Why A Non-Believer Loves Holy Week
Also: Ten Virgins
Holy Tuesday is, in terms of Holy Week, an off day. Not a lot happened on Holy Tuesday; Jesus told a couple of parables (one of which he may not have even told, more on that later). The rest of Holy Week is pretty packed - tomorrow is the day Judas sold Jesus out, Thursday we got the Last Supper, Friday is a big one obviously, Saturday is the harrowing of Hell, and then Sunday the main man pops up again for an encore. But Tuesday? It’s slower. It’s maybe Jesus’ last slow day.
This means this is a good opportunity to talk about why I like Holy Week. I don’t like it for the religious stuff; I don’t believe that Jesus Christ was god or messiah or what have you, and I don’t go to any services. I don’t paint and hide eggs. I don’t participate in the stuff that comes to mind when you think of Holy Week.
No, what I love about Holy Week is the story. They made a Jesus movie called The Greatest Story Ever Told (Donald Pleasance plays the Devil and Charlton Heston is incredibly hilarious as a very aggro John the Baptist, and John Wayne makes the dumbest cameo appearance imaginable), and that title actually sums it up. The story of Holy Week is endlessly compelling to me, and it’s what makes the story of Jesus compelling to me, a non-believer.
As a non-traditional college student majoring in Religious Studies I find the history of the week fascinating, and I love learning about the evolving theology and the pageantry that has grown up around this event. But as a nerd, as a reader, as a devotee of story, it’s the narrative that really grips me. This is one of the great narratives, and it’s the power of that narrative that draws us back to the life of Christ. Christmas? That’s boring. Judas betraying Jesus with a kiss? That’s drama.
The story of Holy Week speaks to me on a deeply human level, even as many believers hold its main character up to superhuman standards. Here’s the outline: a man comes to town and knows that doing so will be the death of him. He knows that the actions he is taking are guaranteeing his doom, and yet he must go through with them for the greater good. He is betrayed by one of his best friends, he struggles with the weight of the task before him, he finally lets go and is killed in one of the worst ways imaginable.
A total bummer, right? Not exactly - even if you don’t believe in the Resurrection, the man’s sacrifice is not in vain; two thousand years later we are still talking about this peasant from Galilee. He is easily the most famous human being to ever live. And all he had to do to get there was to die. As Jesus himself says in Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice’s masterpiece Jesus Christ Superstar: “To conquer death all you have to do is die.”
The arc of Holy Week is unbeatable, from the crowds greeting Christ on Palm Sunday to the crowds chanting for his death on Good Friday (at least in the more anti-semitic leaning Gospels) to the final transcendent escape from the tomb, you got yourself a good three act structure here. The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of Jesus H Christ, if you will. What a story!
But it’s also a story I identify with. You should too. We live in a world where our suffering is guaranteed, where we will at times be forced to do things that will lead us to unhappiness because we know it is the right thing to do. Maybe you’ve already had this experience: given up a dream of a career to care for a child, left a relationship before you wanted to because other needs arose, put the clothes of your young, carefree self in the back of the closet to reluctantly make more room for the garb of the adult. Big and small we have all made sacrifices, found ourselves in tough situations, been misunderstood or hated. We have struggled to carry that burden, wanted to shrug it off and leave it all behind. This is exactly what Jesus goes through during Holy Week. Although, to be fair, his week ends much worse than most of our weeks will.
For me the crucial part of the Holy Week story is the Agony in the Garden. The night before the Crucifixion Jesus goes alone to pray to God asking that maybe he doesn’t have to die so horribly. Jesus knows what’s coming and he wants no part of it, and he is so upset, so anxious, so afraid, that he sweats blood. What an image, but in an anxiety-riddled 21st century what a relatable moment. When I was able to visit Jerusalem I went to the Garden of Gethsemane and I saw the supposed spot where Jesus prayed and had his moment of doubt and pain and I am not afraid to tell you I cried. I don’t know if that event happened or not, but the power of the story has gotten me through difficult times. It is getting me through a difficult time now, as my girlfriend deals with a very serious and very shitty cancer. The moral of the story is that it’s okay to not want the hard times, what matters is what you do with the hard times. Jesus asks for the cup of poison to be taken from him, but when God refuses in silence, he drinks.
