The conspiracy (Luke 22:1–6)
1 Now the feast of Unleavened Bread, called the Passover, was drawing near,
2 and the chief priests and the scribes were seeking a way to put him to death, for they were afraid of the people.
3 Then Satan entered into Judas, the one surnamed Iscariot, who was counted among the Twelve,
4 and he went to the chief priests and temple guards to discuss a plan for handing him over to them.
5 They were pleased and agreed to pay him money.
6 He accepted their offer and sought a favorable opportunity to hand him over to them in the absence of a crowd.
comments by Benedict XVI (General Audience 18 October 2006):
Today, concluding our walk through the portrait gallery of the Apostles called directly by Jesus during his earthly life, we cannot fail to mention the one who has always been named last in the list of the Twelve: Judas Iscariot. We want to associate him with the person who is later elected to substitute him, Matthias.
Already the very name of Judas raises among Christians an instinctive reaction of criticism and condemnation.
The meaning of the name "Judas" is controversial: the more common explanation considers him as a "man from Kerioth", referring to his village of origin situated near Hebron and mentioned twice in Sacred Scripture (cf. Gn 15: 25; Am 2: 2). Others interpret it as a variant of the term "hired assassin", as if to allude to a warrior armed with a dagger, in Latin, sica.
Lastly, there are those who see in the label a simple inscription of a Hebrew-Aramaic root meaning: "the one who is to hand him over". This designation is found twice in the Gospel: after Peter's confession of faith (cf. Jn 6: 71), and then in the course of the anointing at Bethany (cf. Jn 12: 4).
Another passage shows that the betrayal was underway, saying: "he who betrayed him"; and also during the Last Supper, after the announcement of the betrayal (cf. Mt 26: 25), and then at the moment of Jesus' arrest (cf. Mt 26: 46, 48; Jn 18: 2, 5). Rather, the lists of the Twelve recalls the fact of the betrayal as already fulfilled: "Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him", says Mark (3: 19); Matthew (10: 4) and Luke (6: 16) have equivalent formulas.
The betrayal itself happens in two moments: before all, in the planning, when Judas agreed with Jesus' enemies to 30 pieces of silver (cf. Mt 26: 14-16), and then, in its execution, with the kiss given to the Master in Gethsemane (cf. Mt 26: 46-50).
In any case, the Evangelists insist on the status as an Apostle that Judas held in all regards: he is repeatedly called "one of the twelve" (Mt 26: 14, 47; Mk 14: 10, 20; Jn 6: 71) or "of the number of the twelve" (Lk 22: 3).
Moreover, on two occasions, Jesus, addressing the Apostles and speaking precisely of Judas, indicates him as "one of you" (Mt 26: 21; Mk 14: 18; Jn 6: 70; 13: 21). And Peter will say of Judas that "he was numbered among us and allotted his share in this ministry" (Acts 1: 17).
He is therefore a figure belonging to the group of those whom Jesus had chosen as strict companions and collaborators. This brings with it two questions in the attempt to provide an explanation for what happened.
The first consists in asking how is it that Jesus had chosen this man and trusted him. In fact, although Judas is the group's bursar (cf Jn. 12: 6b; 13: 29a), in reality he is called a "thief" (Jn 12: 6a).
The mystery of the choice remains, all the more since Jesus pronounces a very severe judgement on him: "Woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed!" (Mt 26: 24).
What is more, it darkens the mystery around his eternal fate, knowing that Judas "repented and brought back the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying, "I have sinned in betraying innocent blood'" (Mt 27: 3-4). Even though he went to hang himself (cf. Mt 27: 5), it is not up to us to judge his gesture, substituting ourselves for the infinitely merciful and just God.
A second question deals with the motive of Judas' behaviour: why does he betray Jesus? The question raises several theories. Some refer to the fact of his greed for money; others hold to an explanation of a messianic order: Judas would have been disappointed at seeing that Jesus did not fit into his programme for the political-militaristic liberation of his own nation.
In fact, the Gospel texts insist on another aspect: John expressly says that "the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him" (Jn 13: 2). Analogously, Luke writes: "Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was of the number of the twelve" (Lk 22: 3).
In this way, one moves beyond historical motivations and explanations based on the personal responsibility of Judas, who shamefully ceded to a temptation of the Evil One.
The betrayal of Judas remains, in any case, a mystery. Jesus treated him as a friend (cf. Mt 26: 50); however, in his invitations to follow him along the way of the beatitudes, he does not force his will or protect it from the temptations of Satan, respecting human freedom.
In effect, the possibilities to pervert the human heart are truly many. The only way to prevent it consists in not cultivating an individualistic, autonomous vision of things, but on the contrary, by putting oneself always on the side of Jesus, assuming his point of view. We must daily seek to build full communion with him.
Let us remember that Peter also wanted to oppose him and what awaited him at Jerusalem, but he received a very strong reproval: "You are not on the side of God, but of men" (Mk 8: 33)!
After his fall Peter repented and found pardon and grace. Judas also repented, but his repentance degenerated into desperation and thus became self-destructive.
For us it is an invitation to always remember what St Benedict says at the end of the fundamental Chapter Five of his "Rule": "Never despair of God's mercy". In fact, God "is greater than our hearts", as St John says (I Jn 3: 20).
Let us remember two things. The first: Jesus respects our freedom. The second: Jesus awaits our openness to repentance and conversion; he is rich in mercy and forgiveness.
Besides, when we think of the negative role Judas played we must consider it according to the lofty ways in which God leads events. His betrayal led to the death of Jesus, who transformed this tremendous torment into a space of salvific love by consigning himself to the Father (cf. Gal 2: 20; Eph 5: 2, 25).
The word "to betray" is the version of a Greek word that means "to consign". Sometimes the subject is even God in person: it was he who for love "consigned" Jesus for all of us (Rm 8: 32). In his mysterious salvific plan, God assumes Judas' inexcusable gesture as the occasion for the total gift of the Son for the redemption of the world.
John does not offer any psychological interpretation of Judas’ conduct. The only clue he gives is a hint that Judas had helped himself to the contents of the disciples’ money box, of which he had charge (12:6). In the context of chapter 13, the evangelist merely says laconically: “Then after the morsel, Satan entered into him” (13:27).
For John, what happened to Judas is beyond psychological explanation. He has come under the dominion of another. Anyone who breaks off friendship with Jesus, casting off his “easy yoke”, does not attain liberty, does not become free, but succumbs to other powers. To put it another way, he betrays this friendship because he is in the grip of another power to which he has opened himself.
True, the light shed by Jesus into Judas’ soul was not completely extinguished. He does take a step toward conversion: “I have sinned”, he says to those who commissioned him. He tries to save Jesus, and he gives the money back (Mt 27:3-5). Everything pure and great that he had received from Jesus remained inscribed on his soul—he could not forget it.
His second tragedy—after the betrayal—is that he can no longer believe in forgiveness. His remorse turns into despair. Now he sees only himself and his darkness; he no longer sees the light of Jesus, which can illumine and overcome the darkness. He shows us the wrong type of remorse: the type that is unable to hope, that sees only its own darkness, the type that is destructive and in no way authentic. Genuine remorse is marked by the certainty of hope born of faith in the superior power of the light that was made flesh in Jesus.
John concludes the passage about Judas with these dramatic words: “After receiving the morsel, he immediately went out; and it was night” (13:30). Judas goes out—in a deeper sense. He goes into the night; he moves out of light into darkness: the “power of darkness” has taken hold of him (cf. Jn 3:19; Lk 22:53).
In the case of Judas, we encountered the perennial danger that even those “who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit” (Heb 6:4) can perish spiritually through a series of seemingly small infidelities, ultimately passing from the light into the night, where they are no longer capable of conversion.
In conclusion, we want to remember he who, after Easter, was elected in place of the betrayer. In the Church of Jerusalem two were proposed to the community, and then lots were cast for their names: "Joseph called Barsabbas, who was surnamed Justus, and Matthias" (Acts 1: 23).
Precisely the latter was chosen, hence, "he was enrolled with the eleven apostles" (Acts 1: 26). We know nothing else about him, if not that he had been a witness to all Jesus' earthly events (cf. Acts 1: 21-22), remaining faithful to him to the end. To the greatness of his fidelity was later added the divine call to take the place of Judas, almost compensating for his betrayal.
We draw from this a final lesson: while there is no lack of unworthy and traitorous Christians in the Church, it is up to each of us to counterbalance the evil done by them with our clear witness to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.
[The ritual washing of feet
The In Roman Catholic Church, the ritual washing of feet is now associated with the Mass of the Lord's Supper, which celebrates in a special way the Last Supper of Jesus, before which he washed the feet of his twelve apostles. Christian denominations that observe foot washing do so on the basis of the authoritative example and command of Jesus as found in the Gospel of John 13:1–15:
1 Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end.
2 The devil had already induced Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot, to hand him over. So, during supper,
3 fully aware that the Father had put everything into his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God,
4 he rose from supper and took off his outer garments. He took a towel and tied it around his waist.
5 Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and dry them with the towel around his waist.
6 He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Master, are you going to wash my feet?"
7 Jesus answered and said to him, "What I am doing, you do not understand now, but you will understand later."
8 Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." Jesus answered him, "Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me."
9 Simon Peter said to him, "Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well."
10 Jesus said to him, "Whoever has bathed 6 has no need except to have his feet washed, for he is clean all over; so you are clean, but not all."
11 For he knew who would betray him; for this reason, he said, "Not all of you are clean."
12 So when he had washed their feet (and) put his garments back on and reclined at table again, he said to them, "Do you realize what I have done for you?
13 You call me 'teacher' and 'master,' and rightly so, for indeed I am.
14 If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another's feet.
15 I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.
We find two uniquely Johannine elements in the account of Jesus’ final evening with his disciples before the Passion. First, John tells us that Jesus administered the menial service of washing the disciples’ feet. In this context, he also recounts the prophecies of Judas’ betrayal and Peter’s denial. The second element consists of Jesus’ farewell discourse, culminating in the high-priestly prayer.
Jesus “rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him” (Jn 13:4-5). Jesus performs for his disciples the service of a slave, he “emptied himself” (Phil 2:7).
Christ moves in the opposite direction, coming down from his divinity into humanity, taking the form of a servant and becoming obedient even to death on a cross (cf. 2:7-8)—all this is rendered visible in a single gesture. Jesus represents the whole of his saving ministry in one symbolic act.
When we read in the Book of Revelation the paradoxical statement that the redeemed have “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev 7:14), the meaning is that Jesus’ love “to the end” is what cleanses us, washes us. The gesture of washing feet expresses precisely this: it is the servant-love of Jesus that draws us out of our pride and makes us fit for God, makes us “clean”.
The gesture of washing feet expresses precisely this: it is the servant-love of Jesus that draws us out of our pride and makes us fit for God, makes us “clean”.
In Mark’s Gospel we see the radical transformation that Jesus brought to the concept of purity before God: it is not ritual actions that make us pure. Purity and impurity arise within man’s heart and depend on the condition of his heart (Mk 7:14-23). God himself decided that “the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. . . . He made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith” (15:5-11). Faith cleanses the heart. It is the result of God’s initiative toward man. It is not simply a choice that men make for themselves. Faith comes about because men are touched deep within by God’s Spirit, who opens and purifies their hearts.
“You are clean”, says Jesus to his disciples. The gift of purity is an act of God. Man cannot make himself fit for God, whatever systems of purification he may follow. “You are clean”—in Jesus’ wonderfully simple statement, the grandeur of the mystery of Christ is somehow encapsulated. It is the God who comes down to us who makes us clean. Purity is a gift. et an objection springs to mind. A few verses later, Jesus says: “If I, then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (Jn 13:14-15).
The connection of the purified heart with the washing of the feet becomes visible in a surprising way: only by letting ourselves be repeatedly cleansed, “made pure”, by the Lord himself can we learn to act as he did, in union with him.
The account of the washing of the feet presents us with two different human responses to this gift, exemplified by Judas and Peter. Immediately after the exhortation to follow his example, Jesus begins to speak of Judas. John tells us in this regard that Jesus was troubled in spirit and testified: “Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me” (13:21).
Jesus must experience the incomprehension and the infidelity even of those within his innermost circle of friends and, in this way, “fulfill the Scripture”. John 13:18 brings us onto the right track. Here Jesus says, “The Scripture must be fulfilled: ‘He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me’ ” (cf. Ps 41:9; Ps 55:13).He is revealed as the true subject of the Psalms, the “David” from whom they come and through whom they acquire meaning.
Judas’ betrayal was not the last breach of fidelity that Jesus would suffer. “Even my bosom friend, in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me” (Ps 41:9). The breach of friendship extends into the sacramental community of the Church, where people continue to take “his bread” and to betray him. At this hour, Jesus took upon himself the betrayal of all ages, the pain caused by betrayal in every era, and he endured the anguish of history to the bitter end.
In Peter we encounter another danger, that of a fall which is not definitive and which can therefore be healed through conversion. John 13 recounts two exchanges between Jesus and Peter, in which two aspects of this danger become visible. Initially, Peter does not want to have his feet washed by Jesus "You shall never wash my feet” (Jn 13:8). This goes against his understanding of the relationship between master and disciple and against his image of the Messiah, whom he recognizes in Jesus. During the washing of the feet, in the atmosphere of farewell that pervades the scene, Peter asks his master quite openly: “Lord, where are you going?” And again he receives a cryptic answer: “Where I am going you cannot follow me now; but you shall follow afterward” (13:36). Peter understands that Jesus is speaking of his imminent death, and he now wants to emphasize his radical fidelity even unto death: “Why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you” (13:37). Indeed, shortly afterward on the Mount of Olives, he rushes in with his sword, ready to put his intention into effect. But he must learn that even martyrdom is no heroic achievement: rather, it is a grace to be able to suffer for Jesus. He must bid farewell to the heroism of personal deeds and learn the humility of the disciple. His desire to rush in—his heroism—leads to his denial. In order to secure his place by the fire in the forecourt of the high priest’s palace, and in order to keep abreast of every development in Jesus’ destiny as it happens, he claims not to know him. His heroism falls to pieces in a small-minded tactic. He must learn to await his hour. He must learn how to wait, how to persevere. He must learn the way of the disciple in order to be led, when his hour comes, to the place where he does not want to go (cf. Jn 21:18) and to receive the grace of martyrdom.
The two exchanges are essentially about the same thing: not telling God what to do, but learning to accept him as he reveals himself to us; not seeking to exalt ourselves to God’s level, but in humble service letting ourselves be slowly refashioned into God’s true image.
After the Lord has explained to Peter the necessity of having his feet washed, Peter answers: if this be the case, then Jesus should wash not only his feet, but his hands and his head as well. Jesus’ answer is once again enigmatic: “He who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet” (13:10). What does this mean?
Jesus evidently takes for granted that before coming to the meal, the disciples have already had a complete bath, so that at table it is only their feet that need to be washed. It is clear that John sees a deeper symbolic meaning in these words, which is not easy to recognize. the washing of feet acquires another more concrete meaning, over and above its fundamental symbolism, one that points to the practicalities of life in the early Church. What is it? The complete bath that was taken for granted can only mean Baptism, by which man is immersed into Christ once and for all, acquiring his new identity as one who dwells in Christ. This fundamental event, by which we become Christians not through our own doing but through the action of the Lord in his Church, cannot be repeated.
Yet in the life of Christians—for table fellowship with the Lord—it constantly requires completion: “washing of feet”. What is this? There is no single undisputed answer. Yet it seems to me that the First Letter of John points us in the right direction and shows us what is meant. There we read: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1:8-10). Since even the baptized remain sinners, they need confession of sins, “which cleanses us from all unrighteousness”.
The point is this: guilt must not be allowed to fester in the silence of the soul, poisoning it from within. It needs to be confessed. Through confession, we bring it into the light, we place it within Christ’s purifying love (cf. Jn 3:20-21). In confession, the Lord washes our soiled feet over and over again and prepares us for table fellowship with him.
Note: "Johannine literature" is the collection of New Testament works that are attached by tradition to the person of John the Apostle or to the Johannine community.
]
Last Supper (Luke 22:7–23)
7 When the day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread arrived, the day for sacrificing the Passover lamb,
8 he sent out Peter and John, instructing them, "Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover."
9 They asked him, "Where do you want us to make the preparations?"
10 And he answered them, "When you go into the city, a man will meet you carrying a jar of water. Follow him into the house that he enters
11 and say to the master of the house, 'The teacher says to you, "Where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?"'
12 He will show you a large upper room that is furnished. Make the preparations there."
13 Then they went off and found everything exactly as he had told them, and there they prepared the Passover.
14 When the hour came, he took his place at table with the apostles.
15 He said to them, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer,
16 for, I tell you, I shall not eat it (again) until there is fulfillment in the kingdom of God."
17 Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and said, "Take this and share it among yourselves;
18 for I tell you (that) from this time on I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes."
19 Then he took the bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me."
20 And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you.
21 "And yet behold, the hand of the one who is to betray me is with me on the table;
22 for the Son of Man indeed goes as it has been determined; but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed."
23 And they began to debate among themselves who among them would do such a deed.
Luke clearly identifies this last supper of Jesus with the apostles as a Passover meal that commemorated the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Jesus reinterprets the significance of the Passover by setting it in the context of the kingdom of God (Luke 22:16). The "deliverance" associated with the Passover finds its new meaning in the blood that will be shed (Luke 22:20).
The Eucharist is reenacted in accordance with Jesus' instruction at the Last Supper, as recorded in several books of the New Testament, that his followers do in remembrance of him as when he gave his disciples bread, saying, "This is my body", and gave them wine saying, "This is my blood."
The Catholic Church teaches that once consecrated in the Eucharist, the elements cease to be bread and wine and actually become the body and blood of Christ, each of which is accompanied by the other and by Christ's soul and divinity. The empirical appearance and physical properties are not changed, but for Catholics, the reality is. The consecration of the bread (known as the host) and wine represents the separation of Jesus' body from his blood at Calvary. However, since he has risen, the Church teaches that his body and blood can no longer be truly separated. Where one is, the other must be. Therefore, although the priest (or extraordinary minister of Holy Communion) says, "The body of Christ", when administering the host, and, "The blood of Christ", when presenting the chalice, the communicant who receives either one receives Christ, whole and entire.
Regarding the vessel used by Christ at the Last Supper and according to one tradition, Saint Peter passed it on to his successors (the Popes) until Sixtus II in 258, when Christians were being persecuted by Emperor Valerian, and the Romans demanded that relics be turned over to the government. Pope Sixtus gave the cup to his deacon, Saint Lawrence, who passed it to a Spanish soldier, Proselius, with instructions to take it to safety in Lawrence's home country of Spain. According to legend, the monastery of San Juan de la Peña, located at the south-west of Jaca, in the province of Huesca, Spain, protected the chalice of the Last Supper from the Islamic invaders of the Iberian Peninsula. The continuing tradition of the association of the Holy Chalice with Spain is that it was safeguarded by a series of Spanish monarchs, including King Alfuns de Castella in 1200. At one point when he needed money for a military campaign, Alfonso borrowed from the Cathedral of Valencia, using the Chalice as collateral. When he defaulted on the loan, the relic became the property of the Church (the present Chalice of Valencia). This Chalice was the official papal chalice for many popes, and has been used by many others. In July 2006, at the closing Mass of the 5th World Meeting of Families in Valencia, Pope Benedict XVI also celebrated with the Holy Chalice, saying "accipiens et hunc praeclarum Calicem" (this most famous chalice), words in the Roman Canon said to have been used for the first popes until 4th century in Rome, and supporting in this way the tradition of the Holy Chalice of Valencia. The Spanish archaeologist Antonio Beltrán says the artifact is a 1st-century Middle Eastern stone vessel, possibly from Antioch, Syria (now Turkey); its history can be traced to the 11th century, and it now rests atop an ornate stem and base, made in the Medieval era of alabaster, gold, and gemstones.
Writing in the second century, St. Justin Martyr explains the celebration of the Eucharist and Christian belief in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist:
"Bread and a chalice containing wine mixed with water are presented to the one presiding over the brethren. He takes them and offers praise and glory to the Father of all, through the name of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and he recites lengthy prayers of thanksgiving to God. . . . And when he who presides has celebrated the Eucharist, they whom we call deacons permit each one to partake. . . . We call this food the Eucharist, of which only he can partake who has acknowledged the truth of our teachings, who has been cleansed by baptism for the remission of his sins . . . and who regulates his life upon the principles laid down by Christ. Not as ordinary bread or as ordinary drink do we partake of them, but just as, through the word of God, our savior Jesus Christ became incarnate and took upon himself flesh and blood for our salvation, so, we have been taught, the food which has been made the Eucharist by the prayer of his word, and which nourishes our flesh and blood by assimilation, is both the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. The Apostles in their memoirs, which are called Gospels, have handed down what Jesus ordered them to do; that he took bread and, after giving thanks, said: “Do this in remembrance of me; this is my body.” In like manner, he took also the chalice, gave thanks, and said: “This is my blood.” [Luke 22:19; Matt 26:28; Mark 14:24]"
comments by Benedict XVI (Holy Thursday, 21 April 2011):
“I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk 22:15). With these words Jesus began the celebration of his final meal and the institution of the Holy Eucharist. Jesus approached that hour with eager desire. In his heart he awaited the moment when he would give himself to his own under the appearance of bread and wine. He awaited that moment which would in some sense be the true messianic wedding feast: when he would transform the gifts of this world and become one with his own, so as to transform them and thus inaugurate the transformation of the world. In this eager desire of Jesus we can recognize the desire of God himself – his expectant love for mankind, for his creation. A love which awaits the moment of union, a love which wants to draw mankind to itself and thereby fulfil the desire of all creation, for creation eagerly awaits the revelation of the children of God (cf. Rom 8:19). Jesus desires us, he awaits us. But what about ourselves? Do we really desire him? Are we anxious to meet him? Do we desire to encounter him, to become one with him, to receive the gifts he offers us in the Holy Eucharist? Or are we indifferent, distracted, busy about other things? From Jesus’ banquet parables we realize that he knows all about empty places at table, invitations refused, lack of interest in him and his closeness. For us, the empty places at the table of the Lord’s wedding feast, whether excusable or not, are no longer a parable but a reality, in those very countries to which he had revealed his closeness in a special way. Jesus also knew about guests who come to the banquet without being robed in the wedding garment – they come not to rejoice in his presence but merely out of habit, since their hearts are elsewhere. In one of his homilies Saint Gregory the Great asks: Who are these people who enter without the wedding garment? What is this garment and how does one acquire it? He replies that those who are invited and enter do in some way have faith. It is faith which opens the door to them. But they lack the wedding garment of love. Those who do not live their faith as love are not ready for the banquet and are cast out. Eucharistic communion requires faith, but faith requires love; otherwise, even as faith, it is dead.
From all four Gospels we know that Jesus’ final meal before his passion was also a teaching moment. Once again, Jesus urgently set forth the heart of his message. Word and sacrament, message and gift are inseparably linked. Yet at his final meal, more than anything else, Jesus prayed. Matthew, Mark and Luke use two words in describing Jesus’ prayer at the culmination of the meal: “eucharístesas” and “eulógesas” – the verbs “to give thanks” and “to bless”. The upward movement of thanking and the downward movement of blessing go together. The words of transubstantiation are part of this prayer of Jesus. They are themselves words of prayer. Jesus turns his suffering into prayer, into an offering to the Father for the sake of mankind. This transformation of his suffering into love has the power to transform the gifts in which he now gives himself. He gives those gifts to us, so that we, and our world, may be transformed. The ultimate purpose of Eucharistic transformation is our own transformation in communion with Christ. The Eucharist is directed to the new man, the new world, which can only come about from God, through the ministry of God’s Servant.
From Luke, and especially from John, we know that Jesus, during the Last Supper, also prayed to the Father – prayers which also contain a plea to his disciples of that time and of all times. Here I would simply like to take one of these which, as John tells us, Jesus repeated four times in his Priestly Prayer. How deeply it must have concerned him! It remains his constant prayer to the Father on our behalf: the prayer for unity. Jesus explicitly states that this prayer is not meant simply for the disciples then present, but for all who would believe in him (cf. Jn 17:20). He prays that all may be one “as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, so that the world may believe” (Jn 17:21). Christian unity can exist only if Christians are deeply united to him, to Jesus. Faith and love for Jesus, faith in his being one with the Father and openness to becoming one with him, are essential. This unity, then, is not something purely interior or mystical. It must become visible, so visible as to prove before the world that Jesus was sent by the Father. Consequently, Jesus’ prayer has an underlying Eucharistic meaning which Paul clearly brings out in the First Letter to the Corinthians: “The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:16ff.). With the Eucharist, the Church is born. All of us eat the one bread and receive the one body of the Lord; this means that he opens each of us up to something above and beyond us. He makes all of us one. The Eucharist is the mystery of the profound closeness and communion of each individual with the Lord and, at the same time, of visible union between all. The Eucharist is the sacrament of unity. It reaches the very mystery of the Trinity and thus creates visible unity. Let me say it again: it is an extremely personal encounter with the Lord and yet never simply an act of individual piety. Of necessity, we celebrate it together. In each community the Lord is totally present. Yet in all the communities he is but one. Hence the words “una cum Papa nostro et cum episcopo nostro” are a requisite part of the Church’s Eucharistic Prayer. These words are not an addendum of sorts, but a necessary expression of what the Eucharist really is. Furthermore, we mention the Pope and the Bishop by name: unity is something utterly concrete, it has names. In this way unity becomes visible; it becomes a sign for the world and a concrete criterion for ourselves.
“I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you”. Lord, you desire us, you desire me. You eagerly desire to share yourself with us in the Holy Eucharist, to be one with us. Lord, awaken in us the desire for you. Strengthen us in unity with you and with one another. Grant unity to your Church, so that the world may believe. Amen.
comments by Edward Sri, professor of theology and Scripture:
The blood of Jesus is poured forth as an expiatory sacrifice that effects the remission of sins (see Jer 31:31-34). Second, Jesus offers his life to the Father as a vicarious sacrifice; his suffering is not for his own guilt, but for those he represents and has come to save (see Isa 53:4-5, 11-12). And third, Jesus’ death is a covenant sacrifice that establishes a new foundation on which the Father and the human family can be reunited in fellowship and love (see Exod 24:4-8). According to Matthew, the sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’ death, so prevalent in the New Testament, originates with Jesus himself. It is Jesus’ words at the Last Supper that give us eyes to see his death not simply as a degrading execution but as the definitive sacrifice of redemption.
comments by Dr. Mary Healy, professor of Scripture at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit:
Jesus' words over the bread and cup reveal that his death on the cross is an atoning sacrifice, fulfilling the Passover and all the sacrifices of the old covenant. He himself is both the sacrifice and the high priest who offers it (Heb 2:17; 4:14). At the same time, according to Luke and Paul, Jesus transforms his last supper into a memorial that will make his sacrifice present in the Church until the end of time (Luke 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24-25). He instructs his apostles to continue to offer his once-for-all sacrifice and distribute it to the people of God as he had to them. Catholic tradition thus recognizes the Last Supper as the moment when Jesus ordains his apostles as priests of the new covenant, who share in a unique way in his ministry as high priest (Catechism, 1380).
The Fathers of the Church often spoke of the unifying power of the Eucharist, all efficacious power going far beyond the symbolic value of a loaf shared by friends. St John Chrysostom writes, "For what is the bread? It is the body of Christ. And what do those who receive it become? The Body of Christ-not many bodies but one body. For as bread is completely one, though made up of many grains of wheat, and these, albeit unseen, remain nonetheless present, in such a way that their difference is not apparent since they have been made a perfect whole, so too are we mutually joined to one another and together united with Christ" (a. Homilies on first Corinthians 24.2, cited in John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 23)
But Jesus' words reveal that he himself is the paschal Lamb whose blood will save the many from death. Just as the Passover was not complete without eating the paschal lamb, Jesus' sacrifice is complete only when his disciples consume his body and blood. By inviting them to share the one bread that is his body, Jesus is drawing them into a union with himself and one another that is far deeper than any earthly table fellowship.
This is my blood of the covenant. For the Jews, it was forbidden unthinkable to drink blood (Gen 9:4; Deut 12:16). The Old Testament teaches that blood is sacred because it is the seat of life: "the life of all flesh is in its blood" (Lev 17: 14 JB). For the same reason, it is blood that makes atonement for sin (Lev 17:11), since nothing could be offered to God more valuable than the blood of a living creature. But how could Jesus ask his disciples to do what was forbidden in the law? To drink the blood of animals would be demeaning. But to drink the blood of the Son of God is to be elevated to a share in his own divine life.
