I don’t know about you, but my Lent went by so quickly! Thank God for Holy Week—a time to slow down and enter into the agony and the wonder of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The following article was originally published in this month’s GIA Quarterly and is republished here with permission. I hope it may be helpful in reflecting on the Gospel texts that tell the story of our salvation.
Holy Week: Our Salvation Narrative
It’s been said that we have four Gospels because one would not be enough to tell the story of Jesus Christ. And indeed, each of the Gospels tells the story of Jesus in its own unique way. This variety gives us a fuller, more textured portrait of Jesus.
But in the stories of Jesus’ passion and death, the four Gospels find great harmony. Even the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and the Gospel of John—usually quite different in tone and content—agree on significant details of Jesus’ suffering and death.
Why might this be? It’s clear that of all the stories told and retold about Jesus—stories that circulated for decades before they were written or woven into Gospel accounts—the stories of Jesus’ passion and death were especially revered. They were told often. They were preserved with great care. Their details were cherished like precious family heirlooms or holy relics. They were among the church’s most sacred truths.
As we enter into Holy Week, we immerse ourselves in these essential stories once again—hearing, breathing, living them as one salvation narrative.
Palm Sunday
All four Gospels share the high drama of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the back of a colt or donkey, accompanied by the cries and shouts of the people: “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” This moment is understood as the fulfillment of a prophecy: “Your king comes to you” (e.g., Matt 21:5; cf Zech 9:9).
Of course, the excitement of the people as Jesus enters Jerusalem serves as an illuminating backdrop to the week’s unfolding events. The king enters the city to the waving of branches and the laying down of cloaks. But soon the people will scatter in confusion and division, and the king will be abandoned, mocked, and murdered.
This kind of contrast is appropriate to a salvation narrative. The people are genuine in both their praise and their abandonment of Jesus—and so it continues with us. The high drama of Palm Sunday reminds us why we need a savior.
Holy Thursday
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John agree that Jesus shared a final meal with his disciples the night before his death. But here we have a fascinating divergence between the Synoptics and John. While the Synoptic Gospels give us details about a Passover meal, characterized by Jesus as an intimate meal to be shared in his memory, John’s Gospel says very little about the supper itself. Instead, John focuses on another powerful moment: the washing of feet. “He rose from supper and took off his outer garments. He took a towel and tied it around his waist” (13:4).
The wonderful thing about this apparent divergence is the actual convergence of the stories. Eucharist and footwashing are intersecting rituals at the heart of our salvation narrative—both are events, acts, declarations of total love and self-gift: “This is my body, which will be given for you” (Luke 22:19) and “You ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow” (John 13:14-15). Jesus’ life has become pure gift—in both living and dying, it is for the sake of the other.
Every word of Holy Thursday’s narrative—and every sign of its liturgy—is eucharistic, whether of bread and wine, or towel and basin.
Good Friday
All four Gospels agree that Jesus was arrested at the Mount of Olives, tried before the high priest, denied by Simon Peter, mocked and tortured by soldiers, handed over by Pilate, crucified between two criminals at a place called Golgotha, and offered vinegar or wine in his final moments. These traditions are strikingly consistent.
Equally striking—and deeply revealing about the full reality of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—is the variety among the Gospels regarding Jesus’ final words. Here again we are reminded that four Gospels give us a fuller, richer narrative. Each utterance of Jesus sheds light on how he lived and died, and how he saved.
In Matthew and Mark, Jesus cries out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34). Jesus, exhausted, uses his last bit of energy to shout to God his feeling of total abandonment, relying on a psalm he knew by heart. Yes, Psalm 22 ends on a victorious note, but it is not that note that Jesus sounds. God will triumph, but this is a moment of despair—and a moment of remarkable familiarity, for we see that our savior is every bit like us. He is human and in pain.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ final words again rely on a beloved psalm. Jesus cries out: “Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit” (Ps 31:6), and then he “breathes his last” (Luke 23:46). Here we have a final, total declaration of trust in the Father. Rather than a feeling of abandonment, it is self-abandonment that is intoned in this cry—a giving-over-by-choice, an intentional word of surrender.
And finally, in John, a dying man boldly proclaims his own role in the transformation of all that is, saying only: “It is finished” (19:30). Earlier in the same Gospel Jesus had declared: “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down on my own” (10:18). And now he has done this great thing, and it is finished.
We may naturally ask which of these utterances really were Jesus’ last words. And of course it is quite possible that he said all of these things on the cross. The witness of the evangelists is the witness of the early church that all of these statements are true, and all shed brilliant light on the person of Jesus and the nature of his death. The pain and abandonment, trust and surrender, power and agency of Jesus—all were and are a part of the narrative of salvation.
Easter
Our salvation narrative leads in one direction and to one place: an empty tomb on Easter morning. And again, all four Gospels agree on this emptiness, witnessed first by women.
Accounts of encounters with the risen Jesus come in all the Gospels, but the empty tomb is the first and fundamental sign of resurrection. We long to see the Risen One for ourselves, with our own eyes—to reach out and touch him, like Mary Magdalene, with our own hands. And we will. But for now, no matter which Gospel we read, we can peer into the emptiness of this burial place and stand in awe of what is not there. For what is missing is death.
This is where our salvation narrative brings us—biblically, liturgically, and communally. For in all of its sameness and all of its differences, fullness of life was the story it told all along.
The women approach the tomb at daybreak. “Three Marys” by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1910).
