The Last Week of Jesus's LifeSýnishorn

Sunday, March 29, 33 AD

Passover.

Jerusalem.

It’s the perfect time and place to stage a revolution.

Passover in Jerusalem is a religio-political powder keg, a celebration of Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. It is a decidedly un-Roman celebration if ever there was one. The memory of 4 BC lingers in the mind of Annas the wicked high priest and the religious elite—after the death of Herod the Great, inept Archelaus’s men slaughtered three thousand pilgrims in the temple.

Passover falls during the Festival of Unleavened Bread, a weeklong celebration of the nation’s exodus from Egyptian slavery. Potentially hundreds of thousands of Jewish pilgrims pack the capital—excellent for starting riots—and it is a security nightmare for the Romans: Jews everywhere—in every nook, cranny, valley, and hilltop. Tents as far as the eye can see, smoke billowing skyward from ten thousand fires, blood pouring from the temple sacrifices like a swollen river. Moreover, the Jewish prophet Daniel predicted God would show up and end the occupation in 70 x 7 years. After centuries of abuse at the hands of the Greeks and Romans, Jewish expectation is at an all-time high.

A few weeks before Passover, Jesus decides it’s time to head back into Judea. The disciples think it’s a terrible idea, but “doubting” Thomas resolutely says, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16). Jesus gathers his seventy-odd disciples, plus his family and a crowd (Luke 19:11), and begins his final pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He does so extremely slowly and publicly—no point in getting arrested or assassinated before the big finale—and makes several stops along the way.

The most noteworthy is when he learns of his dear friend Lazarus’s passing. Two miles outside Jerusalem in a village called Bethany, Lazarus and his two sisters, Martha and Mary, are old pals and regular hosts for the rabbi on his trips to Jerusalem (Luke 10:38). Lazarus’s corpse has been decomposing in a tomb for four days. Martha scolds Jesus for not coming sooner and healing her ill brother but professes faith that God can still heal through Jesus. When a weeping Mary joins her sister, Jesus cries, and then does what no itinerant rabbi-healer has done before: He raises the dead.

This unsurprisingly freaks out the locals. Many believe in him, but others hightail it to the Pharisees and tell them what has happened. The Pharisees run and tell the corrupt high priests, Annas and Caiaphas. As Jesus predicted in his Luke 16 parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the House of Annas not only does not believe that Lazarus has risen from the dead, but they immediately hatch a plot to have Lazarus murdered because so many Jews are crossing over to Team Jesus (John 12:9–11).

In John 11:48, the chief priests and Pharisees call an emergency assembly of the high priestly advisory council, the synedrion. Much self-centered hand-wringing ensues: “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” The ice-cold high priest, Caiaphas, however, cuts to the chase, saying “It is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish” (v. 50). This may seem patriotic on the surface, but it is nothing more than a war strategy to maintain his family’s exploitative sources of income.

Word evidently makes its way back to Jesus (perhaps through sympathizers in the synedrion like the Galilean Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea), and he retreats into a wilderness village called Ephraim, a dozen or so miles northeast of Jerusalem. We don’t know how long he laid low, but six days before Passover he heads back to Lazarus’s house. A large crowd of Jews gets wind of the arrival and comes out to see Jesus and gawk at Lazarus. It’s just the kind of gathering the Romans don’t want to see during Passover.