The "blood of the covenant" was the phrase used at the moment when God established his t covenant with Israel at Sinai at the climax of the exodus (Exod 24:1-8). Nearly all ancient covenants were sealed with blood, since a covenant was the forging of a kinship bond and kinship is constituted by blood. The Sinai covenant was ratified by the blood of sacrificed bulls sprinkled on the altar, representing God, and on the people. That covenant too was consummated in a sacred meal (Exod 24:9-11) . Jesus' declaration that now his blood is the blood of the covenant means that the covenant is now being definitively renewed, just as Jeremiah had prophesied (Jer 31:31-32). Now there is kinship bond between God and his people that can never be broken
That Jesus' blood will be shed or poured out signifies a violent death. The verb is actually in the present tense ("is shed") because Jesus' words are not merely a prophecy but a window into the inner reality of his passion. His supreme gift of self, offered on the cross, is now made available to all. That it will be shed for many means that Jesus' death is more than a martyrdom; it is an efficacious sacrifice, providing the total forgiveness of sin that was only foreshadowed in the animal sacrifices of the old covenant. "For many" also recalls Isaiah's prophecy of the servant who through his suffering would "justify many" and "take away the sins of many" (Isa 53: 11-12). "Many" does not mean a limited number, but is a Semitic way of expressing a vast multitude: Jesus "died for all"
(2 Cor 5:14).
At the time Mark wrote his Gospel, the Eucharist was already the center of the early Church's worship. Mark's first audience would have read his account in light of their own celebrations of "the breaking of the bread" (Acts 2:42), "the Lord's supper" (1 Cor 11 :20). Although Mark does not record Jesus' injunction to "Do this in memory of me" (Luke 22: 19; 1 Cor 11 :24-25), the liturgy was already a living fulfillment of that word the Church has always understood the eucharistic meal as not only a making present of the past (the passion) but also a foretaste of the future (the full coming of God's kingdom).
commentary by Pablo T. Gadenz, Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Trenton (NJ) :
His comment —I have eagerly desired to eat (literally, “with desire I have desired to eat,” reflecting an underlying Hebrew expression)—is another indication that he acts with intention. The significance of what he says and does here can be examined by focusing on three interrelated key words.
l. Passover: This Passover night is different from all others. The Jewish Passover is a memorial of God’s liberation of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt through the exodus (Exod 12:14; 13:3). Those who observe the annual Passover feast do not simply recall the exodus as a past event but, in a sense, relive it at the present time and thus experience the Lord’s saving power (see Exod 13:8).6 However, at this Passover, Jesus institutes his memorial, saying: in memory of me (or “in remembrance of me,” 1 Cor 11:24-25; Greek anamnesis). Likewise, he is about to accomplish his “exodus” (Luke 9:31)—his death and resurrection—which will bring to those who believe in him a different kind of liberation: forgiveness of their sins (24:47). Thus his apostles who observe the new Passover memorial in obedience to his command will experience the saving power of this new exodus.
In instituting this new Passover, which was prefigured at the multiplication of the loaves with its similar actions (9:16), Jesus took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to the apostles. His accompanying words provide the interpretation. The bread is not the expected “bread of affliction” of the exodus (Deut 16:3) but becomes his very self: This is my body. In this new Passover, it will be Jesus’ body, not that of the lamb, that will be given in sacrifice. Like the sacrifice of the lamb
(Exod 12:13, 23, 27), this will be done for you, he tells the apostles—in other words, on their behalf and for their benefit. Moreover, this body is eaten (see Matt 26:26), as was the lamb (Exod 12:8-1 i). Bread that has become the Eucharist through these words is not merely a symbol. Just as the lamb is real, so the Eucharist is really his body, as indeed Christians have understood from the beginning.
Likewise, Jesus’ words provide the interpretation of the cup taken after supper (1 Cor 11:25), the third of the four cups of wine in the Passover meal, the “cup of blessing” (1 Cor 1o:16): the wine in the cup becomes my blood (see Matt 26:28; Mark 14:24). By drinking the cup, his apostles thus have communion in his blood (1 Cor 10:16). Jesus is referring to his imminent, violent death: his blood will be shed like “the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world” (Luke 11:50 [emphasis added]). However, “he transforms his violent death into a free act of self-giving for others and to others.” In other words, as he already indicated in speaking of his body, his death becomes a sacrifice, offered for you—he again tells his apostles—in other words, on their behalf, for the purpose of atonement. Hence, a better translation is that his blood is not just shed, but “poured out” (22:20 NIV; see Catechism 610). Indeed, the blood of the Passover lamb (see 2 Chron 30:15-16; 35:11) and of sacrifices in general (Deut 12:27) was poured out at the base of the altar (Lev 8:15) .
2. Kingdom: Prior to the two statements about his body and blood, Jesus announces in two statements (Luke 22:16, 18) that this is indeed his “last supper” because of his imminent death. After this meal, he will thus not eat the Passover meal nor drink its cups of wine until the time of fulfillment of the coming kingdom of God. With these words, Jesus looks ahead to his resurrection and entrance into kingly glory (24:26; Acts 2:32-33). After his resurrection, he will once again eat and drink with his disciples (Luke 24:30, 41-43; Acts 10:41), a sign of the kingdom banquet (Luke 13:29), where he will eat and drink with his apostles (see 22:30). Certainly the kingdom has already come among them in Jesus (11:20; 17:20-21), yet its future coming in power has not yet occurred. Thus, just as the Jewish Passover not only looked back to the exodus but also forward to God’s saving action in the future, so too whenever his disciples celebrate the Eucharist they will do so not only in memory of Jesus’ death but also in anticipation and as a foretaste of the kingdom banquet.
3. Covenant: Following the first Passover and the exodus, Moses at Mount Sinai had thrown the blood of sacrifices against the altar (Exod 24:6) when God established the covenant with the twelve tribes of Israel. He also "splashed it on the people, saying, This is the blood of the covenant" (Exod 24:8), before taking part in a sacred meal in which “they ate and drank” (Exod 24:11). Here, in the context of the Last Supper with the twelve apostles, Jesus’ reference to a covenant in his blood recalls this event. However, it also indicates something new. Indeed, if there is a new Passover and a new exodus, there will also be a “new covenant” (1 Cor 11:25), as Jeremiah had prophesied: “See, days are coming ... when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah” (Jer 31:31).
Moreover, under the Mosaic covenant, the bread of the presence (see comment on Luke 6:3-4) was offered (not just set out) each sabbath (Lev 24:7) by the Levitical priests as a kind of grain offering (see Lev 2). It was an unbloody sacrifice. These unleavened loaves were a “memorial” (anamnesis, Lev 24:7 LXX) of the covenant made at Sinai (Lev 24:8). Here, Jesus’ command to his apostles to do this in “memory” of him (Luke 22:19, same Greek word) means that the eucharistic bread that the apostles will offer will serve as a memorial that represents the New Covenant established by Jesus through his bloody sacrifice. Thus, the role of the apostles in the New Covenant was in a sense prefigured by that of the Levitical priests in the Mosaic covenant. Because of Jesus’ command, the Church understands the Last Supper as the institution of the Eucharist and also the institution of the New Covenant priesthood (Catechism 611).
comments by Francis Martin, president of Father Francis Martin Ministries (FFMM), commentary on the Gospel of John:
If the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church, the Eucharist is its beating heart, pumping Christ’s blood through the members of his body, the Church. If we are to grow in holiness and love, we must make the Eucharist the center of our lives, because in doing so we make Christ the center of our lives. If we receive Christ worthily in the Eucharist and worship him in Eucharistic adoration, he will fill us with his grace and enlarge our hearts to love and serve more perfectly.
Eucharistic worship and adoration does not detract from works of love. On the contrary, it is what enables us to do them in the first place. Consider these words of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta: “If we truly understand the Eucharist; if we make the Eucharist the central focus of our lives; if we feed our lives with the Eucharist, we will not find it difficult to discover Christ, to love him, and to serve him in the poor”.
Dispute about Greatness (Luke 22:24–30)
24 Then an argument broke out among them about which of them should be regarded as the greatest.
25 He said to them, "The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them and those in authority over them are addressed as 'Benefactors';
26 but among you it shall not be so. Rather, let the greatest among you be as the youngest, and the leader as the servant.
27 For who is greater: the one seated at table or the one who serves? Is it not the one seated at table? I am among you as the one who serves.
28 It is you who have stood by me in my trials;
29 and I confer a kingdom on you, just as my Father has conferred one on me,
30 that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom; and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
comments by Fr. George Corrigan, Catholic Priest (https://friarmusings.wordpress.com):
The focus of the “teaching” is for the disciples who do not yet fully comprehend who Jesus is or what is at stake on this Passover eve. Jesus’ warns them that even presence at the Lord’s table is no guarantee of fidelity to Jesus. What constitutes fidelity is to bear fruit in ministry and witness. Jesus understands his earthly life is coming to an end and thus the table scene is a last testament in which he admonishes and encourages the apostles to understand authority, leadership and mission in the light of Jesus’ ministry with them: as servant.
Yet, the callousness of the whole group of the Twelve is revealed as their argument about which of them could be guilty of betrayal evolves into a dispute about their greatness. This dispute occurs at a different place in the other Synoptics (Mark 10:42–45; Matt 20:25–28). Jesus tells them that the kingdom has completely different categories of greatness than the world has. He notes ironically that those who tyrannize over their subjects are called “Benefactors”: this was the case in Rome, Egypt, and other Gentile territories. The one who is great in the kingdom of God will be the one who serves in imitation of the Master himself. The Twelve will be given authority, however they will also be subject to temptation and testing. They can expect to share the fate of Jesus.
comments by Pope John Paul II (General Audience — November 4, 1987):
Let us run through again the themes of the reflections on Jesus the Son of Man, which at the same time reveal him as the true Son of God. "I and the Father are one" (Jn 10:30). We have seen that he referred to himself the divine name and attributes; he spoke of his divine pre-existence in union with the Father (and with the Holy Spirit, as we shall explain in a further series of reflections); he claimed for himself power over the law which Israel had received from God through Moses in the old covenant. (That claim was made especially in the Sermon on the Mount (cf. Mt 5); and together with this power, he claimed also the power to forgive sins (cf. Mk 2:1-12 and parallel passages; Lk 7:48; Jn 8:11), and to pronounce the final judgment on the consciences and works of all humanity (cf. Mt 25:31-46; Jn 5:27-29). Finally, he taught as one having authority and he called for faith in his word; he invited people to follow him even unto death, and promised eternal life as a reward. At this point we have at our disposal all the elements and all the reasons for affirming that Jesus Christ has revealed himself as the one who establishes God's kingdom in the history of humanity.
The revelation of God's kingdom had already been prepared in the Old Testament. It happened particularly in the second phase of the history of Israel as narrated in the words of the prophets and the psalms, following the exile and the other painful experiences of the Chosen People. We recall especially the songs of the Psalmists to God who is king of all the earth, who "reigns over the peoples" (Ps 47: 8-9); and the exultant recognition, "Your kingdom is a kingdom for all ages, and your dominion endures through all generations" (Ps 145:13). In his turn the prophet Daniel speaks of the kingdom of God "which shall never be destroyed...rather, it shall break in pieces all these kingdoms, and put an end to them, and it shall stand forever." This kingdom which the "God of heaven" will set up (i.e., the kingdom of heaven), will remain under the dominion of God himself and "shall never be delivered to another people" (cf. Dan 2:44).
Entering into this tradition and sharing this concept of the old covenant, Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed this kingdom from the beginning of his Messianic mission. "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand" (Mk 1:15). In this way he took up one of the constant motifs of Israel's expectation, but he gave a new direction to the eschatological hope which took shape in the final phase of the Old Testament. He did so by proclaiming that it had its initial fulfillment already here on earth, since God is the Lord of history. Certainly, his kingdom is projected toward a final fulfillment beyond time, but it begins to be realized already here on earth and in a certain sense it develops within history. In this perspective Jesus announced and revealed that the time of the ancient promises, expectations and hopes "is fulfilled," and that the kingdom of God "is at hand"—it is already present in his own Person.
Jesus Christ, indeed, not only taught about the kingdom of God, making it the central point of his teaching, but he established this kingdom in the history of Israel and of all humanity. This reveals his divine power, his sovereignty in regard to all in time and space that bears the signs of the primordial creation and of the call to be "new creatures" (cf. 2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15). Through Christ and in Christ all that is transient and ephemeral has been conquered, and he has established for ever the true value of the human person and of everything created.
It is a unique and eternal power which Jesus Christ—crucified and risen—claimed for himself at the end of his earthly mission when he said to the apostles, "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me." By virtue of this power of his he ordered them, "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age" (Mt 28:18-20).
Before reaching this definitive act in the proclamation and revelation of the divine sovereignty of the Son of Man, Jesus frequently announced that the kingdom of God has come into the world. Indeed, in the conflict with his adversaries who did not hesitate to ascribe Jesus' works to a demonic power, he refuted them with an argument that ends with the statement, "If it is by the finger of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you" (Lk 11:20). Therefore in him and through him the spiritual space of the divine dominion gains substance. The kingdom of God enters into the history of Israel and of all humanity. Jesus is in a position to reveal it and to show that he has the power to decide its realization. He shows it by freeing from demons—the whole psychological and spiritual space is reconquered for God.
Moreover, the definitive mandate given to the apostles by Christ crucified and risen (cf. Mt 28:18-20), was prepared by him under every aspect. The key moment of the preparation was the calling of the apostles. "He appointed twelve that they might be with him and he might send them forth to preach and to have authority to drive out demons" (Mk 3:14-15). Among the Twelve, Simon Peter received a special power in regard to the kingdom. "And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (Mt 16:18-19). He who spoke in this way showed that he was convinced to possess the kingdom, to hold its supreme sovereignty, and to be able to entrust the keys to his representative and vicar. He did this just as, and to a still greater degree than, an earthly king would do in the case of his lieutenant or prime minister.
This evident conviction of Jesus explains why, during his ministry, he spoke of his present and future work as of a new kingdom introduced into human history, not only as a truth announced but as a living reality. It develops, grows and ferments the entire human batch of dough, as we read in the parable of the leaven (cf. Mt 13:33; Lk 13:21). This and the other parables of the kingdom (cf. especially Mt 13), attest that this is the central idea of Jesus, and also the substance of his messianic work which he willed to be prolonged in history, even after his return to the Father, and this by means of a visible structure whose head is Peter (cf. Mt 16:18-19).
The establishment of this structure of the kingdom of God coincides with its transmission by Christ to his chosen apostles, "I confer (Latin, dispono; translated by some as "I convey") a kingdom on you, just as my Father has conferred one on me" (Lk 22:29). The transmission of the kingdom is at the same time a mission: "As you sent me into the world, so I send them into the world" (Jn 17:18). Appearing to the apostles after the resurrection, Jesus will again say, "As the Father has sent me, so I send you.... Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained" (Jn 2:21-23).
We should note well that in Jesus' mind, in his messianic work and in his mandate to the apostles, the inauguration of the kingdom in this world is closely connected with his power to conquer sin, to cancel Satan's power in the world and in every human being. It is therefore linked to the paschal mystery, to the cross and resurrection of Christ (Agnus Dei qui tollit peccata mundi...), and as such it is built into the historical mission of the apostles and of their successors. The establishment of the kingdom of God has its foundation in the reconciliation of humanity with God, carried out in Christ and through Christ in the paschal mystery (cf. 2 Cor 5:19; Eph 2:13-18; Col 1:19-20).
The purpose of the vocation and mission of the apostles—and therefore of the Church—in the world is to establish God's kingdom in human history (cf. Mk 16:15; Mt 28:19-20). Jesus was well aware that this mission, like his own messianic mission, would encounter and provoke great opposition. From the days when he sent forth the apostles in the first experiments of collaborating with himself, he warned them, "Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves" (Mt 10:16).
Matthew's Gospel also condenses what Jesus would say later about the fate of his missionaries (Mt 10:17-25). He returned to this theme in one of his last polemical discourses with the "scribes and Pharisees," by confirming, "Behold, I send to you prophets and wisemen and scribes; some of them you will kill and crucify, some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and pursue from town to town..."(Mt 23:34). It was a fate which had already befallen the prophets and other personages of the old covenant to whom the text refers (cf. Mt 23:35). But Jesus gave his followers the assurance that his work and theirs would endure—the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
Despite the opposition and contradiction it would meet with throughout the course of history, the kingdom of God would be established once for all in the world by the power of God himself through the Gospel and the paschal mystery of the Son. It would always bear not only the signs of his passion and death, but also the seal of his divine power, radiant in the resurrection. History would demonstrate it. But the certainty of the apostles and of all believers is founded on the revelation of the divine power of Christ, historical, eschatological and eternal, about whom the Second Vatican Council taught, "Christ, becoming obedient even unto death and because of this exalted by the Father (cf. Phil 2:8-9), entered into the glory of his kingdom. To him all things are made subject until he subjects himself and all created things to the Father that God may be all in all (cf. 1 Cor 15:27-28)" (LG 36).
Denial of Peter (Luke 22:31–34)
31 "Simon, Simon, behold Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat,
32 but I have prayed that your own faith may not fail; and once you have turned back, you must strengthen your brothers."
33 He said to him, "Lord, I am prepared to go to prison and to die with you."
34 But he replied, "I tell you, Peter, before the cock crows this day, you will deny three times that you know me."
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (Holy Thursday, 21 April 2011):
Saint Luke has preserved for us one concrete element of Jesus’ prayer for unity: “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren” (Lk 22:31). Today we are once more painfully aware that Satan has been permitted to sift the disciples before the whole world. And we know that Jesus prays for the faith of Peter and his successors. We know that Peter, who walks towards the Lord upon the stormy waters of history and is in danger of sinking, is sustained ever anew by the Lord’s hand and guided over the waves. But Jesus continues with a prediction and a mandate. “When you have turned again…”. Every human being, save Mary, has constant need of conversion. Jesus tells Peter beforehand of his coming betrayal and conversion. But what did Peter need to be converted from? When first called, terrified by the Lord’s divine power and his own weakness, Peter had said: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Lk 5:8). In the light of the Lord, he recognizes his own inadequacy. Precisely in this way, in the humility of one who knows that he is a sinner, is he called. He must discover this humility ever anew. At Caesarea Philippi Peter could not accept that Jesus would have to suffer and be crucified: it did not fit his image of God and the Messiah. In the Upper Room he did not want Jesus to wash his feet: it did not fit his image of the dignity of the Master. In the Garden of Olives he wielded his sword. He wanted to show his courage. Yet before the servant girl he declared that he did not know Jesus. At the time he considered it a little lie which would let him stay close to Jesus. All his heroism collapsed in a shabby bid to be at the centre of things. We too, all of us, need to learn again to accept God and Jesus Christ as he is, and not the way we want him to be. We too find it hard to accept that he bound himself to the limitations of his Church and her ministers. We too do not want to accept that he is powerless in this world. We too find excuses when being his disciples starts becoming too costly, too dangerous. All of us need the conversion which enables us to accept Jesus in his reality as God and man. We need the humility of the disciple who follows the will of his Master. We want to ask Jesus to look to us, as with kindly eyes he looked to Peter when the time was right, and to convert us.
After Peter was converted, he was called to strengthen his brethren. It is not irrelevant that this task was entrusted to him in the Upper Room. The ministry of unity has its visible place in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. Dear friends, it is a great consolation for the Pope to know that at each Eucharistic celebration everyone prays for him, and that our prayer is joined to the Lord’s prayer for Peter. Only by the prayer of the Lord and of the Church can the Pope fulfil his task of strengthening his brethren – of feeding the flock of Christ and of becoming the guarantor of that unity which becomes a visible witness to the mission which Jesus received from the Father.
comments by John Paul II (General Audience, December 1992):
At the Last Supper Jesus said something to Peter that deserves special consideration. Doubtlessly it refers to the dramatic situation at that time, but it has a fundamental value for the Church of all times, inasmuch as it belongs to the patrimony of the last exhortations and teachings which Jesus gave to the disciples during his earthly life.
In foretelling the triple denial which Peter would make out of fear during the passion, Jesus also predicted that he would overcome the crisis of that night: "Simon, Simon, behold Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed that your own faith may not fail, and once you have turned back, you must strengthen your brothers" (Lk 22:31-32).
With these words Jesus guaranteed Simon a special prayer for the perseverance of his faith, but he also announced the mission entrusted to him of strengthening his brothers in the faith.
The authenticity of Jesus' words is seen not only in Luke's care in collecting positive information and setting it out in a critically sound narrative, as can be seen in the prologue of his Gospel, but also in the type of paradox which this information implies. Jesus lamented Simon Peter's weakness and at the same time entrusted him with the mission of strengthening the others. The paradox shows the grandeur of grace at work in human beings--Peter in this case--far beyond the possibilities afforded by their talents, virtues or merits. It also shows Jesus' awareness and firmness in choosing Peter. The evangelist Luke, wise and attentive to the meaning of words and things, did not hesitate to record that messianic paradox.
The context in which Jesus' words to Peter at the Last Supper are found is also very significant. He had just said to the apostles: "It is you who have stood by me in my trials, and I confer a kingdom on you, just as my Father has conferred one on me" (Lk 22:28-29). The Greek verb diatithemai (to prepare, arrange) has a strong meaning--to arrange in a causative way--and speaks of the reality of the messianic kingdom established by the heavenly Father and shared with the apostles. Jesus' words doubtlessly refer to the eschatological dimension of the kingdom, when the apostles will be called to "judge the twelve tribes of Israel" (Lk 22:30). However, they also have a value for its present phase, for the time of the Church here on earth, and this is a time of trial. Therefore, Jesus assured Simon Peter of his prayer so that in this trial the prince of this world would not prevail: "Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat" (Lk 22:31). Christ's prayer is especially necessary for Peter in view of the trial awaiting him and in view of the task Jesus entrusted to him. The words "strengthen your brothers" refer to this task (Lk 22:32).
The perspective in which Peter's responsibility--like the Church's whole mission--must be considered is therefore both historical and eschatological. It is a responsibility in the Church and for the Church in history, where there are trials to overcome, changes to face, cultural, social and religious situations in which to work. However, everything is in relation to the kingdom of heaven, already prepared and conferred by the Father as the terminus of the entire historical journey and of all personal and social experiences. The "kingdom" transcends the Church in her earthly pilgrimage; it transcends her duties and her powers. It also transcends Peter and the apostolic college, and therefore, their successors in the episcopacy. Nevertheless, it is already in the Church, already at work and developing in its historical phase and the earthly situation of its existence. In the Church there is more than an institutional and societal structure. There is the presence of the Holy Spirit, the essence of the new law according to St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. However, this presence does not exclude, but rather demands on the ministerial level the visible, the institutional, the hierarchical.
The whole New Testament, preserved and preached by the Church, is a function of grace, of the kingdom of heaven. The Petrine ministry is situated in this perspective. Jesus announced to Simon Peter this task of service following the professions of faith he made as the spokesman of the Twelve: faith in Christ, the Son of the living God (cf. Mt 16:16), and in the words which foretold the Eucharist (cf. Jn 6:68). On the road to Caesarea Philippi, Jesus publicly approved of Simon's profession of faith, called him the fundamental rock of the Church and promised to give him the keys to the kingdom of heaven, with the power of binding and loosing. In that context it is understood that the evangelist especially highlights the aspect of mission and power concerning the faith, although other aspects are included, as we will see in the next catechesis.
It is interesting to note that the evangelist, although speaking of the human frailty of Peter who was not sheltered from difficulties and was tempted like the other apostles, emphasizes that he was the beneficiary of a special prayer for his perseverance in the faith: "I have prayed for you" . Peter was not preserved from his denial, but after experiencing his own weakness, he was strengthened in faith by virtue of Jesus' prayer so that he could fulfill the mission of strengthening his brothers. This mission cannot be explained on the basis of purely human considerations.
The Apostle Peter, the only one to deny his Master--three times!--was always Jesus' chosen one, charged with strengthening his companions. The human pretensions to fidelity that Peter professed failed, but grace triumphed.
The experience of falling enabled Peter to learn that he could not put his trust in his own strength or any other human factor, but only in Christ. It also enables us to see Peter's mission and power in light of the grace of election. What Jesus promised and entrusted to him comes from heaven and belongs--must belong--to the kingdom of heaven.
According to the evangelist, Peter's service to the kingdom consists primarily in strengthening his brothers, in helping them to keep the faith and develop it. It is interesting to point out that this mission is to be exercised in trial. Jesus was well aware of the difficulties in the historical phase of the Church, called to follow the way of the cross that he took. Peter's role, as head of the apostles, would be to support his "brothers" and the whole Church in faith. Since faith is not maintained without struggle, Peter must help the faithful in their struggle to overcome whatever would take away or lessen their faith. The experience of the first Christian communities is reflected in Luke's text. He was well aware of how that historical situation of persecution, temptation and struggle is explained in Christ's words to the apostles and principally to Peter.
The basic elements of the Petrine mission are found in those words: first of all, that of strengthening his brothers by expounding the faith, exhorting to faith, as well as all the measures necessary for the development of the faith. This activity is addressed to those whom Jesus, speaking to Peter, calls "your brothers." In context the expression applies first of all to the other apostles, but it does not rule out a wider sense embracing all the members of the Christian community (cf. Acts 1:15). It suggests the purpose of Peter's mission as the one who strengthens and supports faith: fraternal community in virtue of the faith.
Peter, and like him all his successors and heads of the Church, has the mission of encouraging the faithful to put all their trust in Christ and the power of his grace, which Peter personally experienced. This is what Innocent III wrote in the Letter Apostolicae Sedis Primatus (November 12, 1199), citing the text of Luke 22:32 and commenting on it as follows: "The Lord clearly intimates that Peter's successors will never at any time deviate from the Catholic faith, but will instead recall the others and strengthen the hesitant" (DS 775). That medieval Pope felt that Jesus' statement to Simon Peter was confirmed by the experience of 1,000 years.
The mission Jesus entrusted to Peter concerns the Church down through the centuries and human generations. That mandate "strengthen your brothers" means: teach the faith in every age, in different circumstances and amid all the difficulties and contradictions which preaching the faith will encounter in history; by teaching instill courage in the faithful; you yourself experienced that the power of my grace is greater than human weakness; therefore spread the message of faith, preach sound doctrine, reunite the "brethren," putting your trust in the prayer that I promised you; in virtue of my grace, try to help non-believers accept the faith and to comfort those who are in doubt. This is your mission, this is the reason for the mandate I entrust to you.
These words of the evangelist Luke (22:31-33) are very significant for all who exercise the munus Petrinum in the Church. They continually remind them of the kind of original paradox that Christ himself placed in them, with the certitude that in their ministry, as in Peter's, a special grace is at work which supports human weakness and allows him to "strengthen his brothers." "I have prayed"--Jesus' words to Peter, which re-echo in his ever poor, humble successors--"I have prayed that your own faith may not fail, and once you turned back, you must strengthen your brothers" (Lk 22:32).
comments by Fr. George Corrigan, Catholic Priest (https://friarmusings.wordpress.com):
Jesus addresses the leader of the new patriarchs by his Hebrew name. He says that Satan has asked to test the Twelve; the implication is that God’s special permission is needed to interfere with the Twelve. Jesus’ powerful intercession will help the leader, but Peter is free to choose, however badly. Jesus refers to the coming apostasy of Peter, from which he will return to strengthen his brothers. Peter does not accept the hint of his weakness and protests his allegiance and fidelity. Jesus then utters the prediction of his betrayal with unequivocal clarity. Peter must get over thinking that his special role among the Twelve was earned by his own strength.
Luke’s Gospel reserves a special role for the Twelve, that core group of Jesus’ disciples. The very number was symbolic of the gathering of the lost tribes of Israel, the renewal of God’s people that was the object of Jesus’ mission. His disciples were to be the witnesses to Jesus’ teaching and healing (24:44-49); they were to gather the church and take its mission to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8) So Jesus prays for Simon and for the other disciples that the power of evil would not sweep them away (22:31-32). Even though Peter will weaken, the power of grace will draw him back, and his ministry, in turn, is to strengthen his brothers and sisters in the community. As we will see, the evangelist does his best to tell the passion story in this spirit, downplaying the impact of Peter’s denial and passing over in silence the flight of the other disciples. For Luke the sure reconciliation that the Risen Christ brings to the community dissolves memories of its infidelities.
