have been a time of rest for Jesus in Bethany and perhaps an opportunity to plan for the momentous days to come.
On Thursday, after Jesus washes the feet of the disciples in a large room in Jerusalem, the location of which he has apparently pre-arranged, he celebrates a Passover meal with them, the Last Supper. During the meal, after Judas leaves to carry out his betrayal, Jesus offers a long discourse, or passage of preaching (at least in John’s Gospel). Jesus and the disciples visit the Garden of Gethsemane, located just outside the city walls, where he prays for guidance, is confronted by Judas, and is captured by the Roman authorities. This sets in motion his execution.
Friday’s complex timetable is the source of some scholarly debate and the basis for the most serious of questions: Who was responsible for Jesus’s death? The most straightforward answer comes from Father Harrington: “Pontius Pilate, with some cooperation from some Jewish leaders in Jerusalem.”5 The day will include (again, depending on the Gospel) Jewish trials—before Annas, Caiaphas (two “high priests”), and the Sanhedrin (the Jewish assembly or council)—and Roman trials—before Pontius Pilate, Herod, and Pilate again. After his condemnation and torture at the hands of Roman soldiers, Jesus starts his long walk to the hill known as Golgotha (Aramaic for “Place of the Skull”; in Latin, Calvaria), where he is crucified and hangs agonizingly on the cross, uttering a few final sentences. Jesus of Nazareth dies around three o’clock in the afternoon. Later his body is removed from the cross and laid in a tomb provided by a friend.
After spending so much time with Jesus in his ministry in Galilee, such a shorthand description of his painful death may seem shocking to readers. Cold, even heartless. I felt the same way after I returned from four days in Galilee, after tracing the path of the energetic Jesus in his public ministry—preaching, walking, healing, dining, sailing, exorcising—and walking into the chapel at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. Kneeling down on the chapel’s terrazzo floor, I closed my eyes to pray for a few seconds, then looked up and saw Jesus on the wall, crucified.
On a large wooden crucifix outlined in gold, Jesus hung, peering down at his mother, Mary, who stood by him, mourning. Jesus inclined his head toward her with a look of infinite sadness. Here was the lively, active, joyful person I had spent so much time with, nailed to a cross, dying. It was shocking.
THE SHOCK OF THE disciples was infinitely greater. For in the space of less than a week Jesus’s friends move from elation over his triumphant entrance into the city, when they may have anticipated his being acclaimed as king, to despair over his shameful death. And although Jesus seems to have known, even predicted, his end, the disciples, as they have before, seem not to have understood what was awaiting them in Jerusalem.
There were predictions throughout the Gospels. As early as the eighth chapter of Mark’s Gospel, shortly after the Feeding of the Four Thousand, while the disciples are on their way to Jerusalem, Jesus asks them, “Who do people say that I am?”6 A surprising question for the disciples—and the one that began this book.
It seems to catch them off guard. They offer their answers: John the Baptist, Elijah, or “one of the prophets.”7 The responses are not unexpected. Jesus had been baptized by John and most likely brought some of John’s followers under his wing, so the identification with the Baptist is natural. And the Book of Malachi refers to the coming of Elijah as the forerunner of the “great and terrible day of the Lord.”8
Then Peter, either divinely inspired or simply intuiting who it must be who has fed four thousand people, says, “You are the Messiah.” Mark has Peter refer to Jesus as Christos, in Greek, “the anointed one” (Mashiach in Hebrew), likening him to the priests, prophets, and kings of the Old Testament who were anointed with oil as a symbol of their divinely ordained roles. During this period, one prominent form of messianism placed its hopes in a “Davidic king who would restore justice and the good fortunes of God’s people.”9 Such a messiah would therefore pose a threat to the Roman rulers. In light of what Jesus said and did, it was, as Donahue and Harrington explain, “likely that some people did identify Jesus as such a messiah.”10 In other words, if Peter believes in Jesus’s messiahship, others probably do as well. Thus, Mark’s readers are not surprised when Jesus tells the disciples not to share this revelation with anyone; it would have been dangerous to do so.
But Mark’s early readers may have been as surprised as the disciples by what Jesus offers next—a prediction of suffering: “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” Mark notes, “He said all this quite openly.”11 Peter takes him aside and privately “rebukes him,” a harsh phrase indicating Peter’s strong emotional rejection of this prediction.
Why does Peter rebuke Jesus? Perhaps Peter holds out hope that the Davidic king will fulfill Jewish expectations by not only restoring Israel’s fortunes and ushering in an era of peace, but also kicking out the Roman overlords. Or perhaps Peter simply doesn’t want his good friend to suffer. In contemporary parlance, Peter may be saying, “God forbid!”
Whatever the reasons, Jesus will have none of it. Looking at his disciples he says, publicly, so as to teach the group: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”12
Jesus is not saying that Peter is Satan. Rather, he recognizes that Peter is giving voice to the temptation to reject reality. Jesus recognizes this voice. It is an echo of the voice that he heard once in the desert: an appeal to self-interest and pride. Again, God forbid you should suffer!
While Jesus’s words here offer some rich theological insights about the inevitable role of suffering in the Christian life, let’s focus on a related question: Did Jesus accurately predict his execution? Mark is writing roughly forty years (around AD 70) after the death of Jesus, and so he may have added some details. But even if one wonders whether Jesus had perfect foreknowledge, it is easy to understand how he could have predicted his own violent end. For one thing, he knew the fate of the prophets who preceded him. For another, he faced opposition from some religious leaders throughout his days of preaching and healing, from as early as the Rejection in Nazareth.
Moreover, Jesus understood that his actions—which included breaking or at least setting aside ritual laws (like working on the Sabbath), excoriating religious authorities for hypocrisy, and gathering around him those who believed that he was the Messiah—would set him up on a collision course whose end would most likely be in Jerusalem. This may be one reason why he didn’t headquarter his ministry there. Galilee may have bought him time for preaching and healing.
Others seem to have intuited his impending death as well. A few days before Passover, a woman (identified as Mary of Bethany in John’s Gospel) breaks open an “alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard,” used for many occasions but also for anointing the dead.13 She anoints his feet (in Mark, his head) and dries them with her hair in a gesture that is at once lavish, compassionate, and tender. It is also a gesture that scandalizes Judas, who complains that the money could have been put to better use for the poor.
Was she anointing him as king or as a person who was about to die? Perhaps both.
Surely by the time Jesus begins this last series of public acts in Jerusalem—entering the city in triumph (with what the theologian Gerald O’Collins calls its “perceived messianic significance”) and cleansing the temple, he knows that he’s bound to provoke a confrontation. O’Collins says that Jesus understood that the action in the Temple would be “dangerously provocative and could precipitate his de
ath.”14
The night before his assassination, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., told his supporters:
We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t really matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live—a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.15
“I may not get there with you.” Rev. King understood that his ministry had brought him opposition.
Jesus also knew how to read the signs of the times. So when I think of him allowing Mary to anoint him, entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and then moving through the actions of what Christians call Holy Week, I imagine him doing so with an awareness of his impending death. But among all of the important events of the final week of Jesus’s life, let me focus on one that has always captivated me, one that occurs in a place called the Cenacle.
WHEN I WAS A Jesuit novice, a Catholic sister called the novitiate to leave a message for one of the priests. I wrote down the particulars as best I could. Later in the day, David, the assistant novice director, came to me, chuckling. “What does this say?” he asked, holding up my note.
“It’s the name of that sister who called you.”
“And where was she from?” he said, smiling.
“Senegal,” I said. “Is she visiting from Africa?”
“Not Senegal,” David said, laughing. “She’s a Cenacle Sister.”
“Oh,” I said. “What’s that?” Not having grown up in a religious milieu, I had many such conversations during my first year as a Jesuit, in which I was forced to confess ignorance of one or another aspect of Catholicism—such as the names of the various (and many) religious orders.
“It’s a women’s religious order named after the Cenacle,” said David.
“Uh huh,” I said. That didn’t help. “What’s the Cenacle?”
David explained that the Cenacle (from the Latin cenaculum, which derives from cena, or dinner) is where the Last Supper was held. Sometimes called the Upper Room, it was the locus of several other events in the New Testament, including some of the Resurrection appearances and perhaps the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples at Pentecost, which followed the Resurrection.16 The room was also where the apostles later lodged while in Jerusalem, as described in the Acts of the Apostles; it was a natural gathering place considering the remarkable events that had occurred there.
The tradition of the Upper Room begins in the Gospels, when Jesus tells the disciples to prepare for a Passover meal and indicates the person with whom he has made arrangements: “He will show you a large room upstairs, already furnished. Make preparations for us there.”17 (The Greek anagaion mega is a large, above-ground room.) Until recently I assumed that the passages in which Jesus tells the disciples to meet a particular man who will show them a room or to procure for him a “colt that has never been ridden” were signs of his foreknowledge—that is, he was somehow predicting these things. That is certainly possible.
Also possible is that Jesus arranged these preparations himself and was asking the disciples to carry out his plans.
Before our pilgrimage, I imagined the Upper Room as an ancient, decrepit, poorly lit space, where the disciples cowered behind closed doors after the Crucifixion. The actual appearance proved different. Today the Cenacle is located in a nondescript structure that is part of a complex of interlocking buildings on Mount Zion, in the southern part of the Old City. It is near Dormition Abbey, a Benedictine monastery built on the site where Mary “fell asleep,” that is, exited this world peacefully.18 Abutting the Cenacle is the Tomb of David. You ascend a metal staircase to reach the Cenacle, a large, airy room with a plain stone floor, whose high vaulted ceiling is supported by several handsome Gothic pillars. It seemed more like a chapel than a dining room. Open windows allow the strong, clear Jerusalem light to stream into the room, lending a pleasant feel.