Sell your cloak and buy a sword (Luke 22:35–38)
35
He said to them, "When I sent you forth without a money bag or a sack
or sandals, were you in need of anything?" "No, nothing," they replied.
36 He said to them, "But now one who has a money bag should take it, and likewise a sack, and one who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one.
37 For I tell you that this scripture must be fulfilled in me, namely, 'He was counted among the wicked'; and indeed what is written about me is coming to fulfillment."
38 Then they said, "Lord, look, there are two swords here." But he replied, "It is enough!"
commentary by Pablo T. Gadenz, Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Trenton (NJ) :
In view of the present crisis but also the future mission of the apostles, Jesus’ final instructions in his farewell address repeal the earlier restrictions about not taking a money bag or a sack when sent out (Luke 9:3; 10:4). In the more hostile environment they will face, they will have to provide for their own needs, as Paul explains in his similar farewell address: “I have never wanted anyone’s silver or gold or clothing. You know well that these very hands have served my needs and my companions” (Acts 20:33-34).
Likewise, Jesus’ puzzling command to purchase a sword is best understood as referring to the hostile response that lies ahead. Indeed, this is confirmed by the scripture passage that Jesus gives as a reason for his command: He was counted among the wicked (see Isa 53:12). Mistakenly, they take his words literally by pointing to two swords, which they conclude could be useful in self-defense. Consequently, Jesus replies, it is enough! or “That’s enough!” (NIV), bringing an end to the discussion and indicating that his command was meant to be taken metaphorically, as an injunction to be ready for the worst. They will nevertheless persist in their misunderstanding (Luke 22:49-51).
comments by Fr. George Corrigan, Catholic Priest (https://friarmusings.wordpress.com):
In a parting message to all, Jesus asks them to recall the instructions they were given for the preaching mission (9:3). They had been told to rely on God’s providence for the things they would need. Now, because of the impending crisis of Jesus’ passion and death, and in view of the persecution sure to come on the early church, Jesus tells them to prepare themselves well for the struggle, even to preparing to defend themselves. He is speaking figuratively to alert them to the seriousness of the struggle, but they take him literally, producing two swords. “It is enough!” puts an end to a conversation that has been over their heads.
comments by Franciscan Gualberto Gismondi:
In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord recalls the commandment, "You shall not kill" (Mt 5:21) and adds to it the proscription of anger, hatred, and vengeance. Going further, Christ asks his disciples to turn the other cheek, to love their enemies (Cf. Mt 5:22-39; 5:44). Cathecism says:
(CCC 2263) The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. "The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one's own life; and the killing of the aggressor.... The one is intended, the other is not" (St. Thomas Aquinas, STh II-II, 64, 7, corp. art.).
(CCC 2264) Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one's own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow: If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful.... Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one's own life than of another's (Ib.).
(CCC 2265) Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for someone responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility.
When you are forced to defend yourself to preserve your life, it is that act of preservation that is the intended result of the employment of force. You're trying to stop the aggressor. If the aggressor dies as a result of your meeting force with force, that outcome is considered unintentional by the Church. You are trying to stop, not kill, though sometimes only the death of the attacker can halt the assault.
During the Last Supper, Jesus was preparing his followers for what was to come after he was gone. He told them, "one who has a money bag should take it, and likewise a sack, and one who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one" (Luke 22:36). Once He, their shepherd, had left them, they would need to protect themselves, even if it meant selling their clothes to be able to buy a weapon to do so.
Agony in the Garden (Luke 22:39–46)
39 Then going out he went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives, and the disciples followed him.
40 When he arrived at the place he said to them, "Pray that you may not undergo the test."
41 After withdrawing about a stone's throw from them and kneeling, he prayed,
42 saying, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done."
43 (And to strengthen him an angel from heaven appeared to him.
44 He was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground.)
45 When he rose from prayer and returned to his disciples, he found them sleeping from grief.
46 He said to them, "Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not undergo the test."
The verses 43-44, though very ancient, were probably not part of the original text of Luke. They are absent from the oldest papyrus manuscripts of Luke and from manuscripts of wide geographical distribution. It is assumed that they were inserted in order to counter doceticism, the belief that Jesus, as divine, only seemed to suffer. While probably not original to the text, these verses reflect 1st-century tradition.
"Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" (Mark 14:38)
The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. In the New Testament the flesh often signifies the weakness of human nature, which easily inclines toward sin; the spirit is our aspiration toward God and capacity to relate to him. As Paul emphasized, we are caught in perpetual conflict between the two
(Rom 8:12-14; Gal 5:19-24). The disciples desire to be faithful to Jesus (14:31), but their flesh is liable to fall into cowardice, complacency, or selfishness. Jesus' word of warning is also a word of encouragement, implying that his victory is the prototype for all Christians in their struggle against the flesh. "Because he himself was tested through what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested" (Heb 2:18).
The Third Council of Constantinople (AD 681) taught that because of Jesus’ two natures, divine and human, there are in Jesus two wills, divine and human, and the human will acts in conformity with the divine will: “His human will is compliant; it does not resist or oppose but rather submits to his divine and almighty will.” With his human will, Jesus exercises his human freedom to obey the divine will. The Council thus ratified the teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor, who reflected on the words of Jesus’ prayer—“Not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42)—and drew from them a practical lesson for Christians “of setting aside our own will by the perfect fulfillment of the divine.” Pope Benedict XVI comments on these teachings and makes a similar application: “The human will, as created by God, is ordered to the divine will.” In other words, human beings attain their fulfillment by accomplishing God’s will. However, sin introduced opposition to God’s will, so that we experience obedience to God’s will as a threat to our freedom. Through his prayer, Jesus has overcome this opposition and “transformed humanity’s resistance, so that we are all now present within the Son’s obedience.” By our union with Jesus (Gal 2:20), obedience to God’s will becomes possible.
commentary by Pablo T. Gadenz, Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Trenton (NJ) :
Likewise echoing the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus prayed by addressing his Father (11:2). The details regarding his prayer—that he withdrew about a stone’s throw and was kneeling—are recalled at the martyrdom of Stephen, who prays while kneeling as stones are thrown at him (Acts 7:58-60). Moreover, Jesus’ insistence that the will of the Father be done is echoed in Acts when a group of disciples recognize Paul’s similar resolve that “the Lord’s will be done” (Acts 21:14). Jesus in his suffering and death is thus presented as a martyr, like the prophets of old (Luke 11:49-51; 13:34) and as the model for his own disciples. However, Jesus’ death also goes one step further because it is sacrificial: this cup that God is giving him is the sacrifice of the New Covenant in his blood that will be poured out in his death (22:20; see Catechism 612).
comments by Dr. Mary Healy, professor of Scripture at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit:
Readers of this passage have sometimes questioned: why would the Son of God collapse in anguish when so many heroes, such as Christian martyrs and even the pagan philosopher Socrates, have gone to their deaths calm and composed? In the context of the New Testament, what Jesus experiences in
Gethsemane is not merely the dread of suffering but the full weight of human sin and its consequence of alienation from God: the "cup" of wrath (see Isa 51:17). The Christian gospel is far from the Stoic or Buddhist ideal of cool, emotionless detachment from the drama of human suffering. Jesus enters into the depths of the human condition to transform it from within. In Gethsemane we begin to see that God willed the entire passion process so as to bring about the most perfect act of love conceivable from a human heart. The cross would have no value if Jesus had not freely willed it. It is not Jesus' death in itself that God desired, since God has "no pleasure in the death of anyone" (Ezek 18:32). Rather, what redeems humanity is the fire of divine love enkindled in the human heart of Jesus, the love that bound him to the cross (see John 14:31; Eph 5:2).
comments by Brian Pizzalato (Director of Catechesis, R.C.I.A. & Lay Apostolate for the Diocese of Duluth):
Why do people suffer? Suffering can be a result of sin. Of this there is no doubt. Suffering can also serve as a way of testing and purification. Jesus was tested in the desert while he fasted. He was also tested through suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane, so much so that he “began to feel sorrow and distress” and “he was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground” (Matthew 26:37, Luke 22:44).
During this agony, he says, “Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). It is a test that will help us see if we will follow God only in good times, but also in bad times. In the midst of the test of suffering, will we shout out with a loud cry, “My will be done,” or “Thy will be done!”
We also suffer so that a space may be created to show love – of God and of neighbor. The suffering of others provides opportunities to demonstrate our love, the primary scriptural example being the Good Samaritan (cf. Luke 10:29-37).
Typical responses to the suffering of others might be, “I will pray for you.” That is love. “I will make a meal and bring it over.” That is love. “I will come visit you in the hospital.” That is love. “I will call a priest to give you the sacrament of anointing of the sick.” That is love.
Jesus also taught us that suffering is part of the demands of discipleship. “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).
“Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 15:27).
“…Whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:38).
The definitive suffering of Christ began in the upper room and ended on Calvary.
If we want to find the meaning of suffering, we should only look upon the cross. The cross is where we are shown in a perfect way how much God loves us. He loves us with a self-sacrificial, suffering love.
In our own suffering, Christ allows us to share in the deepest sign of his love. He has infused suffering with divine meaning, not human meaninglessness. Human suffering is thus redeemed. Through our suffering, we participate in the sacrifice of Christ, which brings about our salvation and the salvation of others. And it is only through the cross that we are led to the resurrection, there is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday.
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (JN):
“They went to a place which was called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit here, while I pray’ ” (Mk 14:32). Gerhard Kroll comments as follows: “At the time of Jesus, in this terrain on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, there was a farmstead with an oil press for crushing the olives. . . . The farmstead was named Gethsemane on account of the oil press. . . . Nearby was a large natural cave, which could have offered Jesus and his disciples a safe, if not particularly comfortable place to spend the night” (Auf den Spuren Jesu, p. 404).
We know from the pilgrim Egeria that by the end of the fourth century there was a “magnificent church” here, which was reduced to ruins by the turmoil of the times but was rediscovered by the Franciscans in the twentieth century. “Completed in 1924, the present-day Church of Jesus’ Agony not only encompasses the site of the ‘ecclesia elegans’ [Egeria’s church]: it once more surrounds the rock on which tradition tells us that Jesus prayed” (Kroll, Auf den Spuren Jesu, p. 410)
This is one of the most venerable sites of Christianity.
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.
Jesus gives concrete form to this dark vision of an unknown future. Yes, the shepherd is struck down. Jesus himself is the shepherd of Israel, the shepherd of humanity. And he takes injustice upon himself; he shoulders the destructive burden of guilt. He allows himself to be struck down. He takes up the cause of all who are struck down in the course of history. Now, at this hour, there is the further consequence that the community of disciples is scattered, the newly formed family of God falls apart before it has been properly established. “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (Jn 10:11).
Jesus, having passed through death, will live again. As the risen Lord, he is now in the fullest sense the shepherd who leads, through death, to the path of life. The Good Shepherd does both: he offers up his life, and he goes before. Indeed, the offering up of his life is the going before. It is through these actions that he leads us. It is through these actions that he opens the door onto the vast panorama of reality. Having experienced dispersal, the sheep can now be definitively reassembled. So right at the beginning of the night spent on the Mount of Olives, we find the dark saying about striking down and scattering, but also the promise that through these events, Jesus will reveal himself as the true shepherd who gathers together the scattered ones and leads them to God, to life.
After the common recitation of the psalms, Jesus prays alone—as on so many previous nights. Yet close by is the group of three disciples—Peter, James, and John: a trio known to us from other contexts, especially from the account of the Transfiguration. These three disciples, even though they are repeatedly overcome by sleep, are the witnesses of Jesus’ night of anguish. Mark tells us that Jesus “began to be greatly distressed and troubled”. The Lord says to his disciples: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch” (Mk 14:33-34).
The summons to vigilance has already been a major theme of Jesus’ Jerusalem teaching, and now it emerges directly with great urgency. And yet, while it refers specifically to Gethsemane, it also points ahead to the later history of Christianity. Across the centuries, it is the drowsiness of the disciples that opens up possibilities for the power of the Evil One. Such drowsiness deadens the soul, so that it remains undisturbed by the power of the Evil One at work in the world and by all the injustice and suffering ravaging the earth. In its state of numbness, the soul prefers not to see all this; it is easily persuaded that things cannot be so bad, so as to continue in the self-satisfaction of its own comfortable existence. Yet this deadening of souls, this lack of vigilance regarding both God’s closeness and the looming forces of darkness, is what gives the Evil One power in the world. On beholding the drowsy disciples, so disinclined to rouse themselves, the Lord says: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.” This is a quotation from Psalm 43: 5, and it calls to mind other verses from the Psalms.
In the Passion, too—on the Mount of Olives and on the Cross—Jesus uses passages from the Psalms to speak of himself and to address the Father. Yet these quotations have become fully personal; they have become the intimate words of Jesus himself in his agony. It is he who truly prays these psalms; he is their real subject. Jesus’ utterly personal prayer and his praying in the words of faithful, suffering Israel are here seamlessly united.
After this admonition to vigilance, Jesus goes a short distance away. This is where the prayer on the Mount of Olives actually begins. Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus falls on his face—the prayer posture of extreme submission to the will of God, of radical self-offering to him. In the Western liturgy, this posture is still adopted on Good Friday, at monastic professions, and at ordinations.
Luke, however, has Jesus kneeling to pray. In terms of praying posture, then, he draws Jesus’ night of anguish into the context of the history of Christian prayer: Stephen sinks to his knees in prayer as he is being stoned (Acts 7: 60); Peter kneels before he wakes Tabitha from death (Acts 9:40); Paul kneels to bid farewell to the Ephesian elders (Acts 20:36) and again when the disciples tell him not to go up to Jerusalem (Acts 21:5). 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).
There now follows the prayer itself, in which the whole drama of our redemption is made present. In Mark’s account, Jesus begins by asking that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him (14:35). This is then filled out by a statement of the essential content of the prayer: “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; remove this chalice from me; yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mk 14:36).
We may distinguish three elements in this prayer of Jesus. First there is the primordial experience of fear, quaking in the face of the power of death, terror before the abyss of nothingness that makes him tremble to the point that, in Luke’s account, his sweat falls to the ground like drops of blood (cf. 22:44). In the equivalent passage in Saint John’s Gospel (12:27), this horror is expressed, as in the Synoptics, in terms reminiscent of Psalm 43:5, but using a word that emphasizes the dark depths of Jesus’ fear: tetáraktai—it is the same verb, tarássein, that John uses to describe Jesus’ deep emotion at the tomb of Lazarus (cf. 11:33) as well as his inner turmoil at the prophecy of Judas’ betrayal in the Upper Room (cf. 13:21).
In this way John is clearly indicating the primordial fear of created nature in the face of imminent death, and 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).
Because he is the Son, he sees with total clarity the whole foul flood of evil, all the power of lies and pride, all the wiles and cruelty of the evil that masks itself as life yet constantly serves to destroy, debase, and crush life. Because he is the Son, he experiences deeply all the horror, filth, and baseness that he must drink from the “chalice” prepared for him: the vast power of sin and death. All this he must take into himself, so that it can be disarmed and defeated in him.
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. With this understanding, following Pascal, we may see ourselves drawn quite personally into the episode on the Mount of Olives: my own sin was present in that terrifying chalice. “Those drops of blood I shed for you”, Pascal hears the Lord say to him during the agony on the Mount of Olives (cf. Pensées VII, 553).
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).
The relationship between these two prayers in John’s account is essentially no different from what we find in the Synoptics. The anguish of Jesus’ human soul impels him to pray for deliverance from this hour. Yet his awareness of his mission, his knowledge that it was for this hour that he came, enables him to utter the second prayer—the prayer that God glorify his name: it is Jesus’ acceptance of the horror of the Cross, his ignominious experience of being stripped of all dignity and suffering a shameful death, that becomes the glorification of God’s name. 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. Jesus uttered both prayers, but the first one, asking for deliverance, merges into the second one, asking for God to be glorified by the fulfillment of his will—and so the conflicting elements blend into unity deep within the heart of Jesus’ human existence.
What does this mean? What is “Jesus’ Will” will as opposed to “Will of the Father” will?
Who is speaking to whom? Is it the Son addressing the Father? Or the man Jesus addressing the triune God? 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. So it is no coincidence that the early Church’s efforts to arrive at an understanding of the figure of Jesus Christ took their final shape as a result of faith-filled reflection on his prayer on the Mount of Olives.
At this point we should undertake a rapid overview of the early Church’s Christology, in order to grasp its understanding of the interrelation between the divine will and the human will in the figure of Jesus Christ. The Council of Nicea (325) had clarified the Christian concept of God. The three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are one, in the one “substance” of God. More than a century later, the Council of Chalcedon (451) sought to articulate the relation between divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ by adopting the formula that the one person of the Son of God embraces and bears the two natures—human and divine—“without confusion and without separation”.
Thus the infinite difference between God and man, between Creator and creature is preserved: humanity remains humanity, divinity remains divinity. Jesus’ humanity is neither absorbed nor reduced by his divinity. It exists in its fullness, while subsisting in the divine person of the Logos. At the same time, in the continuing distinction of natures, the expression “one person” conveys the radical unity that God in Christ has entered into with man.
Yet an objection comes to mind: What kind of man has no human will? Is a man without a will really a man? Did God in Jesus truly become man, if this man had no will? The great Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor (d. 662) formulated an answer to this question by struggling to understand Jesus’ prayer on the Mount of Olives: Jesus’ human nature is not amputated through union with the Logos; it remains complete. And the will is part of human nature. Maximus says in this regard that the human will, by virtue of creation, tends toward synergy (working together) with the divine will, but that through sin, opposition takes the place of synergy: man, whose will attains fulfillment through becoming attuned to God’s will, now has the sense that his freedom is compromised by God’s will. He regards consenting to God’s will, not as his opportunity to become fully himself, but as a threat to his freedom against which he rebels. The drama of the Mount of Olives lies in the fact that Jesus draws man’s natural will away from opposition and back toward synergy, and in so doing he restores man’s true greatness. 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.
Christoph Schönborn says in this regard that “the transition between the two wills from opposition to union is accomplished through the sacrifice of obedience. In the agony of Gethsemane, this transition occurs” (God’s Human Face, pp. 126-27). 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. Indeed, the Son’s whole being is expressed in the “not I, but you”—in the total self-abandonment of the “I” to the “you” of God the Father. This same “I” has subsumed and transformed humanity’s resistance, so that we are all now present within the Son’s obedience; we are all drawn into sonship.
This brings us to one final point regarding Jesus’ prayer, to its actual interpretative key, namely, the form of address: “Abba, Father” (Mk 14:36). In 1966 Joachim Jeremias wrote an important article about the use of this term in Jesus’ prayer, from which I should like to quote two essential insights: “Whereas there is not a single instance of God being addressed as Abba in the literature of Jewish prayer, Jesus always addressed him in this way (with the exception of the cry from the Cross, Mark 15:34 and parallel passages)”. (Abba, p. 57). Moreover, Jeremias shows that this word Abba belongs to the language of children—that it is the way a child addresses his father within the family. “To the Jewish mind it would have been disrespectful and therefore inconceivable to address God with this familiar word. For Jesus to venture to take this step was something new and unheard of. He spoke to God like a child to his father . . . Jesus’ use of Abba in addressing God reveals the heart of his relationship with God” (p. 62).
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.
Finally we must turn our attention to the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews that points toward the Mount of Olives. There we read: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear” (5:7). Each time, it is a question of Jesus’ encounter with the powers of death, whose ultimate depths he as the Holy One of God can sense in their full horror. The Letter to the Hebrews views the whole of Jesus’ Passion—from the Mount of Olives to the last cry from the Cross—as thoroughly permeated by prayer, one long impassioned plea to God for life in the face of the power of death.
If the Letter to the Hebrews treats the entire Passion as a prayer in which Jesus wrestles with God the Father and at the same time with human nature, it also sheds new light on the theological depth of the Mount of Olives prayer. 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. There are two particular words with which the author of the Letter to the Hebrews underlines this dimension of Jesus’ prayer. The verb “bring” (prosphérein: bring before God, bear aloft—cf. Heb 5:1) comes from the language of the sacrificial cult. What Jesus does here lies right at the heart of what sacrifice is. “He offered himself to do the will of the Father”, as Albert Vanhoye comments (Let Us Confidently Welcome Christ Our High Priest, p. 60). The second word that is important for our purposes tells us that through his sufferings Jesus learned obedience and was thus “made perfect” (Heb 5:8-9). Vanhoye points out that in the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, the expression “make perfect” (teleioun) is used exclusively to mean “consecrate as priest” (p. 62). The Letter to the Hebrews takes over this terminology (cf. 7:11, 19, 28). 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 priest “according to the order of Melchizedek” (Heb 5:9-10; cf. Vanhoye, pp. 61-62).
The text states that Jesus pleaded with him who had the power to save him from death and that, on account of his godly fear (cf. 5: 7), his prayer was granted. But was it granted? He still died on the Cross! We may distinguish different aspects of this “granting”. One possible translation of the text would be: “He was heard and delivered from his fear.” This would correspond to Luke’s account, which says that an angel came and comforted him (cf. 22:43). It would then refer to the inner strength given to Jesus through prayer, so that he was able to endure the arrest and the Passion resolutely. Yet the text obviously says more: the Father raised him from the night of death and, through the Resurrection, saved him definitively and permanently from death: Jesus dies no more (cf. Vanhoye, Let Us Confidently Welcome Christ Our High Priest, p. 60). Yet surely the text means even more: the Resurrection is not just Jesus’ personal rescue from death. He did not die for himself alone. His was a dying “for others”; it was the conquest of death itself. Hence this “granting” may also be understood in terms of the Hence this “granting” may also be understood in terms of the parallel text in John 12:27-28, where in answer to Jesus’ prayer: “Father, glorify your name!” a voice from heaven replies: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The Cross itself has become God’s glorification, the glory of God made manifest in the love of the Son. This glory extends beyond the moment into the whole sweep of history. This glory is life. It is on the Cross that we see it, hidden yet powerful: the glory of God, the transformation of death into life.
From the Cross, new life comes to us. On the Cross, Jesus becomes the source of life for himself and for all. On the Cross, death is conquered. The granting of Jesus’ prayer concerns all mankind: his obedience becomes life for all. This conclusion is spelled out for us in the closing words of the passage we have been studying: “He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek” (Heb 5:9-10; cf. Ps 110:4).
comments by Pope John Paul II (General Audiences: February 3, 1988):
Jesus Christ is true man. We wish to continue the previous reflection on this theme, which is a fundamental truth of our faith. This faith is based on the word of Christ himself, confirmed by the witness of the apostles and disciples. It was transmitted from generation to generation in the Church's teaching: "We believe...true God and true man...not a phantasm, but the one and only Son of God" (Council of Lyons II, DS 852).
More recently the same doctrine was recalled by the Second Vatican Council, which emphasized the new relationship which the Word, on taking flesh and becoming man like us, has initiated with every human being. "By his Incarnation the Son of God has united himself in some fashion with every man. He worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind, acted by human choice and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin" (GS 22).
In the previous reflection we sought to show Christ's likeness to us, which derives from the fact that he is true man. "The Word made flesh"; flesh (sarx) indicates man precisely as a corporeal being (sarkikos), who comes into being through being born of a woman (cf. Gal 4:4). In his corporeal nature Jesus of Nazareth, like every man, experienced fatigue, hunger and thirst. His body was vulnerable, subject to suffering, and sensitive to physical pain. It was precisely in this flesh (sarx) that he was subjected to dreadful tortures and was eventually crucified. "He was crucified, died and was buried."
Today we shall pay particular attention to this last statement which brings us to the heart of Jesus' psychological life. He truly experienced human feelings of joy, sadness, anger, wonder and love. For example, we read that "Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit" (Lk 10:21). He wept over Jerusalem. "He saw the city and wept over it, saying, 'If this day you only knew what makes for peace'" (Lk 19:41-42). He also wept after the death of his friend Lazarus. "When Jesus saw [Mary] weeping and the Jews who had come with her weeping, he became perturbed and deeply troubled, and said, 'Where have you laid him?' They said to him, 'Sir, come and see.' And Jesus wept" (Jn 11:33-35).
His feelings of sorrow were especially intense in the Garden of Gethsemane. We read: "He took with him Peter, James and John and began to be troubled and distressed. Then Jesus said to them, 'My soul is sorrowful even to death'" (Mk 14:33-34; cf. also Mt 26:37). In Luke we read: "He was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground" (Lk 22:44). This was a fact of the psycho-physical order which once again attests to Jesus' true humanity.
We read also of Jesus' anger. When on the sabbath he cured the man with the withered hand, Jesus first of all asked those present, "'Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil?' But they remained silent. Looking around at them with anger and grieved at their hardness of heart, he said to the man, 'Stretch out your hand.' He stretched it out and his hand was restored" (Mk 3:4-5).
Similarly in the case of the buyers and sellers who were driven out of the Temple, Matthew writes: "He drove out all those engaged in selling and buying there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves. And he said to them, 'It is written: "My house shall be a house of prayer," but you have made it a den of thieves'" (Mt 21:12-13; cf. Mk 11:15).
Elsewhere we read that Jesus "was amazed." "He was amazed at their lack of faith" (Mk 6:6). Or he was moved to admiration, as when he said, "Notice how the flowers grow...not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of them" (Lk 12:27). He also admired the faith of the Canaanite woman: "O woman, great is your faith!" (Mt 15:28).
Above all, the Gospels show that Jesus was a person who loved. We read that during his conversation with the young man who had come to ask him what he ought to do in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, "Jesus, looking at him, loved him" (Mk 10:21). The evangelist John writes that "Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus" (Jn 11:5), and John called himself "the disciple...whom Jesus loved" (Jn 13:23).
Jesus loved children. "And people were bringing children to him that he might touch them.... He embraced them and blessed them, placing his hands on them" (Mk 10:13-16). When he proclaimed the commandment of love, he referred to the love with which he himself loved. "This is my commandment: love one another as I love you" (Jn 15:12).
Christ's passion, especially the agony on the cross, constitutes the zenith of the love with which Jesus, "having loved his own who were in the world, loved them unto the end" (Jn 13:1). "Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (Jn 15:13). At the same time this is also the nadir of the sorrow and abandonment which he experienced during his earthly life. The words "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabacthani...My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'" (Mk 15:34) will forever remain a piercing expression of this abandonment. They are words which Jesus took from Psalm 22 (verse 2), and they express the excruciating agony of his soul and body, including the mysterious sensation of being momentarily abandoned by God. It was the most dramatically agonizing moment of the whole passion!
Jesus therefore became truly similar to men, by assuming the condition of a servant, as the letter to the Philippians expresses it (cf. 2:7). However, the Letter to the Hebrews, speaking of him as "high priest of the good things that have come to be" (Heb 9:11), confirms and clarifies that this is not a "priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been similarly tested in every way, yet without sin" (cf. Heb 4:15). Truly he "knew not sin," even though St. Paul will say that "for our sake God made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor 5:21).
The same Jesus could issue the challenge, "Can any of you charge me with sin?" (Jn 8:46). The faith of the Church is expressed as follows: "He was conceived, born and died without sin." This was proclaimed, in harmony with the whole of Tradition, by the Council of Florence (Decree for the Jacobites, DS 1347). Jesus "was conceived, was born and died without sin." He is the truly just and holy man.
We repeat with the New Testament, with the creed, and with Vatican Council II that Jesus Christ "has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin." It is precisely thanks to this likeness that "Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and his love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear" (GS 22).
Through this observation, Vatican Council II gives yet again the answer to the fundamental question which forms the title of St. Anselm's celebrated treatise, Cur Deus homo? It is a question of the intellect that explores the mystery of God the Son, who became true man "for us men and for our salvation," as we profess in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
Christ has fully revealed man to himself precisely by the fact that "he knew not sin," for sin does not enrich man. Quite the contrary—it cheapens him, it diminishes him and it deprives him of the fullness which is his due (cf. GS 13). The rescue and the salvation of fallen man is the fundamental reason for the Incarnation.
Jesus' Jerusalem conflicts, crucifixion, and resurrection
Kiss of Judas (Luke 22:47–53)
47
While he was still speaking, a crowd approached and in front was one of
the Twelve, a man named Judas. He went up to Jesus to kiss him.
48 Jesus said to him, "Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?"
49 His disciples realized what was about to happen, and they asked, "Lord, shall we strike with a sword?"
50 And one of them struck the high priest's servant and cut off his right ear.
51 But Jesus said in reply, "Stop, no more of this!" Then he touched the servant's ear and healed him.
52 And Jesus said to the chief priests and temple guards and elders who had come for him, "Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs?
53 Day after day I was with you in the temple area, and you did not seize me; but this is your hour, the time for the power of darkness."
comments by by Joseph F. Mali (Nigerian Catholic Priest):
When the soldiers entered the garden to arrest Jesus, he said to them: “Day after day I was with you in the temple area, and you did not seize me; but this is your hour, the time for the power of darkness.” Pay attention to what Jesus said to the soldiers: “this is your hour, the time for the power of darkness.” Jesus recognizes the power of evil. This power is about to be displayed in his own life.
By the hour of evil I do not mean those tragic moments that we can avoid. Quite the contrary! The hour of evil is that tragedy we cannot escape. Jesus prayed to God: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done.” The cup, as we know, was not taken away from Jesus. He suffered and died on the cross. The cross, then, is Jesus’ inevitable end. This element of inevitability is what makes the cross the hour of evil.
Like Jesus, there comes a time in our life when we cannot escape evil. Try as you will, and your efforts will all be in vain. Once it is time, evil is unstoppable. One disciple tried to put up a defense for Jesus by cutting off the ear of the high priest’s servant. He succeeded in hurting the servant, but did stop Jesus from undergoing the cross. Like a stone that must come down when it goes up, so is the inevitability of the hour of evil.
The hour of evil is not necessarily the result of sin or guilt. Guilty or innocent, when it is time, evil will strike. Listen to what Pilate said concerning Jesus: “I have conducted my investigation in your presence and have not found this man guilty of the charges you have brought against him, nor did Herod, for he sent him back to us. So no capital crime has been committed by him.” The centurion who witnessed the crucifixion confirmed Pilate’s conclusion, proclaiming, “This man was innocent beyond doubt.” But despite Jesus’ innocence, he went through the horror of the cross. He suffered, of course, not because he was guilty, but because it was the hour of evil.
We have no control over the hour of evil. But we do have control over our response to it. Take Jesus, for instance, he did not return evil with evil. Nor did he wish his executioners any ill. Quite the opposite, when the disciples suggested a violent resistance, saying, “Lord, look, there are two swords here,” he denounced their behavior and opted for non-violence. Also, when one of the disciples cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant, Jesus disapproved of it, saying, “Stop, no more of this!” He then healed the ear of the servant. As he was dying on the cross, he prayed: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”
How we interpret events in the hour of evil will determine our response. A negative reading will lead to a negative reaction. A positive understanding will inspire a positive response. Jesus interpreted the actions of his killers in terms of ignorance and not their wickedness. Consequently, he kept no malice against anyone. He even asked God to forgive those who put him to death. In the hour of evil Jesus did not snap; he consistently sticks to his principles. The hour of evil could not rob Jesus of his goodness. Like Jesus, let us not compromise our good values during the hour of darkness, for evil’s triumph is only temporary, as Easter Sunday will confirm.
Arrest and denial of Peter (Luke 22:54-62)
54 After arresting him they led him away and took him into the house of the high priest; Peter was following at a distance.
55 They lit a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat around it, and Peter sat down with them.
56 When a maid saw him seated in the light, she looked intently at him and said, "This man too was with him."
57 But he denied it saying, "Woman, I do not know him."
58 A short while later someone else saw him and said, "You too are one of them"; but Peter answered, "My friend, I am not."
59 About an hour later, still another insisted, "Assuredly, this man too was with him, for he also is a Galilean."
60 But Peter said, "My friend, I do not know what you are talking about." Just as he was saying this, the cock crowed,
61 and the Lord turned and looked at Peter; and Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him, "Before the cock crows today, you will deny me three times."
62 He went out and began to weep bitterly.
comments by Pope John Paul II (22 February 2000):
This is Christ's promise, our consoling certainty: the Petrine ministry is not founded on human abilities and strengths, but on the prayer of Christ who implores the Father that Simon's faith "may not fail" (Lk 22: 32). When he has "turned again", Peter will be able to carry out his service among his brethren. The Apostle's repentance - we could almost say his second conversion - becomes the decisive turning point on his journey of following the Lord.
We are helped in this by Peter's example, his experience of human weakness which led him, shortly after the conversation with Jesus just recounted, to forget the promises he had made with such insistence and to deny his Lord. Despite his sin and limitations, Christ chose him and called him to a most high task: that of being the foundation of the Church's visible unity and of strengthening his brethren in the faith.
The decisive moment occurred on the night between the Thursday and Friday of the Passion. Christ, led out of the high priest's house, looked directly at Peter. The Apostle, who had just denied him three times, was struck by that gaze and understood everything. He remembered the Master's words and felt pierced to the heart. "And he went out and wept bitterly" (Lk 22: 62).
We are so deeply moved by Peter's tears as to be spurred to an authentic inner purification. "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord", he exclaimed one day after the miraculous catch (Lk 5: 8). Dear brothers and sisters, let us make Peter's invocation our own, as we celebrate our holy Jubilee. Christ will renew his wonders for us too, we hope with humble trust: he will grant us a superabundance of his healing grace and will work new miraculous catches
Christ's response echoes forcefully in our hearts: "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church" (Mt 16: 18). The Evangelist John testifies that Jesus gave Simon the name "Cephas" at their first meeting, when his brother Andrew had brought him to him (cf. Jn 1: 41-42). On the other hand, Matthew's account puts the greatest emphasis on Christ's action by situating it at an important moment in the messianic ministry of Jesus, who explains the significance of the name "Peter" by relating it to the building of his Church.
"You are the Christ": the Church is founded on Peter's profession of faith and on Jesus' subsequent declaration: "You are Peter". An invincible foundation, against which the forces of evil can never prevail: this foundation is safeguarded by the very will of the "Father who is in heaven" (Mt 16: 17). The Chair of Peter, which we celebrate today, is not based on human assurances - "flesh and blood" - but on Christ, the cornerstone. And like Simon, we too are "blessed", for we know we have no reason to boast except in the eternal and providential plan of God.
Peter the shepherd is totally moulded by Jesus the Shepherd and by the dynamism of his paschal mystery. The "Petrine ministry" is rooted in this unique conformation to Christ the Shepherd on the part of Peter and his Successors, a conformation which is based on a special charism of love: "Do you love me more than these? ... Feed my lambs" (Jn 21: 15).
Guards mock Jesus (Luke 22:63–65)
63 The men who held Jesus in custody were ridiculing and beating him.
64 They blindfolded him and questioned him, saying, "Prophesy! Who is it that struck you?"
65 And they reviled him in saying many other things against him.
In what is probably the earliest complete commentary on Mark, an ancient Christian writer comments on Mark gospel on how the insults he faced removed our shame: "This was so that by his guilt he might remove our guilt; that by the blindfold on his face, he might take the blindfold from our hearts; that by receiving the spits, he might wash the face of our soul; that by the blows by which he was struck on the head, he might heal the head of the human race, which is Adam; that by the blows by which he was slapped, his greatest praise might applaud by means of our hands and lips ... that by his cross he might eliminate our torment; that by his death, he might put to death our death .... The insults he received remove our shame. His bonds made us free. By the crown of thorns on his head, we have obtained the diadem of the kingdom. By his wounds we have been healed. By his burial we resurrect. By his descent into hell we ascend into heaven." (a See Cahill, FirstCommentory on Mark)
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (Via Crucis 2007):
One day, walking in the valley of the Jordan not far from Jericho, Jesus halted and spoke to the Twelve with words of fire, words they found impossible to understand: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered to the Gentiles, and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon; and they will scourge him and kill him, ….”. Now at last, the full meaning of those enigmatic words is revealed: in the courtyard of the pretorium, the residence of the Roman governor in Jerusalem, the grim ritual of torture has begun, while outside the palace the murmur of the crowd begins to swell, in expectation of the spectacle of the death march.
In that room closed to the public, things take place that will be repeated down the centuries in a thousand sadistic and perverse ways, in the darkness of countless prison cells. Jesus is not only physically struck but mocked. Indeed, the Evangelist Luke, to describe those insults, uses the word “blaspheme”, as if to bring out the deepest meaning of the violent abuse which the soldiers heap on their victim. And the torments inflicted upon Christ’s flesh are accompanied by a gruesome farce that is an affront to his personal dignity.
The Evangelist John recounts that insulting parody, based on the popular game of the mock king: "And the soldiers plaited a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and arrayed him in a purple robe: they came up to him, saying "Hail, King of the Jews!". There is a crown whose points are made of thorny twigs; the royal purple is replaced by a red mantle; there is the imperial salute: “Hail, Caesar!”. And yet, behind all this mockery, we can see a glorious sign: yes, Jesus is reviled like a mock king, yet in reality he is the true Sovereign of history.
The face transfigured on Tabor is disfigured (Luke 9:29) ; the one who is “the reflection of God’s glory” (Hebrews 1:3) is darkened and abased; as Isaiah had proclaimed, the messianic Servant of the Lord has his back furrowed by the lash, his beard plucked, his face covered with spittle (Isaiah 50:6). In him, the God of glory, our suffering humanity is revealed; in him, the Lord of history, the frailty of every creature is revealed; in him, the Creator of the world, the painful cry of every living creature finds an echo.
Before the High Priest (Luke 22:66–71)
66
When day came the council of elders of the people met, both chief
priests and scribes, and they brought him before their Sanhedrin.
67 They said, "If you are the Messiah, tell us," but he replied to them, "If I tell you, you will not believe,
68 and if I question, you will not respond.
69 But from this time on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God."
70 They all asked, "Are you then the Son of God?" He replied to them, "You say that I am."
71 Then they said, "What further need have we for testimony? We have heard it from his own mouth."
Sanhedrin: the word is a Hebraized form of a Greek word meaning a “council,” and refers to the elders, chief priests, and scribes who met under the high priest’s leadership to decide religious and legal questions that did not pertain to Rome’s interests. Jewish sources are not clear on the competence of the Sanhedrin to sentence and to execute during this period. Further mudding the picture is , even if they had executioner’s powers, the Sanhedrin were not allowed to hold capital trials on the eve of a Sabbath or a festival (m. Sanh 4:2). There have been many scholarly debates as to whether this “meeting” was a trial or not. This question can not be clearly resolved. Fr. Raymond Brown’s The Death of the Messiah (Vol. 1), pp. 328-397 is a comprehensive treatment. Brown’s estimate is that this is a legal proceeding, more attuned to our concept of a preliminary hearing. In any case, that seems to be Luke’s treatment, as there are no religious charges preferred. The only formal charges are political ones brought by the Roman authorities (23:1).
The Sanhedrin had seventy members, including chief priests, scribes, and elders (Mark 15:1), presided over by the high priest. The high priest was a political appointee and was the highest-ranking Jewish authority in the land. Religiously, he alone had the privilege of entering the Holy of Holies in the temple once a year, on the Day of Atonement. Politically, he was held accountable to Rome for maintaining public order and ensuring the payment of tribute, and he could be deposed at will. Financially, he oversaw the temple and all its commerce, the hub of Jerusalem's economy. Under the Romans, the average term of office for the high priest was four years. Caiaphas's unusually long tenure (AD 18-36) testifies to his adeptness at collaborating with Rome. Peter and John (Acts 4:5-21). Stephen (Acts 6:12-15), and Paul (Acts 22:30-23:1 0) would all stand trial before the Sanhedrin as Jesus did.
Caiaphas was the Jewish high priest from A.D. 18 to 36. During this time he also presided over the Jewish high court, the Sanhedrin. The Gospels remember Caiaphas as the one who counseled the Jerusalem leadership that Jesus should die instead of the people (Jn 11:49-52) and who eventually declared him guilty of blasphemy (Mt 27:62; Mk 14:61). He was the son-in-law of the former high priest Annas, who also examined Jesus on the night of his arrest (Jn 18:13, 19-24). The High priest was the chief religious representative of biblical Israel. He served as the primary mediator between God, to whom he interceded for the people with prayers and sacrifices, and the Israelite community, for whom he acquired blessings. In the New Testament period, the high priest was also the acting head of the Jewish Sanhedrin.
Like in Matthew 26:57-67, Caiaphas, other chief priests, and the Bet Shammai dominated Sanhedrin of the time are depicted interrogating Jesus. They are looking for "false evidence" with which to frame Jesus, but are unable to find any. Jesus remains silent throughout the proceedings until Caiaphas demands that Jesus say whether he is the Christ. Jesus replies "You have said so", and "I am: and ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." KJV Caiaphas and the other men charge him with blasphemy and order him beaten.
Previously and as mentioned in John 11, the high priest Caiaphas had called a gathering of the Sanhedrin in reaction to the raising of Lazarus:
47 So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, "What are we going to do? This man is performing many signs.
48 If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation."
49 But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, "You know nothing,
50 nor do you consider that it is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish."
51 He did not say this on his own, but since he was high priest for that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation,
52 and not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God.
53 So from that day on they planned to kill him.
comments by Fr. George Corrigan, Catholic Priest (https://friarmusings.wordpress.com):
The long nighttime ends with an early morning session before the Sanhedrin, the ruling council of the Jews in Jerusalem. Although the gospel accounts give this event the semblance of a “trial” it was probably an informal hearing as the leaders prepared their case against Jesus for presentation before the Roman governor. Luke’s description of a single meeting of the Sanhedrin, taking place at daybreak, is more likely than that of Mark and Matthew, who describe a night meeting followed by a morning session to carry out the decision. A night meeting of the Sanhedrin is otherwise unknown.
Jesus is unwilling to identify himself as the kind of Messiah popularly expected; rather, he speaks of himself as authoritative judge in his role as the Son of Man (Dan 7:13–14). They interpret this answer (correctly) as an affirmation of a special divine status; they can only view this as blasphemy, sufficient reason to condemn him to death (see Mark 14:62–64). The Sanhedrin was (likely) not empowered to impose the death sentence; they had to submit their accusation to the judgment of the Roman authority.
Luke’s narration of the events is distinctive for what it lacks in comparison to the Gospels of Mark and Matthew: there is no succession of false witnesses, no rending of the documents by the chief priests, no cry of blasphemy or statement that Jesus deserves death. As well there are unique features in what Luke includes: the whole Sanhedrin is involved in the questioning – thus the rejection is not from the chief priest alone, but the whole of the religious leadership. And perhaps more importantly, Jesus’ response concerning his being Son of God is answered, not in terms of the parousia (as in Mark and Matthew), but in terms of the resurrection – after which the risen Christ will be seated at the right-hand of the Father.
Luke brings us quickly to the heart of the issue: the reader of this gospel knows from the opening scenes of the infancy narrative that Jesus is the “Messiah” and the “Son of Man”. But the opponents are closed to this truth. They have not believed his words and deeds and an admission that he is the “Son of God” will not help their unbelief, because they do not seek him. Perhaps ironically, Jesus tells them, “in your very question, you possess the answer and the gateway to eternal life”: “You say that I am” (v.70).
The exultation of Jesus to the right hand of God is beginning in the Sanhedrin session; it will be advanced on the cross, where Jesus will speak of being in paradise this day (23:43); and it will be fulfilled in the ascension of Jesus which concludes the Gospel (24:50-51).
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (JN):
In the early stages of his ministry, the Temple authorities had evidently shown little interest in the figure of Jesus or in the movement that formed around him; it all seemed a rather provincial affair—one of those movements that arose in Galilee from time to time and did not warrant much attention. The situation changed on “Palm Sunday”.
The Messianic homage paid to Jesus on his entrance into Jerusalem; the cleansing of the Temple with the interpretation he gave to it, which seemed to indicate the end of the Temple altogether and a radical change in the cult, contrary to the ordinances established by Moses; Jesus’ teaching in the Temple, from which there emerged a claim to authority that seemed to channel Messianic hopes in a new direction, threatening Israel’s monotheism; the miracles that Jesus worked publicly and the growing multitude that gathered around him—all this added up to a situation that could no longer be ignored.
It seems reasonable to assume that what took place when Jesus was brought before the Sanhedrin was not a proper trial, but more of a cross-examination that led to the decision to hand him over to the Roman Governor for sentencing.
Only John explicitly recounts a session of the Sanhedrin, which served to form opinion and to shape an eventual decision on the case of Jesus (11:47-53).
One is tempted to say that the motive for acting against Jesus was a political concern shared by the priestly aristocracy and the Pharisees, though they arrived at it from different starting points; yet this political interpretation of the figure of Jesus and his ministry caused them to miss completely what was most characteristic and new about him. Through the message that he proclaimed, Jesus had actually achieved a separation of the religious from the political, thereby changing the world: this is what truly marks the essence of his new path.
Nevertheless, we must not be too hasty in condemning the “purely political” outlook of his opponents. For in the world they inhabited, the two spheres—political and religious—were inseparable. The “purely” political existed no more than the “purely” religious. The Temple, the Holy City, and the Holy Land with its people: these were neither purely political nor purely religious realities. Anything to do with Temple, nation, and land involved both the religious foundation of politics and its religious consequences. The defense of the “place” and the “nation” was ultimately a religious affair, because it was concerned with God’s house and God’s people.
It is important to distinguish between this underlying religious and political motivation on the part of Israel’s leaders and the specific power-interests of the dynasty of Annas and Caiaphas, which effectively precipitated the catastrophe of the year 70 and so caused precisely the outcome it had been their task to avoid.
In his teaching and in his whole ministry, Jesus had inaugurated a non-political Messianic kingdom and had begun to detach these two hitherto inseparable realities from one another. But this separation—essential to Jesus’ message—of politics from faith, of God’s people from politics, was ultimately possible only through the Cross. Only through the total loss of all external power, through the radical stripping away that led to the Cross, could this new world come into being. Only through faith in the Crucified One, in him who was robbed of all worldly power and thereby exalted, does the new community arise, the new manner of God’s dominion in the world.
John expressed with great clarity this striking combination in Caiaphas of carrying out God’s will and blind self-seeking. While the Council members were perplexed as to what should be done in view of the danger posed by the movement surrounding Jesus, he made the decisive intervention: “You do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish” (11:50). John designates this statement expressly as a “prophetic utterance” that Caiaphas formulated through the charism of his office as high priest, and not of his own accord.
The immediate consequence of Caiaphas’ statement was this: until that moment, the assembled Council had held back in fear from a death sentence, looking for other ways out of the crisis, admittedly without finding a solution. Only a theologically motivated declaration from the high priest, spoken with the authority of his office, could dispel their doubts and prepare them in principle for such a momentous decision. On the surface, the content of Caiaphas’ “prophecy” is thoroughly pragmatic, and, considered in those terms, it seems reasonable from his point of view: if the people can be saved through the death of one man (and in no other way), then this individual’s death might seem the lesser evil and the politically correct path. But what on the surface sounds and is intended to be merely pragmatic acquires an entirely new depth on the basis of its “prophetic” quality. The one man, Jesus, dies for the nation: the mystery of vicarious atonement shines forth, and it is this that constitutes the most profound content of Jesus’ mission. After this pronouncement of Caiaphas, which was tantamount to a death sentence, John added a further comment from the perspective of the disciples’ faith. First he makes it clear—as we have seen—that the reference to dying for the people was a prophetic utterance, and then he goes on to say that Jesus would die, “not for the nation only, but to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (11:52). On first sight this seems a thoroughly Jewish manner of speaking. It expresses the hope that, in the Messianic age, the Israelites scattered around the world would be gathered together in their own land (cf. Barrett, The Gospel according to Saint John, p. 407).
On the lips of the evangelist, though, this saying takes on a new meaning. The gathering is oriented no longer toward a specific geographical territory, but toward the growth into unity of the children of God: we immediately hear echoes of the central element of Jesus’ high-priestly prayer. The gathering is directed toward the unity of all believers, and thus it points ahead to the community of the Church and even beyond, toward definitive eschatological unity.
The scattered children of God are no longer exclusively Jews, but children of Abraham in the wider sense that Paul expounded: people who, like Abraham, focus their gaze upon God; people who are ready to listen to him and to respond to his call—Advent people, we might say. The new community of Jews and Gentiles is taking shape here (cf. Jn 10:16). So a further window is opened onto our Lord’s reference at the Last Supper to the “many”, for whom he would lay down his life: he was referring to the gathering of the “children of God”, that is to say, all those who are willing to hear his call.
After the cleansing of the Temple, two charges against Jesus were in circulation. The first had to do with his interpretation of the prophetic gesture of driving cattle and traders out of the Temple, which seemed like an attack on the Holy Place itself and, hence, on the Torah, on which Israel’s life was built.
In the cleansing of the Temple Jesus fights there, on the one hand against self-serving abuse of the sacred space, but his prophetic gesture and the interpretation he gave to it go much deeper: the old cult of the stone Temple has come to an end. The hour of the new worship in “spirit and truth” has come. The Temple of stone must be destroyed, so that the new one, the New Covenant with its new style of worship, can come. Yet at the same time, this means that Jesus himself must endure crucifixion, so that, after his Resurrection, he may become the new Temple.
I consider it important that it was not the cleansing of the Temple as such for which Jesus was called to account, but only the interpretation he gave to his action. We may conclude that the symbolic gesture itself remained within acceptable limits and did not give rise to public unrest, such as would have supplied a motive for legal intervention. The danger lay in the interpretation, in the seeming attack on the Temple, and in the authority that Jesus was claiming to possess.
On the basis of Jesus’ teaching in the Temple, a second charge was in circulation: that Jesus had made a Messianic claim, through which he somehow put himself on a par with God and thus seemed to contradict the very basis of Israel’s faith—the firm belief that there is only one God. We should note that both charges are of a purely theological nature. Yet given the inseparability of the religious and political realms, of which we spoke earlier, the charges do also have a political dimension. As the place of Israel’s sacrifices, to which the whole people comes on pilgrimage for great feasts, the Temple is the basis of Israel’s inner unity. The Messianic claim is a claim to kingship over Israel. Hence the placing of the charge “King of the Jews” above the Cross, to indicate the reason for Jesus’ execution.
Let us come to the decisive point: to Caiaphas’ question and Jesus’ answer. According to Mark, the high priest’s question is: “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” And Jesus answers: “I am; and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (14:62).
The high priest questions Jesus about his Messiahship and refers to it in terms of Psalm 2:7 (cf. Ps 110:3), using the expression “Son of the Blessed”—Son of God. In the context of the question, this expression refers to the Messianic tradition, while leaving open the form of sonship involved. One may assume that Caiaphas not only based the question on theological tradition, but also formulated it specifically in terms of Jesus’ preaching, which had come to his attention.
In Mark’s account, Jesus answered the question that would determine his fate quite simply and clearly: “I am” (could there be an echo here of Exodus 3:14, “I AM WHO I AM”?). Jesus then explains more closely, basing himself on Psalm 110:1 and Daniel 7:13, how Messiahship and sonship are to be understood. Matthew has Jesus answer more indirectly: “You have said so. But I tell you...” (26:64). Jesus does not contradict Caiaphas, but in response to the high priest’s formulation he explains how he himself wants his mission to be understood—using words from Scripture.
Luke, finally, presents two distinct questions (22:67, 70). In response to the Sanhedrin’s challenge: “If you are the Christ, tell us”, the Lord speaks enigmatically, neither openly agreeing nor explicitly denying it. This is followed by his own confession, combining Psalm 110 and Daniel 7, and then—after the Sanhedrin’s insistent question: “Are you the Son of God, then?” he answers: “You say that I am.”
From all this we may conclude that Jesus accepted the title Messiah, with all the meanings accruing to it from the tradition, but at the same time he qualified it in a way that could only lead to a guilty verdict, which he could have avoided either by rejecting it or by proposing a milder form of Messianism.
As the events of the Jewish War show, there were certain circles within the Sanhedrin that would have favored the liberation of Israel through political and military means. But the way in which Jesus presented his claim seemed to them clearly unsuited to the effective advancement of their cause. So the status quo was preferable, since Rome at least respected the religious foundations of Israel, with the result that the survival of Temple and nation could be considered more or less secure.
Jesus left no room for political or military interpretations of the Messiah’s activity. No, the Messiah—he himself—will come as the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven. Objectively this is quite close to what we find in John’s account when Jesus says: “My kingship is not of this world” (18:36). He claims to sit at the right hand of the Power, that is to say, to come from God in the manner of Daniel’s Son of Man, in order to establish God’s definitive kingdom.
This must have struck the members of the Sanhedrin as politically absurd and theologically unacceptable, for it meant that Jesus was claiming to be close to the “Power”, to participate in God’s own nature, and this would have been understood as blasphemy. However, Jesus had merely pieced a few scriptural quotations together and had expressed his mission “according to the Scriptures”, in language drawn from the Scriptures themselves. But to the members of the Sanhedrin, the application of the noble words of Scripture to Jesus evidently appeared as an intolerable attack on God’s otherness, on his uniqueness.
In any event, as far as the high priest and the members of the assembly were concerned, the evidence for blasphemy was supplied by Jesus’ answer, at which Caiaphas “tore his robes, and said: ‘He has uttered blasphemy’ ” (Mt 26:65):
59 The chief priests and the entire Sanhedrin kept trying to obtain false testimony against Jesus in order to put him to death,
60 but they found none, though many false witnesses came forward. Finally two came forward
61 who stated, "This man said, 'I can destroy the temple of God and within three days rebuild it.'"
62 The high priest rose and addressed him, "Have you no answer? What are these men testifying against you?"
63 But Jesus was silent. Then the high priest said to him, "I order you to tell us under oath before the living God whether you are the Messiah, the Son of God."
64 Jesus said to him in reply, "You have said so. But I tell you: From now on you will see 'the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power' and 'coming on the clouds of heaven.'"
65 Then the high priest tore his robes and said, "He has blasphemed! What further need have we of witnesses? You have now heard the blasphemy;
66 what is your opinion?" They said in reply, "He deserves to die!"
“The tearing of the high priest’s garment does not occur through anger; rather, it is the action prescribed for the officiating judge as a sign of outrage upon hearing a blasphemy” (Gnilka, Matthäusevangelium II, p. 429). There now erupts over Jesus, who had prophesied his coming in glory, the brutal mockery of those who know they are in a position of strength: they make him feel their power, their utter contempt. He whom they had feared only days before was now in their hands. The cowardly conformism of weak souls feels strong in attacking him who now seems utterly powerless.
It does not occur to them that by mocking and striking Jesus, they are causing the destiny of the Suffering Servant to be literally fulfilled in him (cf. Gnilka, Matthäusevangelium II, p. 430). Abasement and exaltation are mysteriously intertwined. As the one enduring blows, he is the Son of Man, coming in the cloud of concealment from God and establishing the kingdom of the Son of Man, the kingdom of the humanity that proceeds from God. “Hereafter you will see. . .”, Jesus had said in Matthew’s account (26:64), in a striking paradox. Hereafter—something new is beginning. All through history, people look upon the disfigured face of Jesus, and there they recognize the glory of God.
While this is happening, Peter insists for the third time that he has nothing to do with Jesus:
66 While Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the high priest's maids came along.
67 Seeing Peter warming himself, she looked intently at him and said, "You too were with the Nazarene, Jesus."
68 But he denied it saying, "I neither know nor understand what you are talking about." So he went out into the outer court. [Then the cock crowed.]
69 The maid saw him and began again to say to the bystanders, "This man is one of them."
70 Once again he denied it. A little later the bystanders said to Peter once more, "Surely you are one of them; for you too are a Galilean."
71 He began to curse and to swear, "I do not know this man about whom you are talking."
72 And immediately a cock crowed a second time. Then Peter remembered the word that Jesus had said to him, "Before the cock crows twice you will deny me three times." He broke down and wept.
The crowing of the cock was regarded as a sign of the end of the night. It opened the day. For Peter, too, cockcrow marked the end of the night of the soul, into which he had sunk. What Jesus had said about his denial before the cock crowed suddenly came back to him—in all its terrifying truth. Luke adds the detail that at this moment the chained and condemned Jesus is led off, to be brought before Pilate’s court. Jesus and Peter encounter one another. Jesus’ gaze meets the eyes and the soul of the unfaithful disciple. And Peter “went out and wept bitterly” (Lk 22:62).