The room, or its antecedent, finds its origins in the earliest days of the church, when the space may have served as a synagogue for Jewish Christians. In the fourth century, the emperor Theodosius built a modest church there, which was enlarged in the next century. That building was destroyed by waves of invaders over the next few centuries, and in the Middle Ages Crusaders erected another church on the site. The current room dates from roughly the fourteenth century, which explains the Gothic-era columns. At one point the room served as a mosque.19 Jerome Murphy-O’Connor believes that a better tradition may locate the events of Pentecost within this room, but concludes that the tradition that relates it to the Last Supper is “unreliable.”20
An odd tableau greeted George and me in the Upper Room. Near the entrance a dozen Korean tourists were softly singing a haunting hymn. On the far end of the room an Italian priest was speaking loudly, shouting really, and gesticulating as two pilgrims listened. Reading from an Italian Bible, he declaimed the story of the Last Supper. Finally, on one of a series of benches sat a man and a woman with their heads bowed, apparently trying to pray. The more the Korean pilgrims sang, the louder the Italian priest shouted, “Questo è il mio corpo! Il quale è data per voi! Fate questo in memoria di me!” The more he bellowed, the more the two in the pews buried their heads in their hands. The man trying to pray covered his ears. George rolled his eyes eloquently.
After the Korean pilgrims finished singing and the Italian priest finished his shouting, everyone filed out.
When we sat down to pray, I wondered, as I often did, if what was supposed to have happened here did happen here. “Unreliable,” said Murphy-O’Connor about the Cenacle, but it’s likely that the room that Jesus asked his disciples to locate was somewhere nearby.
The Italian priest had been shouting the words that Jesus used at the Last Supper as he sat among his disciples: “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” (Though I doubt Jesus said it so loudly.) It is this action that many pilgrims recall when they visit the Cenacle. And a few months before this pilgrimage my understanding of these words had changed, during a Mass I celebrated at a Jesuit church in New York.
PREVIOUSLY I HAD THOUGHT of those words mainly in a theological sense. “Transubstantiation,” which refers to the Catholic belief that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ during the celebration of the Mass, is a mystery, something to be pondered rather than solved. The concept is difficult even for longtime Catholics to understand. And while I wholeheartedly believe it, I could not adequately explain it here.21
A Jesuit friend told me that his parish’s director of religious education once expressed concerns about a boy who was about to make his First Holy Communion. She didn’t think that he should participate in the sacrament. “Why not?” asked my friend.
“He’s not the brightest boy in the class, and I don’t think he fully understands the mystery of the Eucharist,” she said.
“Do you fully understand the mystery of the Eucharist?” my friend asked her. Point taken. The boy made his First Communion with his classmates.
Until recently I thought of the Eucharist in primarily two ways. First, it is the culmination of all of Jesus’s feeding miracles, like the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes and the Wedding Feast at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine.22 No longer does Jesus give food or drink—he gives himself. I’ve always liked that progression: from water and wine, to loaves and fishes, to himself.
Second, I often recall the image of the Body of Christ. In one of the most beautiful metaphors for the church, St. Paul referred to the followers of Christ as a body in which each “member” is valuable.23 Just as the hand and eye and arm play their parts, everyone contributes to the body that is the church. Paul’s image reminds us not only that we are part of a body, but that everyone’s gifts contri
bute uniquely to the whole. The church, then, is often called the Mystical Body of Christ. In the Eucharist Jesus offers his body to the body that is the church. He desires to be with us so intimately that he gives himself as simple food. Whenever I receive the Eucharist or distribute it during a Mass, I always remember what St. Augustine, the fourth-century theologian, wrote about the Eucharist: “Behold what you are; become what you receive.”
A few hours before my seven-year-old nephew Matthew received his First Communion, I asked him, “So, Matthew, what do you know about the Eucharist?”
He said, “Um, Jesus loved us so much that he turned himself into bread. And he wanted to be so close to us that he goes inside of us so we can know that he’s always with us.” Not bad.
Not everyone reading this book is Catholic, so this might not be a part of your faith. But I usually think of the Eucharist in such overtly theological terms: This bread is now become Christ’s body; this wine is now become his blood. Take and eat, Jesus says, as a way of participating in me. Let me nourish you with myself. As I said, theological.
One Sunday, though, as I held up the host and said the words, “Take this and eat of it, this is my body,” I had an insight. Jesus offered his body for us not simply at the Last Supper, and not simply in the Eucharist, but in a more ordinary way. In a very human, less mysterious, but no less profound way.
At that Mass I remembered how Jesus had taken his body all over Galilee and Judea for us. God entered our world as a human being, in the body of an infant who was hungry and thirsty, who was at times sick and feverish, and who felt pain and discomfort. When Jesus was growing up, his body underwent all the physical changes that any adolescent body does. And especially during Jesus’s public ministry, his offering of his body was made visible: the Gospels speak frequently of his walking, climbing, sailing.