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| Judas making a bargain with the priests, depicted by Duccio di Buoninsegna, early 14th century. |
2 and the chief priests and the scribes were seeking a way to put him to death, for they were afraid of the people.
3 Then Satan entered into Judas, the one surnamed Iscariot, who was counted among the Twelve,
4 and he went to the chief priests and temple guards to discuss a plan for handing him over to them.
5 They were pleased and agreed to pay him money.
6 He accepted their offer and sought a favorable opportunity to hand him over to them in the absence of a crowd.
comments by Benedict XVI (General Audience 18 October 2006):
Today, concluding our walk through the portrait gallery of the Apostles called directly by Jesus during his earthly life, we cannot fail to mention the one who has always been named last in the list of the Twelve: Judas Iscariot. We want to associate him with the person who is later elected to substitute him, Matthias.
Already the very name of Judas raises among Christians an instinctive reaction of criticism and condemnation.
The meaning of the name "Judas" is controversial: the more common explanation considers him as a "man from Kerioth", referring to his village of origin situated near Hebron and mentioned twice in Sacred Scripture (cf. Gn 15: 25; Am 2: 2). Others interpret it as a variant of the term "hired assassin", as if to allude to a warrior armed with a dagger, in Latin, sica.
Lastly, there are those who see in the label a simple inscription of a Hebrew-Aramaic root meaning: "the one who is to hand him over". This designation is found twice in the Gospel: after Peter's confession of faith (cf. Jn 6: 71), and then in the course of the anointing at Bethany (cf. Jn 12: 4).
Another passage shows that the betrayal was underway, saying: "he who betrayed him"; and also during the Last Supper, after the announcement of the betrayal (cf. Mt 26: 25), and then at the moment of Jesus' arrest (cf. Mt 26: 46, 48; Jn 18: 2, 5). Rather, the lists of the Twelve recalls the fact of the betrayal as already fulfilled: "Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him", says Mark (3: 19); Matthew (10: 4) and Luke (6: 16) have equivalent formulas.
The betrayal itself happens in two moments: before all, in the planning, when Judas agreed with Jesus' enemies to 30 pieces of silver (cf. Mt 26: 14-16), and then, in its execution, with the kiss given to the Master in Gethsemane (cf. Mt 26: 46-50).
In any case, the Evangelists insist on the status as an Apostle that Judas held in all regards: he is repeatedly called "one of the twelve" (Mt 26: 14, 47; Mk 14: 10, 20; Jn 6: 71) or "of the number of the twelve" (Lk 22: 3).
Moreover, on two occasions, Jesus, addressing the Apostles and speaking precisely of Judas, indicates him as "one of you" (Mt 26: 21; Mk 14: 18; Jn 6: 70; 13: 21). And Peter will say of Judas that "he was numbered among us and allotted his share in this ministry" (Acts 1: 17).
He is therefore a figure belonging to the group of those whom Jesus had chosen as strict companions and collaborators. This brings with it two questions in the attempt to provide an explanation for what happened.
The first consists in asking how is it that Jesus had chosen this man and trusted him. In fact, although Judas is the group's bursar (cf Jn. 12: 6b; 13: 29a), in reality he is called a "thief" (Jn 12: 6a).
The mystery of the choice remains, all the more since Jesus pronounces a very severe judgement on him: "Woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed!" (Mt 26: 24).
What is more, it darkens the mystery around his eternal fate, knowing that Judas "repented and brought back the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying, "I have sinned in betraying innocent blood'" (Mt 27: 3-4). Even though he went to hang himself (cf. Mt 27: 5), it is not up to us to judge his gesture, substituting ourselves for the infinitely merciful and just God.
A second question deals with the motive of Judas' behaviour: why does he betray Jesus? The question raises several theories. Some refer to the fact of his greed for money; others hold to an explanation of a messianic order: Judas would have been disappointed at seeing that Jesus did not fit into his programme for the political-militaristic liberation of his own nation.
In fact, the Gospel texts insist on another aspect: John expressly says that "the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him" (Jn 13: 2). Analogously, Luke writes: "Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was of the number of the twelve" (Lk 22: 3).
In this way, one moves beyond historical motivations and explanations based on the personal responsibility of Judas, who shamefully ceded to a temptation of the Evil One.
The betrayal of Judas remains, in any case, a mystery. Jesus treated him as a friend (cf. Mt 26: 50); however, in his invitations to follow him along the way of the beatitudes, he does not force his will or protect it from the temptations of Satan, respecting human freedom.
In effect, the possibilities to pervert the human heart are truly many. The only way to prevent it consists in not cultivating an individualistic, autonomous vision of things, but on the contrary, by putting oneself always on the side of Jesus, assuming his point of view. We must daily seek to build full communion with him.
Let us remember that Peter also wanted to oppose him and what awaited him at Jerusalem, but he received a very strong reproval: "You are not on the side of God, but of men" (Mk 8: 33)!
After his fall Peter repented and found pardon and grace. Judas also repented, but his repentance degenerated into desperation and thus became self-destructive.
For us it is an invitation to always remember what St Benedict says at the end of the fundamental Chapter Five of his "Rule": "Never despair of God's mercy". In fact, God "is greater than our hearts", as St John says (I Jn 3: 20).
Let us remember two things. The first: Jesus respects our freedom. The second: Jesus awaits our openness to repentance and conversion; he is rich in mercy and forgiveness.
Besides, when we think of the negative role Judas played we must consider it according to the lofty ways in which God leads events. His betrayal led to the death of Jesus, who transformed this tremendous torment into a space of salvific love by consigning himself to the Father (cf. Gal 2: 20; Eph 5: 2, 25).
The word "to betray" is the version of a Greek word that means "to consign". Sometimes the subject is even God in person: it was he who for love "consigned" Jesus for all of us (Rm 8: 32). In his mysterious salvific plan, God assumes Judas' inexcusable gesture as the occasion for the total gift of the Son for the redemption of the world.
John does not offer any psychological interpretation of Judas’ conduct. The only clue he gives is a hint that Judas had helped himself to the contents of the disciples’ money box, of which he had charge (12:6). In the context of chapter 13, the evangelist merely says laconically: “Then after the morsel, Satan entered into him” (13:27).
For John, what happened to Judas is beyond psychological explanation. He has come under the dominion of another. Anyone who breaks off friendship with Jesus, casting off his “easy yoke”, does not attain liberty, does not become free, but succumbs to other powers. To put it another way, he betrays this friendship because he is in the grip of another power to which he has opened himself.
True, the light shed by Jesus into Judas’ soul was not completely extinguished. He does take a step toward conversion: “I have sinned”, he says to those who commissioned him. He tries to save Jesus, and he gives the money back (Mt 27:3-5). Everything pure and great that he had received from Jesus remained inscribed on his soul—he could not forget it.
His second tragedy—after the betrayal—is that he can no longer believe in forgiveness. His remorse turns into despair. Now he sees only himself and his darkness; he no longer sees the light of Jesus, which can illumine and overcome the darkness. He shows us the wrong type of remorse: the type that is unable to hope, that sees only its own darkness, the type that is destructive and in no way authentic. Genuine remorse is marked by the certainty of hope born of faith in the superior power of the light that was made flesh in Jesus.
John concludes the passage about Judas with these dramatic words: “After receiving the morsel, he immediately went out; and it was night” (13:30). Judas goes out—in a deeper sense. He goes into the night; he moves out of light into darkness: the “power of darkness” has taken hold of him (cf. Jn 3:19; Lk 22:53).
In the case of Judas, we encountered the perennial danger that even those “who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit” (Heb 6:4) can perish spiritually through a series of seemingly small infidelities, ultimately passing from the light into the night, where they are no longer capable of conversion.
In conclusion, we want to remember he who, after Easter, was elected in place of the betrayer. In the Church of Jerusalem two were proposed to the community, and then lots were cast for their names: "Joseph called Barsabbas, who was surnamed Justus, and Matthias" (Acts 1: 23).
Precisely the latter was chosen, hence, "he was enrolled with the eleven apostles" (Acts 1: 26). We know nothing else about him, if not that he had been a witness to all Jesus' earthly events (cf. Acts 1: 21-22), remaining faithful to him to the end. To the greatness of his fidelity was later added the divine call to take the place of Judas, almost compensating for his betrayal.
We draw from this a final lesson: while there is no lack of unworthy and traitorous Christians in the Church, it is up to each of us to counterbalance the evil done by them with our clear witness to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.
[The ritual washing of feet
The In Roman Catholic Church, the ritual washing of feet is now associated with the Mass of the Lord's Supper, which celebrates in a special way the Last Supper of Jesus, before which he washed the feet of his twelve apostles. Christian denominations that observe foot washing do so on the basis of the authoritative example and command of Jesus as found in the Gospel of John 13:1–15:
1 Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end.
2 The devil had already induced Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot, to hand him over. So, during supper,
3 fully aware that the Father had put everything into his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God,
4 he rose from supper and took off his outer garments. He took a towel and tied it around his waist.
5 Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and dry them with the towel around his waist.
6 He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Master, are you going to wash my feet?"
7 Jesus answered and said to him, "What I am doing, you do not understand now, but you will understand later."
8 Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." Jesus answered him, "Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me."
9 Simon Peter said to him, "Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well."
10 Jesus said to him, "Whoever has bathed 6 has no need except to have his feet washed, for he is clean all over; so you are clean, but not all."
11 For he knew who would betray him; for this reason, he said, "Not all of you are clean."
12 So when he had washed their feet (and) put his garments back on and reclined at table again, he said to them, "Do you realize what I have done for you?
13 You call me 'teacher' and 'master,' and rightly so, for indeed I am.
14 If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another's feet.
15 I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.
We find two uniquely Johannine elements in the account of Jesus’ final evening with his disciples before the Passion. First, John tells us that Jesus administered the menial service of washing the disciples’ feet. In this context, he also recounts the prophecies of Judas’ betrayal and Peter’s denial. The second element consists of Jesus’ farewell discourse, culminating in the high-priestly prayer.
Jesus “rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him” (Jn 13:4-5). Jesus performs for his disciples the service of a slave, he “emptied himself” (Phil 2:7).
Christ moves in the opposite direction, coming down from his divinity into humanity, taking the form of a servant and becoming obedient even to death on a cross (cf. 2:7-8)—all this is rendered visible in a single gesture. Jesus represents the whole of his saving ministry in one symbolic act.
When we read in the Book of Revelation the paradoxical statement that the redeemed have “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev 7:14), the meaning is that Jesus’ love “to the end” is what cleanses us, washes us. The gesture of washing feet expresses precisely this: it is the servant-love of Jesus that draws us out of our pride and makes us fit for God, makes us “clean”.
The gesture of washing feet expresses precisely this: it is the servant-love of Jesus that draws us out of our pride and makes us fit for God, makes us “clean”.
In Mark’s Gospel we see the radical transformation that Jesus brought to the concept of purity before God: it is not ritual actions that make us pure. Purity and impurity arise within man’s heart and depend on the condition of his heart (Mk 7:14-23). God himself decided that “the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. . . . He made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith” (15:5-11). Faith cleanses the heart. It is the result of God’s initiative toward man. It is not simply a choice that men make for themselves. Faith comes about because men are touched deep within by God’s Spirit, who opens and purifies their hearts.
“You are clean”, says Jesus to his disciples. The gift of purity is an act of God. Man cannot make himself fit for God, whatever systems of purification he may follow. “You are clean”—in Jesus’ wonderfully simple statement, the grandeur of the mystery of Christ is somehow encapsulated. It is the God who comes down to us who makes us clean. Purity is a gift. et an objection springs to mind. A few verses later, Jesus says: “If I, then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (Jn 13:14-15).
The connection of the purified heart with the washing of the feet becomes visible in a surprising way: only by letting ourselves be repeatedly cleansed, “made pure”, by the Lord himself can we learn to act as he did, in union with him.
The account of the washing of the feet presents us with two different human responses to this gift, exemplified by Judas and Peter. Immediately after the exhortation to follow his example, Jesus begins to speak of Judas. John tells us in this regard that Jesus was troubled in spirit and testified: “Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me” (13:21).
Jesus must experience the incomprehension and the infidelity even of those within his innermost circle of friends and, in this way, “fulfill the Scripture”. John 13:18 brings us onto the right track. Here Jesus says, “The Scripture must be fulfilled: ‘He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me’ ” (cf. Ps 41:9; Ps 55:13).He is revealed as the true subject of the Psalms, the “David” from whom they come and through whom they acquire meaning.
Judas’ betrayal was not the last breach of fidelity that Jesus would suffer. “Even my bosom friend, in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me” (Ps 41:9). The breach of friendship extends into the sacramental community of the Church, where people continue to take “his bread” and to betray him. At this hour, Jesus took upon himself the betrayal of all ages, the pain caused by betrayal in every era, and he endured the anguish of history to the bitter end.
In Peter we encounter another danger, that of a fall which is not definitive and which can therefore be healed through conversion. John 13 recounts two exchanges between Jesus and Peter, in which two aspects of this danger become visible. Initially, Peter does not want to have his feet washed by Jesus "You shall never wash my feet” (Jn 13:8). This goes against his understanding of the relationship between master and disciple and against his image of the Messiah, whom he recognizes in Jesus. During the washing of the feet, in the atmosphere of farewell that pervades the scene, Peter asks his master quite openly: “Lord, where are you going?” And again he receives a cryptic answer: “Where I am going you cannot follow me now; but you shall follow afterward” (13:36). Peter understands that Jesus is speaking of his imminent death, and he now wants to emphasize his radical fidelity even unto death: “Why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you” (13:37). Indeed, shortly afterward on the Mount of Olives, he rushes in with his sword, ready to put his intention into effect. But he must learn that even martyrdom is no heroic achievement: rather, it is a grace to be able to suffer for Jesus. He must bid farewell to the heroism of personal deeds and learn the humility of the disciple. His desire to rush in—his heroism—leads to his denial. In order to secure his place by the fire in the forecourt of the high priest’s palace, and in order to keep abreast of every development in Jesus’ destiny as it happens, he claims not to know him. His heroism falls to pieces in a small-minded tactic. He must learn to await his hour. He must learn how to wait, how to persevere. He must learn the way of the disciple in order to be led, when his hour comes, to the place where he does not want to go (cf. Jn 21:18) and to receive the grace of martyrdom.
The two exchanges are essentially about the same thing: not telling God what to do, but learning to accept him as he reveals himself to us; not seeking to exalt ourselves to God’s level, but in humble service letting ourselves be slowly refashioned into God’s true image.
After the Lord has explained to Peter the necessity of having his feet washed, Peter answers: if this be the case, then Jesus should wash not only his feet, but his hands and his head as well. Jesus’ answer is once again enigmatic: “He who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet” (13:10). What does this mean?
Jesus evidently takes for granted that before coming to the meal, the disciples have already had a complete bath, so that at table it is only their feet that need to be washed. It is clear that John sees a deeper symbolic meaning in these words, which is not easy to recognize. the washing of feet acquires another more concrete meaning, over and above its fundamental symbolism, one that points to the practicalities of life in the early Church. What is it? The complete bath that was taken for granted can only mean Baptism, by which man is immersed into Christ once and for all, acquiring his new identity as one who dwells in Christ. This fundamental event, by which we become Christians not through our own doing but through the action of the Lord in his Church, cannot be repeated.
Yet in the life of Christians—for table fellowship with the Lord—it constantly requires completion: “washing of feet”. What is this? There is no single undisputed answer. Yet it seems to me that the First Letter of John points us in the right direction and shows us what is meant. There we read: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1:8-10). Since even the baptized remain sinners, they need confession of sins, “which cleanses us from all unrighteousness”.
The point is this: guilt must not be allowed to fester in the silence of the soul, poisoning it from within. It needs to be confessed. Through confession, we bring it into the light, we place it within Christ’s purifying love (cf. Jn 3:20-21). In confession, the Lord washes our soiled feet over and over again and prepares us for table fellowship with him.
Note: "Johannine literature" is the collection of New Testament works that are attached by tradition to the person of John the Apostle or to the Johannine community.
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Last Supper (Luke 22:7–23)
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| The last Supper by Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1896) |
8 he sent out Peter and John, instructing them, "Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover."
9 They asked him, "Where do you want us to make the preparations?"
10 And he answered them, "When you go into the city, a man will meet you carrying a jar of water. Follow him into the house that he enters
11 and say to the master of the house, 'The teacher says to you, "Where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?"'
12 He will show you a large upper room that is furnished. Make the preparations there."
13 Then they went off and found everything exactly as he had told them, and there they prepared the Passover.
14 When the hour came, he took his place at table with the apostles.
15 He said to them, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer,
16 for, I tell you, I shall not eat it (again) until there is fulfillment in the kingdom of God."
17 Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and said, "Take this and share it among yourselves;
18 for I tell you (that) from this time on I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes."
19 Then he took the bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me."
20 And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you.
21 "And yet behold, the hand of the one who is to betray me is with me on the table;
22 for the Son of Man indeed goes as it has been determined; but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed."
23 And they began to debate among themselves who among them would do such a deed.
Luke clearly identifies this last supper of Jesus with the apostles as a Passover meal that commemorated the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Jesus reinterprets the significance of the Passover by setting it in the context of the kingdom of God (Luke 22:16). The "deliverance" associated with the Passover finds its new meaning in the blood that will be shed (Luke 22:20).
The Eucharist is reenacted in accordance with Jesus' instruction at the Last Supper, as recorded in several books of the New Testament, that his followers do in remembrance of him as when he gave his disciples bread, saying, "This is my body", and gave them wine saying, "This is my blood."
The Catholic Church teaches that once consecrated in the Eucharist, the elements cease to be bread and wine and actually become the body and blood of Christ, each of which is accompanied by the other and by Christ's soul and divinity. The empirical appearance and physical properties are not changed, but for Catholics, the reality is. The consecration of the bread (known as the host) and wine represents the separation of Jesus' body from his blood at Calvary. However, since he has risen, the Church teaches that his body and blood can no longer be truly separated. Where one is, the other must be. Therefore, although the priest (or extraordinary minister of Holy Communion) says, "The body of Christ", when administering the host, and, "The blood of Christ", when presenting the chalice, the communicant who receives either one receives Christ, whole and entire.
Regarding the vessel used by Christ at the Last Supper and according to one tradition, Saint Peter passed it on to his successors (the Popes) until Sixtus II in 258, when Christians were being persecuted by Emperor Valerian, and the Romans demanded that relics be turned over to the government. Pope Sixtus gave the cup to his deacon, Saint Lawrence, who passed it to a Spanish soldier, Proselius, with instructions to take it to safety in Lawrence's home country of Spain. According to legend, the monastery of San Juan de la Peña, located at the south-west of Jaca, in the province of Huesca, Spain, protected the chalice of the Last Supper from the Islamic invaders of the Iberian Peninsula. The continuing tradition of the association of the Holy Chalice with Spain is that it was safeguarded by a series of Spanish monarchs, including King Alfuns de Castella in 1200. At one point when he needed money for a military campaign, Alfonso borrowed from the Cathedral of Valencia, using the Chalice as collateral. When he defaulted on the loan, the relic became the property of the Church (the present Chalice of Valencia). This Chalice was the official papal chalice for many popes, and has been used by many others. In July 2006, at the closing Mass of the 5th World Meeting of Families in Valencia, Pope Benedict XVI also celebrated with the Holy Chalice, saying "accipiens et hunc praeclarum Calicem" (this most famous chalice), words in the Roman Canon said to have been used for the first popes until 4th century in Rome, and supporting in this way the tradition of the Holy Chalice of Valencia. The Spanish archaeologist Antonio Beltrán says the artifact is a 1st-century Middle Eastern stone vessel, possibly from Antioch, Syria (now Turkey); its history can be traced to the 11th century, and it now rests atop an ornate stem and base, made in the Medieval era of alabaster, gold, and gemstones.
Writing in the second century, St. Justin Martyr explains the celebration of the Eucharist and Christian belief in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist:
"Bread and a chalice containing wine mixed with water are presented to the one presiding over the brethren. He takes them and offers praise and glory to the Father of all, through the name of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and he recites lengthy prayers of thanksgiving to God. . . . And when he who presides has celebrated the Eucharist, they whom we call deacons permit each one to partake. . . . We call this food the Eucharist, of which only he can partake who has acknowledged the truth of our teachings, who has been cleansed by baptism for the remission of his sins . . . and who regulates his life upon the principles laid down by Christ. Not as ordinary bread or as ordinary drink do we partake of them, but just as, through the word of God, our savior Jesus Christ became incarnate and took upon himself flesh and blood for our salvation, so, we have been taught, the food which has been made the Eucharist by the prayer of his word, and which nourishes our flesh and blood by assimilation, is both the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. The Apostles in their memoirs, which are called Gospels, have handed down what Jesus ordered them to do; that he took bread and, after giving thanks, said: “Do this in remembrance of me; this is my body.” In like manner, he took also the chalice, gave thanks, and said: “This is my blood.” [Luke 22:19; Matt 26:28; Mark 14:24]"
comments by Benedict XVI (Holy Thursday, 21 April 2011):
“I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk 22:15). With these words Jesus began the celebration of his final meal and the institution of the Holy Eucharist. Jesus approached that hour with eager desire. In his heart he awaited the moment when he would give himself to his own under the appearance of bread and wine. He awaited that moment which would in some sense be the true messianic wedding feast: when he would transform the gifts of this world and become one with his own, so as to transform them and thus inaugurate the transformation of the world. In this eager desire of Jesus we can recognize the desire of God himself – his expectant love for mankind, for his creation. A love which awaits the moment of union, a love which wants to draw mankind to itself and thereby fulfil the desire of all creation, for creation eagerly awaits the revelation of the children of God (cf. Rom 8:19). Jesus desires us, he awaits us. But what about ourselves? Do we really desire him? Are we anxious to meet him? Do we desire to encounter him, to become one with him, to receive the gifts he offers us in the Holy Eucharist? Or are we indifferent, distracted, busy about other things? From Jesus’ banquet parables we realize that he knows all about empty places at table, invitations refused, lack of interest in him and his closeness. For us, the empty places at the table of the Lord’s wedding feast, whether excusable or not, are no longer a parable but a reality, in those very countries to which he had revealed his closeness in a special way. Jesus also knew about guests who come to the banquet without being robed in the wedding garment – they come not to rejoice in his presence but merely out of habit, since their hearts are elsewhere. In one of his homilies Saint Gregory the Great asks: Who are these people who enter without the wedding garment? What is this garment and how does one acquire it? He replies that those who are invited and enter do in some way have faith. It is faith which opens the door to them. But they lack the wedding garment of love. Those who do not live their faith as love are not ready for the banquet and are cast out. Eucharistic communion requires faith, but faith requires love; otherwise, even as faith, it is dead.
From all four Gospels we know that Jesus’ final meal before his passion was also a teaching moment. Once again, Jesus urgently set forth the heart of his message. Word and sacrament, message and gift are inseparably linked. Yet at his final meal, more than anything else, Jesus prayed. Matthew, Mark and Luke use two words in describing Jesus’ prayer at the culmination of the meal: “eucharístesas” and “eulógesas” – the verbs “to give thanks” and “to bless”. The upward movement of thanking and the downward movement of blessing go together. The words of transubstantiation are part of this prayer of Jesus. They are themselves words of prayer. Jesus turns his suffering into prayer, into an offering to the Father for the sake of mankind. This transformation of his suffering into love has the power to transform the gifts in which he now gives himself. He gives those gifts to us, so that we, and our world, may be transformed. The ultimate purpose of Eucharistic transformation is our own transformation in communion with Christ. The Eucharist is directed to the new man, the new world, which can only come about from God, through the ministry of God’s Servant.
From Luke, and especially from John, we know that Jesus, during the Last Supper, also prayed to the Father – prayers which also contain a plea to his disciples of that time and of all times. Here I would simply like to take one of these which, as John tells us, Jesus repeated four times in his Priestly Prayer. How deeply it must have concerned him! It remains his constant prayer to the Father on our behalf: the prayer for unity. Jesus explicitly states that this prayer is not meant simply for the disciples then present, but for all who would believe in him (cf. Jn 17:20). He prays that all may be one “as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, so that the world may believe” (Jn 17:21). Christian unity can exist only if Christians are deeply united to him, to Jesus. Faith and love for Jesus, faith in his being one with the Father and openness to becoming one with him, are essential. This unity, then, is not something purely interior or mystical. It must become visible, so visible as to prove before the world that Jesus was sent by the Father. Consequently, Jesus’ prayer has an underlying Eucharistic meaning which Paul clearly brings out in the First Letter to the Corinthians: “The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:16ff.). With the Eucharist, the Church is born. All of us eat the one bread and receive the one body of the Lord; this means that he opens each of us up to something above and beyond us. He makes all of us one. The Eucharist is the mystery of the profound closeness and communion of each individual with the Lord and, at the same time, of visible union between all. The Eucharist is the sacrament of unity. It reaches the very mystery of the Trinity and thus creates visible unity. Let me say it again: it is an extremely personal encounter with the Lord and yet never simply an act of individual piety. Of necessity, we celebrate it together. In each community the Lord is totally present. Yet in all the communities he is but one. Hence the words “una cum Papa nostro et cum episcopo nostro” are a requisite part of the Church’s Eucharistic Prayer. These words are not an addendum of sorts, but a necessary expression of what the Eucharist really is. Furthermore, we mention the Pope and the Bishop by name: unity is something utterly concrete, it has names. In this way unity becomes visible; it becomes a sign for the world and a concrete criterion for ourselves.
“I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you”. Lord, you desire us, you desire me. You eagerly desire to share yourself with us in the Holy Eucharist, to be one with us. Lord, awaken in us the desire for you. Strengthen us in unity with you and with one another. Grant unity to your Church, so that the world may believe. Amen.
comments by Edward Sri, professor of theology and Scripture:
The blood of Jesus is poured forth as an expiatory sacrifice that effects the remission of sins (see Jer 31:31-34). Second, Jesus offers his life to the Father as a vicarious sacrifice; his suffering is not for his own guilt, but for those he represents and has come to save (see Isa 53:4-5, 11-12). And third, Jesus’ death is a covenant sacrifice that establishes a new foundation on which the Father and the human family can be reunited in fellowship and love (see Exod 24:4-8). According to Matthew, the sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’ death, so prevalent in the New Testament, originates with Jesus himself. It is Jesus’ words at the Last Supper that give us eyes to see his death not simply as a degrading execution but as the definitive sacrifice of redemption.
comments by Dr. Mary Healy, professor of Scripture at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit:
Jesus' words over the bread and cup reveal that his death on the cross is an atoning sacrifice, fulfilling the Passover and all the sacrifices of the old covenant. He himself is both the sacrifice and the high priest who offers it (Heb 2:17; 4:14). At the same time, according to Luke and Paul, Jesus transforms his last supper into a memorial that will make his sacrifice present in the Church until the end of time (Luke 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24-25). He instructs his apostles to continue to offer his once-for-all sacrifice and distribute it to the people of God as he had to them. Catholic tradition thus recognizes the Last Supper as the moment when Jesus ordains his apostles as priests of the new covenant, who share in a unique way in his ministry as high priest (Catechism, 1380).
The Fathers of the Church often spoke of the unifying power of the Eucharist, all efficacious power going far beyond the symbolic value of a loaf shared by friends. St John Chrysostom writes, "For what is the bread? It is the body of Christ. And what do those who receive it become? The Body of Christ-not many bodies but one body. For as bread is completely one, though made up of many grains of wheat, and these, albeit unseen, remain nonetheless present, in such a way that their difference is not apparent since they have been made a perfect whole, so too are we mutually joined to one another and together united with Christ" (a. Homilies on first Corinthians 24.2, cited in John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 23)
But Jesus' words reveal that he himself is the paschal Lamb whose blood will save the many from death. Just as the Passover was not complete without eating the paschal lamb, Jesus' sacrifice is complete only when his disciples consume his body and blood. By inviting them to share the one bread that is his body, Jesus is drawing them into a union with himself and one another that is far deeper than any earthly table fellowship.
This is my blood of the covenant. For the Jews, it was forbidden unthinkable to drink blood (Gen 9:4; Deut 12:16). The Old Testament teaches that blood is sacred because it is the seat of life: "the life of all flesh is in its blood" (Lev 17: 14 JB). For the same reason, it is blood that makes atonement for sin (Lev 17:11), since nothing could be offered to God more valuable than the blood of a living creature. But how could Jesus ask his disciples to do what was forbidden in the law? To drink the blood of animals would be demeaning. But to drink the blood of the Son of God is to be elevated to a share in his own divine life.
The "blood of the covenant" was the phrase used at the moment when God established his t covenant with Israel at Sinai at the climax of the exodus (Exod 24:1-8). Nearly all ancient covenants were sealed with blood, since a covenant was the forging of a kinship bond and kinship is constituted by blood. The Sinai covenant was ratified by the blood of sacrificed bulls sprinkled on the altar, representing God, and on the people. That covenant too was consummated in a sacred meal (Exod 24:9-11) . Jesus' declaration that now his blood is the blood of the covenant means that the covenant is now being definitively renewed, just as Jeremiah had prophesied (Jer 31:31-32). Now there is kinship bond between God and his people that can never be broken
That Jesus' blood will be shed or poured out signifies a violent death. The verb is actually in the present tense ("is shed") because Jesus' words are not merely a prophecy but a window into the inner reality of his passion. His supreme gift of self, offered on the cross, is now made available to all. That it will be shed for many means that Jesus' death is more than a martyrdom; it is an efficacious sacrifice, providing the total forgiveness of sin that was only foreshadowed in the animal sacrifices of the old covenant. "For many" also recalls Isaiah's prophecy of the servant who through his suffering would "justify many" and "take away the sins of many" (Isa 53: 11-12). "Many" does not mean a limited number, but is a Semitic way of expressing a vast multitude: Jesus "died for all"
(2 Cor 5:14).
At the time Mark wrote his Gospel, the Eucharist was already the center of the early Church's worship. Mark's first audience would have read his account in light of their own celebrations of "the breaking of the bread" (Acts 2:42), "the Lord's supper" (1 Cor 11 :20). Although Mark does not record Jesus' injunction to "Do this in memory of me" (Luke 22: 19; 1 Cor 11 :24-25), the liturgy was already a living fulfillment of that word the Church has always understood the eucharistic meal as not only a making present of the past (the passion) but also a foretaste of the future (the full coming of God's kingdom).
commentary by Pablo T. Gadenz, Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Trenton (NJ) :
His comment —I have eagerly desired to eat (literally, “with desire I have desired to eat,” reflecting an underlying Hebrew expression)—is another indication that he acts with intention. The significance of what he says and does here can be examined by focusing on three interrelated key words.
l. Passover: This Passover night is different from all others. The Jewish Passover is a memorial of God’s liberation of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt through the exodus (Exod 12:14; 13:3). Those who observe the annual Passover feast do not simply recall the exodus as a past event but, in a sense, relive it at the present time and thus experience the Lord’s saving power (see Exod 13:8).6 However, at this Passover, Jesus institutes his memorial, saying: in memory of me (or “in remembrance of me,” 1 Cor 11:24-25; Greek anamnesis). Likewise, he is about to accomplish his “exodus” (Luke 9:31)—his death and resurrection—which will bring to those who believe in him a different kind of liberation: forgiveness of their sins (24:47). Thus his apostles who observe the new Passover memorial in obedience to his command will experience the saving power of this new exodus.
In instituting this new Passover, which was prefigured at the multiplication of the loaves with its similar actions (9:16), Jesus took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to the apostles. His accompanying words provide the interpretation. The bread is not the expected “bread of affliction” of the exodus (Deut 16:3) but becomes his very self: This is my body. In this new Passover, it will be Jesus’ body, not that of the lamb, that will be given in sacrifice. Like the sacrifice of the lamb
(Exod 12:13, 23, 27), this will be done for you, he tells the apostles—in other words, on their behalf and for their benefit. Moreover, this body is eaten (see Matt 26:26), as was the lamb (Exod 12:8-1 i). Bread that has become the Eucharist through these words is not merely a symbol. Just as the lamb is real, so the Eucharist is really his body, as indeed Christians have understood from the beginning.
Likewise, Jesus’ words provide the interpretation of the cup taken after supper (1 Cor 11:25), the third of the four cups of wine in the Passover meal, the “cup of blessing” (1 Cor 1o:16): the wine in the cup becomes my blood (see Matt 26:28; Mark 14:24). By drinking the cup, his apostles thus have communion in his blood (1 Cor 10:16). Jesus is referring to his imminent, violent death: his blood will be shed like “the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world” (Luke 11:50 [emphasis added]). However, “he transforms his violent death into a free act of self-giving for others and to others.” In other words, as he already indicated in speaking of his body, his death becomes a sacrifice, offered for you—he again tells his apostles—in other words, on their behalf, for the purpose of atonement. Hence, a better translation is that his blood is not just shed, but “poured out” (22:20 NIV; see Catechism 610). Indeed, the blood of the Passover lamb (see 2 Chron 30:15-16; 35:11) and of sacrifices in general (Deut 12:27) was poured out at the base of the altar (Lev 8:15) .
2. Kingdom: Prior to the two statements about his body and blood, Jesus announces in two statements (Luke 22:16, 18) that this is indeed his “last supper” because of his imminent death. After this meal, he will thus not eat the Passover meal nor drink its cups of wine until the time of fulfillment of the coming kingdom of God. With these words, Jesus looks ahead to his resurrection and entrance into kingly glory (24:26; Acts 2:32-33). After his resurrection, he will once again eat and drink with his disciples (Luke 24:30, 41-43; Acts 10:41), a sign of the kingdom banquet (Luke 13:29), where he will eat and drink with his apostles (see 22:30). Certainly the kingdom has already come among them in Jesus (11:20; 17:20-21), yet its future coming in power has not yet occurred. Thus, just as the Jewish Passover not only looked back to the exodus but also forward to God’s saving action in the future, so too whenever his disciples celebrate the Eucharist they will do so not only in memory of Jesus’ death but also in anticipation and as a foretaste of the kingdom banquet.
3. Covenant: Following the first Passover and the exodus, Moses at Mount Sinai had thrown the blood of sacrifices against the altar (Exod 24:6) when God established the covenant with the twelve tribes of Israel. He also "splashed it on the people, saying, This is the blood of the covenant" (Exod 24:8), before taking part in a sacred meal in which “they ate and drank” (Exod 24:11). Here, in the context of the Last Supper with the twelve apostles, Jesus’ reference to a covenant in his blood recalls this event. However, it also indicates something new. Indeed, if there is a new Passover and a new exodus, there will also be a “new covenant” (1 Cor 11:25), as Jeremiah had prophesied: “See, days are coming ... when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah” (Jer 31:31).
Moreover, under the Mosaic covenant, the bread of the presence (see comment on Luke 6:3-4) was offered (not just set out) each sabbath (Lev 24:7) by the Levitical priests as a kind of grain offering (see Lev 2). It was an unbloody sacrifice. These unleavened loaves were a “memorial” (anamnesis, Lev 24:7 LXX) of the covenant made at Sinai (Lev 24:8). Here, Jesus’ command to his apostles to do this in “memory” of him (Luke 22:19, same Greek word) means that the eucharistic bread that the apostles will offer will serve as a memorial that represents the New Covenant established by Jesus through his bloody sacrifice. Thus, the role of the apostles in the New Covenant was in a sense prefigured by that of the Levitical priests in the Mosaic covenant. Because of Jesus’ command, the Church understands the Last Supper as the institution of the Eucharist and also the institution of the New Covenant priesthood (Catechism 611).
comments by Francis Martin, president of Father Francis Martin Ministries (FFMM), commentary on the Gospel of John:
If the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church, the Eucharist is its beating heart, pumping Christ’s blood through the members of his body, the Church. If we are to grow in holiness and love, we must make the Eucharist the center of our lives, because in doing so we make Christ the center of our lives. If we receive Christ worthily in the Eucharist and worship him in Eucharistic adoration, he will fill us with his grace and enlarge our hearts to love and serve more perfectly.
Eucharistic worship and adoration does not detract from works of love. On the contrary, it is what enables us to do them in the first place. Consider these words of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta: “If we truly understand the Eucharist; if we make the Eucharist the central focus of our lives; if we feed our lives with the Eucharist, we will not find it difficult to discover Christ, to love him, and to serve him in the poor”.
Dispute about Greatness (Luke 22:24–30)
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| Francisco de Zurbarán - “Benjamin,“ “Simeon,“ “Levi,“ “Judah“ from the twelve Israeli tribes (1645) |
25 He said to them, "The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them and those in authority over them are addressed as 'Benefactors';
26 but among you it shall not be so. Rather, let the greatest among you be as the youngest, and the leader as the servant.
27 For who is greater: the one seated at table or the one who serves? Is it not the one seated at table? I am among you as the one who serves.
28 It is you who have stood by me in my trials;
29 and I confer a kingdom on you, just as my Father has conferred one on me,
30 that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom; and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
comments by Fr. George Corrigan, Catholic Priest (https://friarmusings.wordpress.com):
The focus of the “teaching” is for the disciples who do not yet fully comprehend who Jesus is or what is at stake on this Passover eve. Jesus’ warns them that even presence at the Lord’s table is no guarantee of fidelity to Jesus. What constitutes fidelity is to bear fruit in ministry and witness. Jesus understands his earthly life is coming to an end and thus the table scene is a last testament in which he admonishes and encourages the apostles to understand authority, leadership and mission in the light of Jesus’ ministry with them: as servant.
Yet, the callousness of the whole group of the Twelve is revealed as their argument about which of them could be guilty of betrayal evolves into a dispute about their greatness. This dispute occurs at a different place in the other Synoptics (Mark 10:42–45; Matt 20:25–28). Jesus tells them that the kingdom has completely different categories of greatness than the world has. He notes ironically that those who tyrannize over their subjects are called “Benefactors”: this was the case in Rome, Egypt, and other Gentile territories. The one who is great in the kingdom of God will be the one who serves in imitation of the Master himself. The Twelve will be given authority, however they will also be subject to temptation and testing. They can expect to share the fate of Jesus.
comments by Pope John Paul II (General Audience — November 4, 1987):
Let us run through again the themes of the reflections on Jesus the Son of Man, which at the same time reveal him as the true Son of God. "I and the Father are one" (Jn 10:30). We have seen that he referred to himself the divine name and attributes; he spoke of his divine pre-existence in union with the Father (and with the Holy Spirit, as we shall explain in a further series of reflections); he claimed for himself power over the law which Israel had received from God through Moses in the old covenant. (That claim was made especially in the Sermon on the Mount (cf. Mt 5); and together with this power, he claimed also the power to forgive sins (cf. Mk 2:1-12 and parallel passages; Lk 7:48; Jn 8:11), and to pronounce the final judgment on the consciences and works of all humanity (cf. Mt 25:31-46; Jn 5:27-29). Finally, he taught as one having authority and he called for faith in his word; he invited people to follow him even unto death, and promised eternal life as a reward. At this point we have at our disposal all the elements and all the reasons for affirming that Jesus Christ has revealed himself as the one who establishes God's kingdom in the history of humanity.
The revelation of God's kingdom had already been prepared in the Old Testament. It happened particularly in the second phase of the history of Israel as narrated in the words of the prophets and the psalms, following the exile and the other painful experiences of the Chosen People. We recall especially the songs of the Psalmists to God who is king of all the earth, who "reigns over the peoples" (Ps 47: 8-9); and the exultant recognition, "Your kingdom is a kingdom for all ages, and your dominion endures through all generations" (Ps 145:13). In his turn the prophet Daniel speaks of the kingdom of God "which shall never be destroyed...rather, it shall break in pieces all these kingdoms, and put an end to them, and it shall stand forever." This kingdom which the "God of heaven" will set up (i.e., the kingdom of heaven), will remain under the dominion of God himself and "shall never be delivered to another people" (cf. Dan 2:44).
Entering into this tradition and sharing this concept of the old covenant, Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed this kingdom from the beginning of his Messianic mission. "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand" (Mk 1:15). In this way he took up one of the constant motifs of Israel's expectation, but he gave a new direction to the eschatological hope which took shape in the final phase of the Old Testament. He did so by proclaiming that it had its initial fulfillment already here on earth, since God is the Lord of history. Certainly, his kingdom is projected toward a final fulfillment beyond time, but it begins to be realized already here on earth and in a certain sense it develops within history. In this perspective Jesus announced and revealed that the time of the ancient promises, expectations and hopes "is fulfilled," and that the kingdom of God "is at hand"—it is already present in his own Person.
Jesus Christ, indeed, not only taught about the kingdom of God, making it the central point of his teaching, but he established this kingdom in the history of Israel and of all humanity. This reveals his divine power, his sovereignty in regard to all in time and space that bears the signs of the primordial creation and of the call to be "new creatures" (cf. 2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15). Through Christ and in Christ all that is transient and ephemeral has been conquered, and he has established for ever the true value of the human person and of everything created.
It is a unique and eternal power which Jesus Christ—crucified and risen—claimed for himself at the end of his earthly mission when he said to the apostles, "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me." By virtue of this power of his he ordered them, "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age" (Mt 28:18-20).
Before reaching this definitive act in the proclamation and revelation of the divine sovereignty of the Son of Man, Jesus frequently announced that the kingdom of God has come into the world. Indeed, in the conflict with his adversaries who did not hesitate to ascribe Jesus' works to a demonic power, he refuted them with an argument that ends with the statement, "If it is by the finger of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you" (Lk 11:20). Therefore in him and through him the spiritual space of the divine dominion gains substance. The kingdom of God enters into the history of Israel and of all humanity. Jesus is in a position to reveal it and to show that he has the power to decide its realization. He shows it by freeing from demons—the whole psychological and spiritual space is reconquered for God.
Moreover, the definitive mandate given to the apostles by Christ crucified and risen (cf. Mt 28:18-20), was prepared by him under every aspect. The key moment of the preparation was the calling of the apostles. "He appointed twelve that they might be with him and he might send them forth to preach and to have authority to drive out demons" (Mk 3:14-15). Among the Twelve, Simon Peter received a special power in regard to the kingdom. "And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (Mt 16:18-19). He who spoke in this way showed that he was convinced to possess the kingdom, to hold its supreme sovereignty, and to be able to entrust the keys to his representative and vicar. He did this just as, and to a still greater degree than, an earthly king would do in the case of his lieutenant or prime minister.
This evident conviction of Jesus explains why, during his ministry, he spoke of his present and future work as of a new kingdom introduced into human history, not only as a truth announced but as a living reality. It develops, grows and ferments the entire human batch of dough, as we read in the parable of the leaven (cf. Mt 13:33; Lk 13:21). This and the other parables of the kingdom (cf. especially Mt 13), attest that this is the central idea of Jesus, and also the substance of his messianic work which he willed to be prolonged in history, even after his return to the Father, and this by means of a visible structure whose head is Peter (cf. Mt 16:18-19).
The establishment of this structure of the kingdom of God coincides with its transmission by Christ to his chosen apostles, "I confer (Latin, dispono; translated by some as "I convey") a kingdom on you, just as my Father has conferred one on me" (Lk 22:29). The transmission of the kingdom is at the same time a mission: "As you sent me into the world, so I send them into the world" (Jn 17:18). Appearing to the apostles after the resurrection, Jesus will again say, "As the Father has sent me, so I send you.... Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained" (Jn 2:21-23).
We should note well that in Jesus' mind, in his messianic work and in his mandate to the apostles, the inauguration of the kingdom in this world is closely connected with his power to conquer sin, to cancel Satan's power in the world and in every human being. It is therefore linked to the paschal mystery, to the cross and resurrection of Christ (Agnus Dei qui tollit peccata mundi...), and as such it is built into the historical mission of the apostles and of their successors. The establishment of the kingdom of God has its foundation in the reconciliation of humanity with God, carried out in Christ and through Christ in the paschal mystery (cf. 2 Cor 5:19; Eph 2:13-18; Col 1:19-20).
The purpose of the vocation and mission of the apostles—and therefore of the Church—in the world is to establish God's kingdom in human history (cf. Mk 16:15; Mt 28:19-20). Jesus was well aware that this mission, like his own messianic mission, would encounter and provoke great opposition. From the days when he sent forth the apostles in the first experiments of collaborating with himself, he warned them, "Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves" (Mt 10:16).
Matthew's Gospel also condenses what Jesus would say later about the fate of his missionaries (Mt 10:17-25). He returned to this theme in one of his last polemical discourses with the "scribes and Pharisees," by confirming, "Behold, I send to you prophets and wisemen and scribes; some of them you will kill and crucify, some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and pursue from town to town..."(Mt 23:34). It was a fate which had already befallen the prophets and other personages of the old covenant to whom the text refers (cf. Mt 23:35). But Jesus gave his followers the assurance that his work and theirs would endure—the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
Despite the opposition and contradiction it would meet with throughout the course of history, the kingdom of God would be established once for all in the world by the power of God himself through the Gospel and the paschal mystery of the Son. It would always bear not only the signs of his passion and death, but also the seal of his divine power, radiant in the resurrection. History would demonstrate it. But the certainty of the apostles and of all believers is founded on the revelation of the divine power of Christ, historical, eschatological and eternal, about whom the Second Vatican Council taught, "Christ, becoming obedient even unto death and because of this exalted by the Father (cf. Phil 2:8-9), entered into the glory of his kingdom. To him all things are made subject until he subjects himself and all created things to the Father that God may be all in all (cf. 1 Cor 15:27-28)" (LG 36).
Denial of Peter (Luke 22:31–34)
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| Nicolas Tournier - The Denial of St. Peter (1625) |
32 but I have prayed that your own faith may not fail; and once you have turned back, you must strengthen your brothers."
33 He said to him, "Lord, I am prepared to go to prison and to die with you."
34 But he replied, "I tell you, Peter, before the cock crows this day, you will deny three times that you know me."
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (Holy Thursday, 21 April 2011):
Saint Luke has preserved for us one concrete element of Jesus’ prayer for unity: “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren” (Lk 22:31). Today we are once more painfully aware that Satan has been permitted to sift the disciples before the whole world. And we know that Jesus prays for the faith of Peter and his successors. We know that Peter, who walks towards the Lord upon the stormy waters of history and is in danger of sinking, is sustained ever anew by the Lord’s hand and guided over the waves. But Jesus continues with a prediction and a mandate. “When you have turned again…”. Every human being, save Mary, has constant need of conversion. Jesus tells Peter beforehand of his coming betrayal and conversion. But what did Peter need to be converted from? When first called, terrified by the Lord’s divine power and his own weakness, Peter had said: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Lk 5:8). In the light of the Lord, he recognizes his own inadequacy. Precisely in this way, in the humility of one who knows that he is a sinner, is he called. He must discover this humility ever anew. At Caesarea Philippi Peter could not accept that Jesus would have to suffer and be crucified: it did not fit his image of God and the Messiah. In the Upper Room he did not want Jesus to wash his feet: it did not fit his image of the dignity of the Master. In the Garden of Olives he wielded his sword. He wanted to show his courage. Yet before the servant girl he declared that he did not know Jesus. At the time he considered it a little lie which would let him stay close to Jesus. All his heroism collapsed in a shabby bid to be at the centre of things. We too, all of us, need to learn again to accept God and Jesus Christ as he is, and not the way we want him to be. We too find it hard to accept that he bound himself to the limitations of his Church and her ministers. We too do not want to accept that he is powerless in this world. We too find excuses when being his disciples starts becoming too costly, too dangerous. All of us need the conversion which enables us to accept Jesus in his reality as God and man. We need the humility of the disciple who follows the will of his Master. We want to ask Jesus to look to us, as with kindly eyes he looked to Peter when the time was right, and to convert us.
After Peter was converted, he was called to strengthen his brethren. It is not irrelevant that this task was entrusted to him in the Upper Room. The ministry of unity has its visible place in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. Dear friends, it is a great consolation for the Pope to know that at each Eucharistic celebration everyone prays for him, and that our prayer is joined to the Lord’s prayer for Peter. Only by the prayer of the Lord and of the Church can the Pope fulfil his task of strengthening his brethren – of feeding the flock of Christ and of becoming the guarantor of that unity which becomes a visible witness to the mission which Jesus received from the Father.
comments by John Paul II (General Audience, December 1992):
At the Last Supper Jesus said something to Peter that deserves special consideration. Doubtlessly it refers to the dramatic situation at that time, but it has a fundamental value for the Church of all times, inasmuch as it belongs to the patrimony of the last exhortations and teachings which Jesus gave to the disciples during his earthly life.
In foretelling the triple denial which Peter would make out of fear during the passion, Jesus also predicted that he would overcome the crisis of that night: "Simon, Simon, behold Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed that your own faith may not fail, and once you have turned back, you must strengthen your brothers" (Lk 22:31-32).
With these words Jesus guaranteed Simon a special prayer for the perseverance of his faith, but he also announced the mission entrusted to him of strengthening his brothers in the faith.
The authenticity of Jesus' words is seen not only in Luke's care in collecting positive information and setting it out in a critically sound narrative, as can be seen in the prologue of his Gospel, but also in the type of paradox which this information implies. Jesus lamented Simon Peter's weakness and at the same time entrusted him with the mission of strengthening the others. The paradox shows the grandeur of grace at work in human beings--Peter in this case--far beyond the possibilities afforded by their talents, virtues or merits. It also shows Jesus' awareness and firmness in choosing Peter. The evangelist Luke, wise and attentive to the meaning of words and things, did not hesitate to record that messianic paradox.
The context in which Jesus' words to Peter at the Last Supper are found is also very significant. He had just said to the apostles: "It is you who have stood by me in my trials, and I confer a kingdom on you, just as my Father has conferred one on me" (Lk 22:28-29). The Greek verb diatithemai (to prepare, arrange) has a strong meaning--to arrange in a causative way--and speaks of the reality of the messianic kingdom established by the heavenly Father and shared with the apostles. Jesus' words doubtlessly refer to the eschatological dimension of the kingdom, when the apostles will be called to "judge the twelve tribes of Israel" (Lk 22:30). However, they also have a value for its present phase, for the time of the Church here on earth, and this is a time of trial. Therefore, Jesus assured Simon Peter of his prayer so that in this trial the prince of this world would not prevail: "Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat" (Lk 22:31). Christ's prayer is especially necessary for Peter in view of the trial awaiting him and in view of the task Jesus entrusted to him. The words "strengthen your brothers" refer to this task (Lk 22:32).
The perspective in which Peter's responsibility--like the Church's whole mission--must be considered is therefore both historical and eschatological. It is a responsibility in the Church and for the Church in history, where there are trials to overcome, changes to face, cultural, social and religious situations in which to work. However, everything is in relation to the kingdom of heaven, already prepared and conferred by the Father as the terminus of the entire historical journey and of all personal and social experiences. The "kingdom" transcends the Church in her earthly pilgrimage; it transcends her duties and her powers. It also transcends Peter and the apostolic college, and therefore, their successors in the episcopacy. Nevertheless, it is already in the Church, already at work and developing in its historical phase and the earthly situation of its existence. In the Church there is more than an institutional and societal structure. There is the presence of the Holy Spirit, the essence of the new law according to St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. However, this presence does not exclude, but rather demands on the ministerial level the visible, the institutional, the hierarchical.
The whole New Testament, preserved and preached by the Church, is a function of grace, of the kingdom of heaven. The Petrine ministry is situated in this perspective. Jesus announced to Simon Peter this task of service following the professions of faith he made as the spokesman of the Twelve: faith in Christ, the Son of the living God (cf. Mt 16:16), and in the words which foretold the Eucharist (cf. Jn 6:68). On the road to Caesarea Philippi, Jesus publicly approved of Simon's profession of faith, called him the fundamental rock of the Church and promised to give him the keys to the kingdom of heaven, with the power of binding and loosing. In that context it is understood that the evangelist especially highlights the aspect of mission and power concerning the faith, although other aspects are included, as we will see in the next catechesis.
It is interesting to note that the evangelist, although speaking of the human frailty of Peter who was not sheltered from difficulties and was tempted like the other apostles, emphasizes that he was the beneficiary of a special prayer for his perseverance in the faith: "I have prayed for you" . Peter was not preserved from his denial, but after experiencing his own weakness, he was strengthened in faith by virtue of Jesus' prayer so that he could fulfill the mission of strengthening his brothers. This mission cannot be explained on the basis of purely human considerations.
The Apostle Peter, the only one to deny his Master--three times!--was always Jesus' chosen one, charged with strengthening his companions. The human pretensions to fidelity that Peter professed failed, but grace triumphed.
The experience of falling enabled Peter to learn that he could not put his trust in his own strength or any other human factor, but only in Christ. It also enables us to see Peter's mission and power in light of the grace of election. What Jesus promised and entrusted to him comes from heaven and belongs--must belong--to the kingdom of heaven.
According to the evangelist, Peter's service to the kingdom consists primarily in strengthening his brothers, in helping them to keep the faith and develop it. It is interesting to point out that this mission is to be exercised in trial. Jesus was well aware of the difficulties in the historical phase of the Church, called to follow the way of the cross that he took. Peter's role, as head of the apostles, would be to support his "brothers" and the whole Church in faith. Since faith is not maintained without struggle, Peter must help the faithful in their struggle to overcome whatever would take away or lessen their faith. The experience of the first Christian communities is reflected in Luke's text. He was well aware of how that historical situation of persecution, temptation and struggle is explained in Christ's words to the apostles and principally to Peter.
The basic elements of the Petrine mission are found in those words: first of all, that of strengthening his brothers by expounding the faith, exhorting to faith, as well as all the measures necessary for the development of the faith. This activity is addressed to those whom Jesus, speaking to Peter, calls "your brothers." In context the expression applies first of all to the other apostles, but it does not rule out a wider sense embracing all the members of the Christian community (cf. Acts 1:15). It suggests the purpose of Peter's mission as the one who strengthens and supports faith: fraternal community in virtue of the faith.
Peter, and like him all his successors and heads of the Church, has the mission of encouraging the faithful to put all their trust in Christ and the power of his grace, which Peter personally experienced. This is what Innocent III wrote in the Letter Apostolicae Sedis Primatus (November 12, 1199), citing the text of Luke 22:32 and commenting on it as follows: "The Lord clearly intimates that Peter's successors will never at any time deviate from the Catholic faith, but will instead recall the others and strengthen the hesitant" (DS 775). That medieval Pope felt that Jesus' statement to Simon Peter was confirmed by the experience of 1,000 years.
The mission Jesus entrusted to Peter concerns the Church down through the centuries and human generations. That mandate "strengthen your brothers" means: teach the faith in every age, in different circumstances and amid all the difficulties and contradictions which preaching the faith will encounter in history; by teaching instill courage in the faithful; you yourself experienced that the power of my grace is greater than human weakness; therefore spread the message of faith, preach sound doctrine, reunite the "brethren," putting your trust in the prayer that I promised you; in virtue of my grace, try to help non-believers accept the faith and to comfort those who are in doubt. This is your mission, this is the reason for the mandate I entrust to you.
These words of the evangelist Luke (22:31-33) are very significant for all who exercise the munus Petrinum in the Church. They continually remind them of the kind of original paradox that Christ himself placed in them, with the certitude that in their ministry, as in Peter's, a special grace is at work which supports human weakness and allows him to "strengthen his brothers." "I have prayed"--Jesus' words to Peter, which re-echo in his ever poor, humble successors--"I have prayed that your own faith may not fail, and once you turned back, you must strengthen your brothers" (Lk 22:32).
comments by Fr. George Corrigan, Catholic Priest (https://friarmusings.wordpress.com):
Jesus addresses the leader of the new patriarchs by his Hebrew name. He says that Satan has asked to test the Twelve; the implication is that God’s special permission is needed to interfere with the Twelve. Jesus’ powerful intercession will help the leader, but Peter is free to choose, however badly. Jesus refers to the coming apostasy of Peter, from which he will return to strengthen his brothers. Peter does not accept the hint of his weakness and protests his allegiance and fidelity. Jesus then utters the prediction of his betrayal with unequivocal clarity. Peter must get over thinking that his special role among the Twelve was earned by his own strength.
Luke’s Gospel reserves a special role for the Twelve, that core group of Jesus’ disciples. The very number was symbolic of the gathering of the lost tribes of Israel, the renewal of God’s people that was the object of Jesus’ mission. His disciples were to be the witnesses to Jesus’ teaching and healing (24:44-49); they were to gather the church and take its mission to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8) So Jesus prays for Simon and for the other disciples that the power of evil would not sweep them away (22:31-32). Even though Peter will weaken, the power of grace will draw him back, and his ministry, in turn, is to strengthen his brothers and sisters in the community. As we will see, the evangelist does his best to tell the passion story in this spirit, downplaying the impact of Peter’s denial and passing over in silence the flight of the other disciples. For Luke the sure reconciliation that the Risen Christ brings to the community dissolves memories of its infidelities.
Sell your cloak and buy a sword (Luke 22:35–38)
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| Mariano Fortuny - The swordsmith (1867) |
36 He said to them, "But now one who has a money bag should take it, and likewise a sack, and one who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one.
37 For I tell you that this scripture must be fulfilled in me, namely, 'He was counted among the wicked'; and indeed what is written about me is coming to fulfillment."
38 Then they said, "Lord, look, there are two swords here." But he replied, "It is enough!"
commentary by Pablo T. Gadenz, Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Trenton (NJ) :
In view of the present crisis but also the future mission of the apostles, Jesus’ final instructions in his farewell address repeal the earlier restrictions about not taking a money bag or a sack when sent out (Luke 9:3; 10:4). In the more hostile environment they will face, they will have to provide for their own needs, as Paul explains in his similar farewell address: “I have never wanted anyone’s silver or gold or clothing. You know well that these very hands have served my needs and my companions” (Acts 20:33-34).
Likewise, Jesus’ puzzling command to purchase a sword is best understood as referring to the hostile response that lies ahead. Indeed, this is confirmed by the scripture passage that Jesus gives as a reason for his command: He was counted among the wicked (see Isa 53:12). Mistakenly, they take his words literally by pointing to two swords, which they conclude could be useful in self-defense. Consequently, Jesus replies, it is enough! or “That’s enough!” (NIV), bringing an end to the discussion and indicating that his command was meant to be taken metaphorically, as an injunction to be ready for the worst. They will nevertheless persist in their misunderstanding (Luke 22:49-51).
comments by Fr. George Corrigan, Catholic Priest (https://friarmusings.wordpress.com):
In a parting message to all, Jesus asks them to recall the instructions they were given for the preaching mission (9:3). They had been told to rely on God’s providence for the things they would need. Now, because of the impending crisis of Jesus’ passion and death, and in view of the persecution sure to come on the early church, Jesus tells them to prepare themselves well for the struggle, even to preparing to defend themselves. He is speaking figuratively to alert them to the seriousness of the struggle, but they take him literally, producing two swords. “It is enough!” puts an end to a conversation that has been over their heads.
comments by Franciscan Gualberto Gismondi:
In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord recalls the commandment, "You shall not kill" (Mt 5:21) and adds to it the proscription of anger, hatred, and vengeance. Going further, Christ asks his disciples to turn the other cheek, to love their enemies (Cf. Mt 5:22-39; 5:44). Cathecism says:
(CCC 2263) The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. "The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one's own life; and the killing of the aggressor.... The one is intended, the other is not" (St. Thomas Aquinas, STh II-II, 64, 7, corp. art.).
(CCC 2264) Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one's own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow: If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful.... Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one's own life than of another's (Ib.).
(CCC 2265) Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for someone responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility.
When you are forced to defend yourself to preserve your life, it is that act of preservation that is the intended result of the employment of force. You're trying to stop the aggressor. If the aggressor dies as a result of your meeting force with force, that outcome is considered unintentional by the Church. You are trying to stop, not kill, though sometimes only the death of the attacker can halt the assault.
During the Last Supper, Jesus was preparing his followers for what was to come after he was gone. He told them, "one who has a money bag should take it, and likewise a sack, and one who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one" (Luke 22:36). Once He, their shepherd, had left them, they would need to protect themselves, even if it meant selling their clothes to be able to buy a weapon to do so.
Agony in the Garden (Luke 22:39–46)
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| Giorgio Vasari - Prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (1633) |
40 When he arrived at the place he said to them, "Pray that you may not undergo the test."
41 After withdrawing about a stone's throw from them and kneeling, he prayed,
42 saying, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done."
43 (And to strengthen him an angel from heaven appeared to him.
44 He was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground.)
45 When he rose from prayer and returned to his disciples, he found them sleeping from grief.
46 He said to them, "Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not undergo the test."
The verses 43-44, though very ancient, were probably not part of the original text of Luke. They are absent from the oldest papyrus manuscripts of Luke and from manuscripts of wide geographical distribution. It is assumed that they were inserted in order to counter doceticism, the belief that Jesus, as divine, only seemed to suffer. While probably not original to the text, these verses reflect 1st-century tradition.
"Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" (Mark 14:38)
The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. In the New Testament the flesh often signifies the weakness of human nature, which easily inclines toward sin; the spirit is our aspiration toward God and capacity to relate to him. As Paul emphasized, we are caught in perpetual conflict between the two
(Rom 8:12-14; Gal 5:19-24). The disciples desire to be faithful to Jesus (14:31), but their flesh is liable to fall into cowardice, complacency, or selfishness. Jesus' word of warning is also a word of encouragement, implying that his victory is the prototype for all Christians in their struggle against the flesh. "Because he himself was tested through what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested" (Heb 2:18).
The Third Council of Constantinople (AD 681) taught that because of Jesus’ two natures, divine and human, there are in Jesus two wills, divine and human, and the human will acts in conformity with the divine will: “His human will is compliant; it does not resist or oppose but rather submits to his divine and almighty will.” With his human will, Jesus exercises his human freedom to obey the divine will. The Council thus ratified the teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor, who reflected on the words of Jesus’ prayer—“Not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42)—and drew from them a practical lesson for Christians “of setting aside our own will by the perfect fulfillment of the divine.” Pope Benedict XVI comments on these teachings and makes a similar application: “The human will, as created by God, is ordered to the divine will.” In other words, human beings attain their fulfillment by accomplishing God’s will. However, sin introduced opposition to God’s will, so that we experience obedience to God’s will as a threat to our freedom. Through his prayer, Jesus has overcome this opposition and “transformed humanity’s resistance, so that we are all now present within the Son’s obedience.” By our union with Jesus (Gal 2:20), obedience to God’s will becomes possible.
commentary by Pablo T. Gadenz, Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Trenton (NJ) :
Likewise echoing the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus prayed by addressing his Father (11:2). The details regarding his prayer—that he withdrew about a stone’s throw and was kneeling—are recalled at the martyrdom of Stephen, who prays while kneeling as stones are thrown at him (Acts 7:58-60). Moreover, Jesus’ insistence that the will of the Father be done is echoed in Acts when a group of disciples recognize Paul’s similar resolve that “the Lord’s will be done” (Acts 21:14). Jesus in his suffering and death is thus presented as a martyr, like the prophets of old (Luke 11:49-51; 13:34) and as the model for his own disciples. However, Jesus’ death also goes one step further because it is sacrificial: this cup that God is giving him is the sacrifice of the New Covenant in his blood that will be poured out in his death (22:20; see Catechism 612).
comments by Dr. Mary Healy, professor of Scripture at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit:
Readers of this passage have sometimes questioned: why would the Son of God collapse in anguish when so many heroes, such as Christian martyrs and even the pagan philosopher Socrates, have gone to their deaths calm and composed? In the context of the New Testament, what Jesus experiences in
Gethsemane is not merely the dread of suffering but the full weight of human sin and its consequence of alienation from God: the "cup" of wrath (see Isa 51:17). The Christian gospel is far from the Stoic or Buddhist ideal of cool, emotionless detachment from the drama of human suffering. Jesus enters into the depths of the human condition to transform it from within. In Gethsemane we begin to see that God willed the entire passion process so as to bring about the most perfect act of love conceivable from a human heart. The cross would have no value if Jesus had not freely willed it. It is not Jesus' death in itself that God desired, since God has "no pleasure in the death of anyone" (Ezek 18:32). Rather, what redeems humanity is the fire of divine love enkindled in the human heart of Jesus, the love that bound him to the cross (see John 14:31; Eph 5:2).
comments by Brian Pizzalato (Director of Catechesis, R.C.I.A. & Lay Apostolate for the Diocese of Duluth):
Why do people suffer? Suffering can be a result of sin. Of this there is no doubt. Suffering can also serve as a way of testing and purification. Jesus was tested in the desert while he fasted. He was also tested through suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane, so much so that he “began to feel sorrow and distress” and “he was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground” (Matthew 26:37, Luke 22:44).
During this agony, he says, “Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). It is a test that will help us see if we will follow God only in good times, but also in bad times. In the midst of the test of suffering, will we shout out with a loud cry, “My will be done,” or “Thy will be done!”
We also suffer so that a space may be created to show love – of God and of neighbor. The suffering of others provides opportunities to demonstrate our love, the primary scriptural example being the Good Samaritan (cf. Luke 10:29-37).
Typical responses to the suffering of others might be, “I will pray for you.” That is love. “I will make a meal and bring it over.” That is love. “I will come visit you in the hospital.” That is love. “I will call a priest to give you the sacrament of anointing of the sick.” That is love.
Jesus also taught us that suffering is part of the demands of discipleship. “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).
“Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 15:27).
“…Whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:38).
The definitive suffering of Christ began in the upper room and ended on Calvary.
If we want to find the meaning of suffering, we should only look upon the cross. The cross is where we are shown in a perfect way how much God loves us. He loves us with a self-sacrificial, suffering love.
In our own suffering, Christ allows us to share in the deepest sign of his love. He has infused suffering with divine meaning, not human meaninglessness. Human suffering is thus redeemed. Through our suffering, we participate in the sacrifice of Christ, which brings about our salvation and the salvation of others. And it is only through the cross that we are led to the resurrection, there is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday.
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (JN):
“They went to a place which was called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit here, while I pray’ ” (Mk 14:32). Gerhard Kroll comments as follows: “At the time of Jesus, in this terrain on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, there was a farmstead with an oil press for crushing the olives. . . . The farmstead was named Gethsemane on account of the oil press. . . . Nearby was a large natural cave, which could have offered Jesus and his disciples a safe, if not particularly comfortable place to spend the night” (Auf den Spuren Jesu, p. 404).
We know from the pilgrim Egeria that by the end of the fourth century there was a “magnificent church” here, which was reduced to ruins by the turmoil of the times but was rediscovered by the Franciscans in the twentieth century. “Completed in 1924, the present-day Church of Jesus’ Agony not only encompasses the site of the ‘ecclesia elegans’ [Egeria’s church]: it once more surrounds the rock on which tradition tells us that Jesus prayed” (Kroll, Auf den Spuren Jesu, p. 410)
This is one of the most venerable sites of Christianity.
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.
Jesus gives concrete form to this dark vision of an unknown future. Yes, the shepherd is struck down. Jesus himself is the shepherd of Israel, the shepherd of humanity. And he takes injustice upon himself; he shoulders the destructive burden of guilt. He allows himself to be struck down. He takes up the cause of all who are struck down in the course of history. Now, at this hour, there is the further consequence that the community of disciples is scattered, the newly formed family of God falls apart before it has been properly established. “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (Jn 10:11).
Jesus, having passed through death, will live again. As the risen Lord, he is now in the fullest sense the shepherd who leads, through death, to the path of life. The Good Shepherd does both: he offers up his life, and he goes before. Indeed, the offering up of his life is the going before. It is through these actions that he leads us. It is through these actions that he opens the door onto the vast panorama of reality. Having experienced dispersal, the sheep can now be definitively reassembled. So right at the beginning of the night spent on the Mount of Olives, we find the dark saying about striking down and scattering, but also the promise that through these events, Jesus will reveal himself as the true shepherd who gathers together the scattered ones and leads them to God, to life.
After the common recitation of the psalms, Jesus prays alone—as on so many previous nights. Yet close by is the group of three disciples—Peter, James, and John: a trio known to us from other contexts, especially from the account of the Transfiguration. These three disciples, even though they are repeatedly overcome by sleep, are the witnesses of Jesus’ night of anguish. Mark tells us that Jesus “began to be greatly distressed and troubled”. The Lord says to his disciples: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch” (Mk 14:33-34).
The summons to vigilance has already been a major theme of Jesus’ Jerusalem teaching, and now it emerges directly with great urgency. And yet, while it refers specifically to Gethsemane, it also points ahead to the later history of Christianity. Across the centuries, it is the drowsiness of the disciples that opens up possibilities for the power of the Evil One. Such drowsiness deadens the soul, so that it remains undisturbed by the power of the Evil One at work in the world and by all the injustice and suffering ravaging the earth. In its state of numbness, the soul prefers not to see all this; it is easily persuaded that things cannot be so bad, so as to continue in the self-satisfaction of its own comfortable existence. Yet this deadening of souls, this lack of vigilance regarding both God’s closeness and the looming forces of darkness, is what gives the Evil One power in the world. On beholding the drowsy disciples, so disinclined to rouse themselves, the Lord says: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.” This is a quotation from Psalm 43: 5, and it calls to mind other verses from the Psalms.
In the Passion, too—on the Mount of Olives and on the Cross—Jesus uses passages from the Psalms to speak of himself and to address the Father. Yet these quotations have become fully personal; they have become the intimate words of Jesus himself in his agony. It is he who truly prays these psalms; he is their real subject. Jesus’ utterly personal prayer and his praying in the words of faithful, suffering Israel are here seamlessly united.
After this admonition to vigilance, Jesus goes a short distance away. This is where the prayer on the Mount of Olives actually begins. Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus falls on his face—the prayer posture of extreme submission to the will of God, of radical self-offering to him. In the Western liturgy, this posture is still adopted on Good Friday, at monastic professions, and at ordinations.
Luke, however, has Jesus kneeling to pray. In terms of praying posture, then, he draws Jesus’ night of anguish into the context of the history of Christian prayer: Stephen sinks to his knees in prayer as he is being stoned (Acts 7: 60); Peter kneels before he wakes Tabitha from death (Acts 9:40); Paul kneels to bid farewell to the Ephesian elders (Acts 20:36) and again when the disciples tell him not to go up to Jerusalem (Acts 21:5). 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).
There now follows the prayer itself, in which the whole drama of our redemption is made present. In Mark’s account, Jesus begins by asking that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him (14:35). This is then filled out by a statement of the essential content of the prayer: “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; remove this chalice from me; yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mk 14:36).
We may distinguish three elements in this prayer of Jesus. First there is the primordial experience of fear, quaking in the face of the power of death, terror before the abyss of nothingness that makes him tremble to the point that, in Luke’s account, his sweat falls to the ground like drops of blood (cf. 22:44). In the equivalent passage in Saint John’s Gospel (12:27), this horror is expressed, as in the Synoptics, in terms reminiscent of Psalm 43:5, but using a word that emphasizes the dark depths of Jesus’ fear: tetáraktai—it is the same verb, tarássein, that John uses to describe Jesus’ deep emotion at the tomb of Lazarus (cf. 11:33) as well as his inner turmoil at the prophecy of Judas’ betrayal in the Upper Room (cf. 13:21).
In this way John is clearly indicating the primordial fear of created nature in the face of imminent death, and 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).
Because he is the Son, he sees with total clarity the whole foul flood of evil, all the power of lies and pride, all the wiles and cruelty of the evil that masks itself as life yet constantly serves to destroy, debase, and crush life. Because he is the Son, he experiences deeply all the horror, filth, and baseness that he must drink from the “chalice” prepared for him: the vast power of sin and death. All this he must take into himself, so that it can be disarmed and defeated in him.
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. With this understanding, following Pascal, we may see ourselves drawn quite personally into the episode on the Mount of Olives: my own sin was present in that terrifying chalice. “Those drops of blood I shed for you”, Pascal hears the Lord say to him during the agony on the Mount of Olives (cf. Pensées VII, 553).
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).
The relationship between these two prayers in John’s account is essentially no different from what we find in the Synoptics. The anguish of Jesus’ human soul impels him to pray for deliverance from this hour. Yet his awareness of his mission, his knowledge that it was for this hour that he came, enables him to utter the second prayer—the prayer that God glorify his name: it is Jesus’ acceptance of the horror of the Cross, his ignominious experience of being stripped of all dignity and suffering a shameful death, that becomes the glorification of God’s name. 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. Jesus uttered both prayers, but the first one, asking for deliverance, merges into the second one, asking for God to be glorified by the fulfillment of his will—and so the conflicting elements blend into unity deep within the heart of Jesus’ human existence.
What does this mean? What is “Jesus’ Will” will as opposed to “Will of the Father” will?
Who is speaking to whom? Is it the Son addressing the Father? Or the man Jesus addressing the triune God? 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. So it is no coincidence that the early Church’s efforts to arrive at an understanding of the figure of Jesus Christ took their final shape as a result of faith-filled reflection on his prayer on the Mount of Olives.
At this point we should undertake a rapid overview of the early Church’s Christology, in order to grasp its understanding of the interrelation between the divine will and the human will in the figure of Jesus Christ. The Council of Nicea (325) had clarified the Christian concept of God. The three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are one, in the one “substance” of God. More than a century later, the Council of Chalcedon (451) sought to articulate the relation between divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ by adopting the formula that the one person of the Son of God embraces and bears the two natures—human and divine—“without confusion and without separation”.
Thus the infinite difference between God and man, between Creator and creature is preserved: humanity remains humanity, divinity remains divinity. Jesus’ humanity is neither absorbed nor reduced by his divinity. It exists in its fullness, while subsisting in the divine person of the Logos. At the same time, in the continuing distinction of natures, the expression “one person” conveys the radical unity that God in Christ has entered into with man.
Yet an objection comes to mind: What kind of man has no human will? Is a man without a will really a man? Did God in Jesus truly become man, if this man had no will? The great Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor (d. 662) formulated an answer to this question by struggling to understand Jesus’ prayer on the Mount of Olives: Jesus’ human nature is not amputated through union with the Logos; it remains complete. And the will is part of human nature. Maximus says in this regard that the human will, by virtue of creation, tends toward synergy (working together) with the divine will, but that through sin, opposition takes the place of synergy: man, whose will attains fulfillment through becoming attuned to God’s will, now has the sense that his freedom is compromised by God’s will. He regards consenting to God’s will, not as his opportunity to become fully himself, but as a threat to his freedom against which he rebels. The drama of the Mount of Olives lies in the fact that Jesus draws man’s natural will away from opposition and back toward synergy, and in so doing he restores man’s true greatness. 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.
Christoph Schönborn says in this regard that “the transition between the two wills from opposition to union is accomplished through the sacrifice of obedience. In the agony of Gethsemane, this transition occurs” (God’s Human Face, pp. 126-27). 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. Indeed, the Son’s whole being is expressed in the “not I, but you”—in the total self-abandonment of the “I” to the “you” of God the Father. This same “I” has subsumed and transformed humanity’s resistance, so that we are all now present within the Son’s obedience; we are all drawn into sonship.
This brings us to one final point regarding Jesus’ prayer, to its actual interpretative key, namely, the form of address: “Abba, Father” (Mk 14:36). In 1966 Joachim Jeremias wrote an important article about the use of this term in Jesus’ prayer, from which I should like to quote two essential insights: “Whereas there is not a single instance of God being addressed as Abba in the literature of Jewish prayer, Jesus always addressed him in this way (with the exception of the cry from the Cross, Mark 15:34 and parallel passages)”. (Abba, p. 57). Moreover, Jeremias shows that this word Abba belongs to the language of children—that it is the way a child addresses his father within the family. “To the Jewish mind it would have been disrespectful and therefore inconceivable to address God with this familiar word. For Jesus to venture to take this step was something new and unheard of. He spoke to God like a child to his father . . . Jesus’ use of Abba in addressing God reveals the heart of his relationship with God” (p. 62).
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.
Finally we must turn our attention to the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews that points toward the Mount of Olives. There we read: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear” (5:7). Each time, it is a question of Jesus’ encounter with the powers of death, whose ultimate depths he as the Holy One of God can sense in their full horror. The Letter to the Hebrews views the whole of Jesus’ Passion—from the Mount of Olives to the last cry from the Cross—as thoroughly permeated by prayer, one long impassioned plea to God for life in the face of the power of death.
If the Letter to the Hebrews treats the entire Passion as a prayer in which Jesus wrestles with God the Father and at the same time with human nature, it also sheds new light on the theological depth of the Mount of Olives prayer. 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. There are two particular words with which the author of the Letter to the Hebrews underlines this dimension of Jesus’ prayer. The verb “bring” (prosphérein: bring before God, bear aloft—cf. Heb 5:1) comes from the language of the sacrificial cult. What Jesus does here lies right at the heart of what sacrifice is. “He offered himself to do the will of the Father”, as Albert Vanhoye comments (Let Us Confidently Welcome Christ Our High Priest, p. 60). The second word that is important for our purposes tells us that through his sufferings Jesus learned obedience and was thus “made perfect” (Heb 5:8-9). Vanhoye points out that in the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, the expression “make perfect” (teleioun) is used exclusively to mean “consecrate as priest” (p. 62). The Letter to the Hebrews takes over this terminology (cf. 7:11, 19, 28). 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 priest “according to the order of Melchizedek” (Heb 5:9-10; cf. Vanhoye, pp. 61-62).
The text states that Jesus pleaded with him who had the power to save him from death and that, on account of his godly fear (cf. 5: 7), his prayer was granted. But was it granted? He still died on the Cross! We may distinguish different aspects of this “granting”. One possible translation of the text would be: “He was heard and delivered from his fear.” This would correspond to Luke’s account, which says that an angel came and comforted him (cf. 22:43). It would then refer to the inner strength given to Jesus through prayer, so that he was able to endure the arrest and the Passion resolutely. Yet the text obviously says more: the Father raised him from the night of death and, through the Resurrection, saved him definitively and permanently from death: Jesus dies no more (cf. Vanhoye, Let Us Confidently Welcome Christ Our High Priest, p. 60). Yet surely the text means even more: the Resurrection is not just Jesus’ personal rescue from death. He did not die for himself alone. His was a dying “for others”; it was the conquest of death itself. Hence this “granting” may also be understood in terms of the Hence this “granting” may also be understood in terms of the parallel text in John 12:27-28, where in answer to Jesus’ prayer: “Father, glorify your name!” a voice from heaven replies: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The Cross itself has become God’s glorification, the glory of God made manifest in the love of the Son. This glory extends beyond the moment into the whole sweep of history. This glory is life. It is on the Cross that we see it, hidden yet powerful: the glory of God, the transformation of death into life.
From the Cross, new life comes to us. On the Cross, Jesus becomes the source of life for himself and for all. On the Cross, death is conquered. The granting of Jesus’ prayer concerns all mankind: his obedience becomes life for all. This conclusion is spelled out for us in the closing words of the passage we have been studying: “He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek” (Heb 5:9-10; cf. Ps 110:4).
comments by Pope John Paul II (General Audiences: February 3, 1988):
Jesus Christ is true man. We wish to continue the previous reflection on this theme, which is a fundamental truth of our faith. This faith is based on the word of Christ himself, confirmed by the witness of the apostles and disciples. It was transmitted from generation to generation in the Church's teaching: "We believe...true God and true man...not a phantasm, but the one and only Son of God" (Council of Lyons II, DS 852).
More recently the same doctrine was recalled by the Second Vatican Council, which emphasized the new relationship which the Word, on taking flesh and becoming man like us, has initiated with every human being. "By his Incarnation the Son of God has united himself in some fashion with every man. He worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind, acted by human choice and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin" (GS 22).
In the previous reflection we sought to show Christ's likeness to us, which derives from the fact that he is true man. "The Word made flesh"; flesh (sarx) indicates man precisely as a corporeal being (sarkikos), who comes into being through being born of a woman (cf. Gal 4:4). In his corporeal nature Jesus of Nazareth, like every man, experienced fatigue, hunger and thirst. His body was vulnerable, subject to suffering, and sensitive to physical pain. It was precisely in this flesh (sarx) that he was subjected to dreadful tortures and was eventually crucified. "He was crucified, died and was buried."
Today we shall pay particular attention to this last statement which brings us to the heart of Jesus' psychological life. He truly experienced human feelings of joy, sadness, anger, wonder and love. For example, we read that "Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit" (Lk 10:21). He wept over Jerusalem. "He saw the city and wept over it, saying, 'If this day you only knew what makes for peace'" (Lk 19:41-42). He also wept after the death of his friend Lazarus. "When Jesus saw [Mary] weeping and the Jews who had come with her weeping, he became perturbed and deeply troubled, and said, 'Where have you laid him?' They said to him, 'Sir, come and see.' And Jesus wept" (Jn 11:33-35).
His feelings of sorrow were especially intense in the Garden of Gethsemane. We read: "He took with him Peter, James and John and began to be troubled and distressed. Then Jesus said to them, 'My soul is sorrowful even to death'" (Mk 14:33-34; cf. also Mt 26:37). In Luke we read: "He was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground" (Lk 22:44). This was a fact of the psycho-physical order which once again attests to Jesus' true humanity.
We read also of Jesus' anger. When on the sabbath he cured the man with the withered hand, Jesus first of all asked those present, "'Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil?' But they remained silent. Looking around at them with anger and grieved at their hardness of heart, he said to the man, 'Stretch out your hand.' He stretched it out and his hand was restored" (Mk 3:4-5).
Similarly in the case of the buyers and sellers who were driven out of the Temple, Matthew writes: "He drove out all those engaged in selling and buying there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves. And he said to them, 'It is written: "My house shall be a house of prayer," but you have made it a den of thieves'" (Mt 21:12-13; cf. Mk 11:15).
Elsewhere we read that Jesus "was amazed." "He was amazed at their lack of faith" (Mk 6:6). Or he was moved to admiration, as when he said, "Notice how the flowers grow...not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of them" (Lk 12:27). He also admired the faith of the Canaanite woman: "O woman, great is your faith!" (Mt 15:28).
Above all, the Gospels show that Jesus was a person who loved. We read that during his conversation with the young man who had come to ask him what he ought to do in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, "Jesus, looking at him, loved him" (Mk 10:21). The evangelist John writes that "Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus" (Jn 11:5), and John called himself "the disciple...whom Jesus loved" (Jn 13:23).
Jesus loved children. "And people were bringing children to him that he might touch them.... He embraced them and blessed them, placing his hands on them" (Mk 10:13-16). When he proclaimed the commandment of love, he referred to the love with which he himself loved. "This is my commandment: love one another as I love you" (Jn 15:12).
Christ's passion, especially the agony on the cross, constitutes the zenith of the love with which Jesus, "having loved his own who were in the world, loved them unto the end" (Jn 13:1). "Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (Jn 15:13). At the same time this is also the nadir of the sorrow and abandonment which he experienced during his earthly life. The words "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabacthani...My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'" (Mk 15:34) will forever remain a piercing expression of this abandonment. They are words which Jesus took from Psalm 22 (verse 2), and they express the excruciating agony of his soul and body, including the mysterious sensation of being momentarily abandoned by God. It was the most dramatically agonizing moment of the whole passion!
Jesus therefore became truly similar to men, by assuming the condition of a servant, as the letter to the Philippians expresses it (cf. 2:7). However, the Letter to the Hebrews, speaking of him as "high priest of the good things that have come to be" (Heb 9:11), confirms and clarifies that this is not a "priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been similarly tested in every way, yet without sin" (cf. Heb 4:15). Truly he "knew not sin," even though St. Paul will say that "for our sake God made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor 5:21).
The same Jesus could issue the challenge, "Can any of you charge me with sin?" (Jn 8:46). The faith of the Church is expressed as follows: "He was conceived, born and died without sin." This was proclaimed, in harmony with the whole of Tradition, by the Council of Florence (Decree for the Jacobites, DS 1347). Jesus "was conceived, was born and died without sin." He is the truly just and holy man.
We repeat with the New Testament, with the creed, and with Vatican Council II that Jesus Christ "has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin." It is precisely thanks to this likeness that "Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and his love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear" (GS 22).
Through this observation, Vatican Council II gives yet again the answer to the fundamental question which forms the title of St. Anselm's celebrated treatise, Cur Deus homo? It is a question of the intellect that explores the mystery of God the Son, who became true man "for us men and for our salvation," as we profess in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
Christ has fully revealed man to himself precisely by the fact that "he knew not sin," for sin does not enrich man. Quite the contrary—it cheapens him, it diminishes him and it deprives him of the fullness which is his due (cf. GS 13). The rescue and the salvation of fallen man is the fundamental reason for the Incarnation.
Jesus' Jerusalem conflicts, crucifixion, and resurrection
Kiss of Judas (Luke 22:47–53)
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| Kiss of Judas by Giotto in the Arena Chapel, 1305 |
48 Jesus said to him, "Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?"
49 His disciples realized what was about to happen, and they asked, "Lord, shall we strike with a sword?"
50 And one of them struck the high priest's servant and cut off his right ear.
51 But Jesus said in reply, "Stop, no more of this!" Then he touched the servant's ear and healed him.
52 And Jesus said to the chief priests and temple guards and elders who had come for him, "Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs?
53 Day after day I was with you in the temple area, and you did not seize me; but this is your hour, the time for the power of darkness."
comments by by Joseph F. Mali (Nigerian Catholic Priest):
When the soldiers entered the garden to arrest Jesus, he said to them: “Day after day I was with you in the temple area, and you did not seize me; but this is your hour, the time for the power of darkness.” Pay attention to what Jesus said to the soldiers: “this is your hour, the time for the power of darkness.” Jesus recognizes the power of evil. This power is about to be displayed in his own life.
By the hour of evil I do not mean those tragic moments that we can avoid. Quite the contrary! The hour of evil is that tragedy we cannot escape. Jesus prayed to God: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done.” The cup, as we know, was not taken away from Jesus. He suffered and died on the cross. The cross, then, is Jesus’ inevitable end. This element of inevitability is what makes the cross the hour of evil.
Like Jesus, there comes a time in our life when we cannot escape evil. Try as you will, and your efforts will all be in vain. Once it is time, evil is unstoppable. One disciple tried to put up a defense for Jesus by cutting off the ear of the high priest’s servant. He succeeded in hurting the servant, but did stop Jesus from undergoing the cross. Like a stone that must come down when it goes up, so is the inevitability of the hour of evil.
The hour of evil is not necessarily the result of sin or guilt. Guilty or innocent, when it is time, evil will strike. Listen to what Pilate said concerning Jesus: “I have conducted my investigation in your presence and have not found this man guilty of the charges you have brought against him, nor did Herod, for he sent him back to us. So no capital crime has been committed by him.” The centurion who witnessed the crucifixion confirmed Pilate’s conclusion, proclaiming, “This man was innocent beyond doubt.” But despite Jesus’ innocence, he went through the horror of the cross. He suffered, of course, not because he was guilty, but because it was the hour of evil.
We have no control over the hour of evil. But we do have control over our response to it. Take Jesus, for instance, he did not return evil with evil. Nor did he wish his executioners any ill. Quite the opposite, when the disciples suggested a violent resistance, saying, “Lord, look, there are two swords here,” he denounced their behavior and opted for non-violence. Also, when one of the disciples cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant, Jesus disapproved of it, saying, “Stop, no more of this!” He then healed the ear of the servant. As he was dying on the cross, he prayed: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”
How we interpret events in the hour of evil will determine our response. A negative reading will lead to a negative reaction. A positive understanding will inspire a positive response. Jesus interpreted the actions of his killers in terms of ignorance and not their wickedness. Consequently, he kept no malice against anyone. He even asked God to forgive those who put him to death. In the hour of evil Jesus did not snap; he consistently sticks to his principles. The hour of evil could not rob Jesus of his goodness. Like Jesus, let us not compromise our good values during the hour of darkness, for evil’s triumph is only temporary, as Easter Sunday will confirm.
Arrest and denial of Peter (Luke 22:54-62)
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| Carl Heinrich Bloch - Peter’s Denial (1873) |
55 They lit a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat around it, and Peter sat down with them.
56 When a maid saw him seated in the light, she looked intently at him and said, "This man too was with him."
57 But he denied it saying, "Woman, I do not know him."
58 A short while later someone else saw him and said, "You too are one of them"; but Peter answered, "My friend, I am not."
59 About an hour later, still another insisted, "Assuredly, this man too was with him, for he also is a Galilean."
60 But Peter said, "My friend, I do not know what you are talking about." Just as he was saying this, the cock crowed,
61 and the Lord turned and looked at Peter; and Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him, "Before the cock crows today, you will deny me three times."
62 He went out and began to weep bitterly.
comments by Pope John Paul II (22 February 2000):
This is Christ's promise, our consoling certainty: the Petrine ministry is not founded on human abilities and strengths, but on the prayer of Christ who implores the Father that Simon's faith "may not fail" (Lk 22: 32). When he has "turned again", Peter will be able to carry out his service among his brethren. The Apostle's repentance - we could almost say his second conversion - becomes the decisive turning point on his journey of following the Lord.
We are helped in this by Peter's example, his experience of human weakness which led him, shortly after the conversation with Jesus just recounted, to forget the promises he had made with such insistence and to deny his Lord. Despite his sin and limitations, Christ chose him and called him to a most high task: that of being the foundation of the Church's visible unity and of strengthening his brethren in the faith.
The decisive moment occurred on the night between the Thursday and Friday of the Passion. Christ, led out of the high priest's house, looked directly at Peter. The Apostle, who had just denied him three times, was struck by that gaze and understood everything. He remembered the Master's words and felt pierced to the heart. "And he went out and wept bitterly" (Lk 22: 62).
We are so deeply moved by Peter's tears as to be spurred to an authentic inner purification. "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord", he exclaimed one day after the miraculous catch (Lk 5: 8). Dear brothers and sisters, let us make Peter's invocation our own, as we celebrate our holy Jubilee. Christ will renew his wonders for us too, we hope with humble trust: he will grant us a superabundance of his healing grace and will work new miraculous catches
Christ's response echoes forcefully in our hearts: "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church" (Mt 16: 18). The Evangelist John testifies that Jesus gave Simon the name "Cephas" at their first meeting, when his brother Andrew had brought him to him (cf. Jn 1: 41-42). On the other hand, Matthew's account puts the greatest emphasis on Christ's action by situating it at an important moment in the messianic ministry of Jesus, who explains the significance of the name "Peter" by relating it to the building of his Church.
"You are the Christ": the Church is founded on Peter's profession of faith and on Jesus' subsequent declaration: "You are Peter". An invincible foundation, against which the forces of evil can never prevail: this foundation is safeguarded by the very will of the "Father who is in heaven" (Mt 16: 17). The Chair of Peter, which we celebrate today, is not based on human assurances - "flesh and blood" - but on Christ, the cornerstone. And like Simon, we too are "blessed", for we know we have no reason to boast except in the eternal and providential plan of God.
Peter the shepherd is totally moulded by Jesus the Shepherd and by the dynamism of his paschal mystery. The "Petrine ministry" is rooted in this unique conformation to Christ the Shepherd on the part of Peter and his Successors, a conformation which is based on a special charism of love: "Do you love me more than these? ... Feed my lambs" (Jn 21: 15).
Guards mock Jesus (Luke 22:63–65)
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| The Mocking of Christ (Gerrit van Honthorst, 1617) |
64 They blindfolded him and questioned him, saying, "Prophesy! Who is it that struck you?"
65 And they reviled him in saying many other things against him.
In what is probably the earliest complete commentary on Mark, an ancient Christian writer comments on Mark gospel on how the insults he faced removed our shame: "This was so that by his guilt he might remove our guilt; that by the blindfold on his face, he might take the blindfold from our hearts; that by receiving the spits, he might wash the face of our soul; that by the blows by which he was struck on the head, he might heal the head of the human race, which is Adam; that by the blows by which he was slapped, his greatest praise might applaud by means of our hands and lips ... that by his cross he might eliminate our torment; that by his death, he might put to death our death .... The insults he received remove our shame. His bonds made us free. By the crown of thorns on his head, we have obtained the diadem of the kingdom. By his wounds we have been healed. By his burial we resurrect. By his descent into hell we ascend into heaven." (a See Cahill, FirstCommentory on Mark)
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (Via Crucis 2007):
One day, walking in the valley of the Jordan not far from Jericho, Jesus halted and spoke to the Twelve with words of fire, words they found impossible to understand: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered to the Gentiles, and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon; and they will scourge him and kill him, ….”. Now at last, the full meaning of those enigmatic words is revealed: in the courtyard of the pretorium, the residence of the Roman governor in Jerusalem, the grim ritual of torture has begun, while outside the palace the murmur of the crowd begins to swell, in expectation of the spectacle of the death march.
In that room closed to the public, things take place that will be repeated down the centuries in a thousand sadistic and perverse ways, in the darkness of countless prison cells. Jesus is not only physically struck but mocked. Indeed, the Evangelist Luke, to describe those insults, uses the word “blaspheme”, as if to bring out the deepest meaning of the violent abuse which the soldiers heap on their victim. And the torments inflicted upon Christ’s flesh are accompanied by a gruesome farce that is an affront to his personal dignity.
The Evangelist John recounts that insulting parody, based on the popular game of the mock king: "And the soldiers plaited a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and arrayed him in a purple robe: they came up to him, saying "Hail, King of the Jews!". There is a crown whose points are made of thorny twigs; the royal purple is replaced by a red mantle; there is the imperial salute: “Hail, Caesar!”. And yet, behind all this mockery, we can see a glorious sign: yes, Jesus is reviled like a mock king, yet in reality he is the true Sovereign of history.
The face transfigured on Tabor is disfigured (Luke 9:29) ; the one who is “the reflection of God’s glory” (Hebrews 1:3) is darkened and abased; as Isaiah had proclaimed, the messianic Servant of the Lord has his back furrowed by the lash, his beard plucked, his face covered with spittle (Isaiah 50:6). In him, the God of glory, our suffering humanity is revealed; in him, the Lord of history, the frailty of every creature is revealed; in him, the Creator of the world, the painful cry of every living creature finds an echo.
Before the High Priest (Luke 22:66–71)
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| Mattias Stom - Christ before Caiaphas (1630) |
67 They said, "If you are the Messiah, tell us," but he replied to them, "If I tell you, you will not believe,
68 and if I question, you will not respond.
69 But from this time on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God."
70 They all asked, "Are you then the Son of God?" He replied to them, "You say that I am."
71 Then they said, "What further need have we for testimony? We have heard it from his own mouth."
Sanhedrin: the word is a Hebraized form of a Greek word meaning a “council,” and refers to the elders, chief priests, and scribes who met under the high priest’s leadership to decide religious and legal questions that did not pertain to Rome’s interests. Jewish sources are not clear on the competence of the Sanhedrin to sentence and to execute during this period. Further mudding the picture is , even if they had executioner’s powers, the Sanhedrin were not allowed to hold capital trials on the eve of a Sabbath or a festival (m. Sanh 4:2). There have been many scholarly debates as to whether this “meeting” was a trial or not. This question can not be clearly resolved. Fr. Raymond Brown’s The Death of the Messiah (Vol. 1), pp. 328-397 is a comprehensive treatment. Brown’s estimate is that this is a legal proceeding, more attuned to our concept of a preliminary hearing. In any case, that seems to be Luke’s treatment, as there are no religious charges preferred. The only formal charges are political ones brought by the Roman authorities (23:1).
The Sanhedrin had seventy members, including chief priests, scribes, and elders (Mark 15:1), presided over by the high priest. The high priest was a political appointee and was the highest-ranking Jewish authority in the land. Religiously, he alone had the privilege of entering the Holy of Holies in the temple once a year, on the Day of Atonement. Politically, he was held accountable to Rome for maintaining public order and ensuring the payment of tribute, and he could be deposed at will. Financially, he oversaw the temple and all its commerce, the hub of Jerusalem's economy. Under the Romans, the average term of office for the high priest was four years. Caiaphas's unusually long tenure (AD 18-36) testifies to his adeptness at collaborating with Rome. Peter and John (Acts 4:5-21). Stephen (Acts 6:12-15), and Paul (Acts 22:30-23:1 0) would all stand trial before the Sanhedrin as Jesus did.
Caiaphas was the Jewish high priest from A.D. 18 to 36. During this time he also presided over the Jewish high court, the Sanhedrin. The Gospels remember Caiaphas as the one who counseled the Jerusalem leadership that Jesus should die instead of the people (Jn 11:49-52) and who eventually declared him guilty of blasphemy (Mt 27:62; Mk 14:61). He was the son-in-law of the former high priest Annas, who also examined Jesus on the night of his arrest (Jn 18:13, 19-24). The High priest was the chief religious representative of biblical Israel. He served as the primary mediator between God, to whom he interceded for the people with prayers and sacrifices, and the Israelite community, for whom he acquired blessings. In the New Testament period, the high priest was also the acting head of the Jewish Sanhedrin.
Like in Matthew 26:57-67, Caiaphas, other chief priests, and the Bet Shammai dominated Sanhedrin of the time are depicted interrogating Jesus. They are looking for "false evidence" with which to frame Jesus, but are unable to find any. Jesus remains silent throughout the proceedings until Caiaphas demands that Jesus say whether he is the Christ. Jesus replies "You have said so", and "I am: and ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." KJV Caiaphas and the other men charge him with blasphemy and order him beaten.
Previously and as mentioned in John 11, the high priest Caiaphas had called a gathering of the Sanhedrin in reaction to the raising of Lazarus:
47 So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, "What are we going to do? This man is performing many signs.
48 If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation."
49 But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, "You know nothing,
50 nor do you consider that it is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish."
51 He did not say this on his own, but since he was high priest for that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation,
52 and not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God.
53 So from that day on they planned to kill him.
comments by Fr. George Corrigan, Catholic Priest (https://friarmusings.wordpress.com):
The long nighttime ends with an early morning session before the Sanhedrin, the ruling council of the Jews in Jerusalem. Although the gospel accounts give this event the semblance of a “trial” it was probably an informal hearing as the leaders prepared their case against Jesus for presentation before the Roman governor. Luke’s description of a single meeting of the Sanhedrin, taking place at daybreak, is more likely than that of Mark and Matthew, who describe a night meeting followed by a morning session to carry out the decision. A night meeting of the Sanhedrin is otherwise unknown.
Jesus is unwilling to identify himself as the kind of Messiah popularly expected; rather, he speaks of himself as authoritative judge in his role as the Son of Man (Dan 7:13–14). They interpret this answer (correctly) as an affirmation of a special divine status; they can only view this as blasphemy, sufficient reason to condemn him to death (see Mark 14:62–64). The Sanhedrin was (likely) not empowered to impose the death sentence; they had to submit their accusation to the judgment of the Roman authority.
Luke’s narration of the events is distinctive for what it lacks in comparison to the Gospels of Mark and Matthew: there is no succession of false witnesses, no rending of the documents by the chief priests, no cry of blasphemy or statement that Jesus deserves death. As well there are unique features in what Luke includes: the whole Sanhedrin is involved in the questioning – thus the rejection is not from the chief priest alone, but the whole of the religious leadership. And perhaps more importantly, Jesus’ response concerning his being Son of God is answered, not in terms of the parousia (as in Mark and Matthew), but in terms of the resurrection – after which the risen Christ will be seated at the right-hand of the Father.
Luke brings us quickly to the heart of the issue: the reader of this gospel knows from the opening scenes of the infancy narrative that Jesus is the “Messiah” and the “Son of Man”. But the opponents are closed to this truth. They have not believed his words and deeds and an admission that he is the “Son of God” will not help their unbelief, because they do not seek him. Perhaps ironically, Jesus tells them, “in your very question, you possess the answer and the gateway to eternal life”: “You say that I am” (v.70).
The exultation of Jesus to the right hand of God is beginning in the Sanhedrin session; it will be advanced on the cross, where Jesus will speak of being in paradise this day (23:43); and it will be fulfilled in the ascension of Jesus which concludes the Gospel (24:50-51).
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (JN):
In the early stages of his ministry, the Temple authorities had evidently shown little interest in the figure of Jesus or in the movement that formed around him; it all seemed a rather provincial affair—one of those movements that arose in Galilee from time to time and did not warrant much attention. The situation changed on “Palm Sunday”.
The Messianic homage paid to Jesus on his entrance into Jerusalem; the cleansing of the Temple with the interpretation he gave to it, which seemed to indicate the end of the Temple altogether and a radical change in the cult, contrary to the ordinances established by Moses; Jesus’ teaching in the Temple, from which there emerged a claim to authority that seemed to channel Messianic hopes in a new direction, threatening Israel’s monotheism; the miracles that Jesus worked publicly and the growing multitude that gathered around him—all this added up to a situation that could no longer be ignored.
It seems reasonable to assume that what took place when Jesus was brought before the Sanhedrin was not a proper trial, but more of a cross-examination that led to the decision to hand him over to the Roman Governor for sentencing.
Only John explicitly recounts a session of the Sanhedrin, which served to form opinion and to shape an eventual decision on the case of Jesus (11:47-53).
One is tempted to say that the motive for acting against Jesus was a political concern shared by the priestly aristocracy and the Pharisees, though they arrived at it from different starting points; yet this political interpretation of the figure of Jesus and his ministry caused them to miss completely what was most characteristic and new about him. Through the message that he proclaimed, Jesus had actually achieved a separation of the religious from the political, thereby changing the world: this is what truly marks the essence of his new path.
Nevertheless, we must not be too hasty in condemning the “purely political” outlook of his opponents. For in the world they inhabited, the two spheres—political and religious—were inseparable. The “purely” political existed no more than the “purely” religious. The Temple, the Holy City, and the Holy Land with its people: these were neither purely political nor purely religious realities. Anything to do with Temple, nation, and land involved both the religious foundation of politics and its religious consequences. The defense of the “place” and the “nation” was ultimately a religious affair, because it was concerned with God’s house and God’s people.
It is important to distinguish between this underlying religious and political motivation on the part of Israel’s leaders and the specific power-interests of the dynasty of Annas and Caiaphas, which effectively precipitated the catastrophe of the year 70 and so caused precisely the outcome it had been their task to avoid.
In his teaching and in his whole ministry, Jesus had inaugurated a non-political Messianic kingdom and had begun to detach these two hitherto inseparable realities from one another. But this separation—essential to Jesus’ message—of politics from faith, of God’s people from politics, was ultimately possible only through the Cross. Only through the total loss of all external power, through the radical stripping away that led to the Cross, could this new world come into being. Only through faith in the Crucified One, in him who was robbed of all worldly power and thereby exalted, does the new community arise, the new manner of God’s dominion in the world.
John expressed with great clarity this striking combination in Caiaphas of carrying out God’s will and blind self-seeking. While the Council members were perplexed as to what should be done in view of the danger posed by the movement surrounding Jesus, he made the decisive intervention: “You do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish” (11:50). John designates this statement expressly as a “prophetic utterance” that Caiaphas formulated through the charism of his office as high priest, and not of his own accord.
The immediate consequence of Caiaphas’ statement was this: until that moment, the assembled Council had held back in fear from a death sentence, looking for other ways out of the crisis, admittedly without finding a solution. Only a theologically motivated declaration from the high priest, spoken with the authority of his office, could dispel their doubts and prepare them in principle for such a momentous decision. On the surface, the content of Caiaphas’ “prophecy” is thoroughly pragmatic, and, considered in those terms, it seems reasonable from his point of view: if the people can be saved through the death of one man (and in no other way), then this individual’s death might seem the lesser evil and the politically correct path. But what on the surface sounds and is intended to be merely pragmatic acquires an entirely new depth on the basis of its “prophetic” quality. The one man, Jesus, dies for the nation: the mystery of vicarious atonement shines forth, and it is this that constitutes the most profound content of Jesus’ mission. After this pronouncement of Caiaphas, which was tantamount to a death sentence, John added a further comment from the perspective of the disciples’ faith. First he makes it clear—as we have seen—that the reference to dying for the people was a prophetic utterance, and then he goes on to say that Jesus would die, “not for the nation only, but to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (11:52). On first sight this seems a thoroughly Jewish manner of speaking. It expresses the hope that, in the Messianic age, the Israelites scattered around the world would be gathered together in their own land (cf. Barrett, The Gospel according to Saint John, p. 407).
On the lips of the evangelist, though, this saying takes on a new meaning. The gathering is oriented no longer toward a specific geographical territory, but toward the growth into unity of the children of God: we immediately hear echoes of the central element of Jesus’ high-priestly prayer. The gathering is directed toward the unity of all believers, and thus it points ahead to the community of the Church and even beyond, toward definitive eschatological unity.
The scattered children of God are no longer exclusively Jews, but children of Abraham in the wider sense that Paul expounded: people who, like Abraham, focus their gaze upon God; people who are ready to listen to him and to respond to his call—Advent people, we might say. The new community of Jews and Gentiles is taking shape here (cf. Jn 10:16). So a further window is opened onto our Lord’s reference at the Last Supper to the “many”, for whom he would lay down his life: he was referring to the gathering of the “children of God”, that is to say, all those who are willing to hear his call.
After the cleansing of the Temple, two charges against Jesus were in circulation. The first had to do with his interpretation of the prophetic gesture of driving cattle and traders out of the Temple, which seemed like an attack on the Holy Place itself and, hence, on the Torah, on which Israel’s life was built.
In the cleansing of the Temple Jesus fights there, on the one hand against self-serving abuse of the sacred space, but his prophetic gesture and the interpretation he gave to it go much deeper: the old cult of the stone Temple has come to an end. The hour of the new worship in “spirit and truth” has come. The Temple of stone must be destroyed, so that the new one, the New Covenant with its new style of worship, can come. Yet at the same time, this means that Jesus himself must endure crucifixion, so that, after his Resurrection, he may become the new Temple.
I consider it important that it was not the cleansing of the Temple as such for which Jesus was called to account, but only the interpretation he gave to his action. We may conclude that the symbolic gesture itself remained within acceptable limits and did not give rise to public unrest, such as would have supplied a motive for legal intervention. The danger lay in the interpretation, in the seeming attack on the Temple, and in the authority that Jesus was claiming to possess.
On the basis of Jesus’ teaching in the Temple, a second charge was in circulation: that Jesus had made a Messianic claim, through which he somehow put himself on a par with God and thus seemed to contradict the very basis of Israel’s faith—the firm belief that there is only one God. We should note that both charges are of a purely theological nature. Yet given the inseparability of the religious and political realms, of which we spoke earlier, the charges do also have a political dimension. As the place of Israel’s sacrifices, to which the whole people comes on pilgrimage for great feasts, the Temple is the basis of Israel’s inner unity. The Messianic claim is a claim to kingship over Israel. Hence the placing of the charge “King of the Jews” above the Cross, to indicate the reason for Jesus’ execution.
Let us come to the decisive point: to Caiaphas’ question and Jesus’ answer. According to Mark, the high priest’s question is: “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” And Jesus answers: “I am; and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (14:62).
The high priest questions Jesus about his Messiahship and refers to it in terms of Psalm 2:7 (cf. Ps 110:3), using the expression “Son of the Blessed”—Son of God. In the context of the question, this expression refers to the Messianic tradition, while leaving open the form of sonship involved. One may assume that Caiaphas not only based the question on theological tradition, but also formulated it specifically in terms of Jesus’ preaching, which had come to his attention.
In Mark’s account, Jesus answered the question that would determine his fate quite simply and clearly: “I am” (could there be an echo here of Exodus 3:14, “I AM WHO I AM”?). Jesus then explains more closely, basing himself on Psalm 110:1 and Daniel 7:13, how Messiahship and sonship are to be understood. Matthew has Jesus answer more indirectly: “You have said so. But I tell you...” (26:64). Jesus does not contradict Caiaphas, but in response to the high priest’s formulation he explains how he himself wants his mission to be understood—using words from Scripture.
Luke, finally, presents two distinct questions (22:67, 70). In response to the Sanhedrin’s challenge: “If you are the Christ, tell us”, the Lord speaks enigmatically, neither openly agreeing nor explicitly denying it. This is followed by his own confession, combining Psalm 110 and Daniel 7, and then—after the Sanhedrin’s insistent question: “Are you the Son of God, then?” he answers: “You say that I am.”
From all this we may conclude that Jesus accepted the title Messiah, with all the meanings accruing to it from the tradition, but at the same time he qualified it in a way that could only lead to a guilty verdict, which he could have avoided either by rejecting it or by proposing a milder form of Messianism.
As the events of the Jewish War show, there were certain circles within the Sanhedrin that would have favored the liberation of Israel through political and military means. But the way in which Jesus presented his claim seemed to them clearly unsuited to the effective advancement of their cause. So the status quo was preferable, since Rome at least respected the religious foundations of Israel, with the result that the survival of Temple and nation could be considered more or less secure.
Jesus left no room for political or military interpretations of the Messiah’s activity. No, the Messiah—he himself—will come as the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven. Objectively this is quite close to what we find in John’s account when Jesus says: “My kingship is not of this world” (18:36). He claims to sit at the right hand of the Power, that is to say, to come from God in the manner of Daniel’s Son of Man, in order to establish God’s definitive kingdom.
This must have struck the members of the Sanhedrin as politically absurd and theologically unacceptable, for it meant that Jesus was claiming to be close to the “Power”, to participate in God’s own nature, and this would have been understood as blasphemy. However, Jesus had merely pieced a few scriptural quotations together and had expressed his mission “according to the Scriptures”, in language drawn from the Scriptures themselves. But to the members of the Sanhedrin, the application of the noble words of Scripture to Jesus evidently appeared as an intolerable attack on God’s otherness, on his uniqueness.
In any event, as far as the high priest and the members of the assembly were concerned, the evidence for blasphemy was supplied by Jesus’ answer, at which Caiaphas “tore his robes, and said: ‘He has uttered blasphemy’ ” (Mt 26:65):
59 The chief priests and the entire Sanhedrin kept trying to obtain false testimony against Jesus in order to put him to death,
60 but they found none, though many false witnesses came forward. Finally two came forward
61 who stated, "This man said, 'I can destroy the temple of God and within three days rebuild it.'"
62 The high priest rose and addressed him, "Have you no answer? What are these men testifying against you?"
63 But Jesus was silent. Then the high priest said to him, "I order you to tell us under oath before the living God whether you are the Messiah, the Son of God."
64 Jesus said to him in reply, "You have said so. But I tell you: From now on you will see 'the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power' and 'coming on the clouds of heaven.'"
65 Then the high priest tore his robes and said, "He has blasphemed! What further need have we of witnesses? You have now heard the blasphemy;
66 what is your opinion?" They said in reply, "He deserves to die!"
“The tearing of the high priest’s garment does not occur through anger; rather, it is the action prescribed for the officiating judge as a sign of outrage upon hearing a blasphemy” (Gnilka, Matthäusevangelium II, p. 429). There now erupts over Jesus, who had prophesied his coming in glory, the brutal mockery of those who know they are in a position of strength: they make him feel their power, their utter contempt. He whom they had feared only days before was now in their hands. The cowardly conformism of weak souls feels strong in attacking him who now seems utterly powerless.
It does not occur to them that by mocking and striking Jesus, they are causing the destiny of the Suffering Servant to be literally fulfilled in him (cf. Gnilka, Matthäusevangelium II, p. 430). Abasement and exaltation are mysteriously intertwined. As the one enduring blows, he is the Son of Man, coming in the cloud of concealment from God and establishing the kingdom of the Son of Man, the kingdom of the humanity that proceeds from God. “Hereafter you will see. . .”, Jesus had said in Matthew’s account (26:64), in a striking paradox. Hereafter—something new is beginning. All through history, people look upon the disfigured face of Jesus, and there they recognize the glory of God.
While this is happening, Peter insists for the third time that he has nothing to do with Jesus:
66 While Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the high priest's maids came along.
67 Seeing Peter warming himself, she looked intently at him and said, "You too were with the Nazarene, Jesus."
68 But he denied it saying, "I neither know nor understand what you are talking about." So he went out into the outer court. [Then the cock crowed.]
69 The maid saw him and began again to say to the bystanders, "This man is one of them."
70 Once again he denied it. A little later the bystanders said to Peter once more, "Surely you are one of them; for you too are a Galilean."
71 He began to curse and to swear, "I do not know this man about whom you are talking."
72 And immediately a cock crowed a second time. Then Peter remembered the word that Jesus had said to him, "Before the cock crows twice you will deny me three times." He broke down and wept.
The crowing of the cock was regarded as a sign of the end of the night. It opened the day. For Peter, too, cockcrow marked the end of the night of the soul, into which he had sunk. What Jesus had said about his denial before the cock crowed suddenly came back to him—in all its terrifying truth. Luke adds the detail that at this moment the chained and condemned Jesus is led off, to be brought before Pilate’s court. Jesus and Peter encounter one another. Jesus’ gaze meets the eyes and the soul of the unfaithful disciple. And Peter “went out and wept bitterly” (Lk 22:62).
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