As I have begun studying religion and Christianity in particular a new element of Holy Week has become interesting to me. It is pretty clear that none of the apostles expected this week to end with their master dead; it’s arguable whether or not Jesus thought that was going to be the outcome. I have to imagine nobody involved wanted this; to die on a cross was a painful and humiliating torture reserved usually for slaves. Being a martyr in the ancient world would certainly have involved dying in battle, not getting beaten, whipped and nailed to wood. This was not anyone’s preferred outcome.
When this all happened the survivors had to make sense of the horror of that week, of that event. And the narrative of Holy Week, and eventually the entire concept of modern Christianity grew out of that attempt at sense-making. This grotesque end to their teacher’s life? Ordained by God, and full of deep meaning. The death of Christ himself? Simply a temporary inconvenience, necessary for the salvation of all mankind. They found a way to make sense of the senseless and accidentally altered the entire course of human history in the process.
Making sense of the senseless is the only thing we can do. That’s what stories are for, to make sense of things in a world where nothing really makes sense. It makes no sense that my beautiful, smart and vibrant girlfriend has to deal with a brutal cancer and its brutal treatments while Donald Trump is gearing up for his second presidential nomination and is using his legal troubles to enrich himself. For the apostles it made no sense why the Romans and the high priests flourished while their master died in agony. They needed to find a meaning in it. The world will never give us - we must impose one ourselves. That’s why storytellers were born.
Retrofitting events became something of a regular activity for the early Christians. The reclaiming of the death of Jesus was one part of that. But another retcon that needed to happen became clear in the decades after he died, as this new religion began to spread. One thing you have to know about Jesus’ ministry is that he was an apocalyptic preacher - he ran around telling everybody that the end of the world was nigh, that the kingdom of God was coming soon. How soon? From Matthew:
“Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
The Gospels were written down sometime after 70 CE, maybe between then and 90AD. John was written the latest, closer to 100 CE. It is pretty obvious that nobody Jesus was talking to there was going to still be alive in 100 CE. You got yourself a problem.
That problem is visible in the epistles of Paul. Paul was the main guy who brought Christianity to the gentiles; in many ways he was the true founder of the religion (this statement could cause a fist fight in certain circles). His epistles - a fancy word for letters! - are the earliest Christian writings we have, predating the Gospels themselves, and there’s a theme that Paul has in those letters: the Second Coming is like right around the corner, so don’t make any big changes in your life. You’re single? Don’t bother getting married, Jesus is coming. You’re married but unhappy? Tough it out a little bit, Jesus is coming. You’re a slave? Don't sweat it, Jesus is coming (he really said that).
But Jesus didn’t come. The promised Kingdom of Heaven, supposedly arriving while some who were standing there had not yet tasted death, did not come. The Second Coming did not happen. And Christianity moved into its second century and needed to address this.
This brings us back to Holy Tuesday. One of the two parables Jesus tells today is the parable of the Ten Virgins. Here’s how it goes; there are ten virgins (or maybe just young women) and they are waiting for a bridegroom to come in the night. Each of these women have their own lamp, and five of the women were smart and brought extra oil for the lamp. Five were not thinking ahead, or maybe they took the bridegroom at his word that he would be showing up at 8 sharp, and they didn’t bring extra oil. As midnight approaches the virgins are called - the bridegroom arrives! The five who had extra oil are able to go out and meet him, but the other five (after being denied oil by the ladies with extra - not very nice) run off trying to find oil and miss the whole thing. They don’t get to go to the party with the bridegroom.
Many scholars think that this parable was inserted later (the Jesus Seminar, a convocation of academics dedicated to figuring out the historical Jesus and trying to decide what quotes are really his, marks this parable as unlikely to be a real teaching of Christ when he was alive), and you can understand why. The moral of this story is that you have to be prepared to wait a long time for the bridegroom, aka Jesus. If you’re not stocking up on oil and getting ready for the long haul you’re going to miss the Kingdom of Heaven.
The Ten Virgins story is in Matthew, which also includes this ass-covering line:
“But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
Which indicates Jesus himself didn’t know when he would come back! It’s pretty likely that this was also added in later to give a bit of wiggle room as the second century began and Jesus had not made his promised comeback.
This has had big implications in world history, as many grifters and zealots have tried to call the time of the Second Coming, and we live in a country whose policy is largely shaped by people who believe in really fringe readings of some of this shit, but I can’t be too mad at the early Christians. They believed something that, at the time, wasn’t really very harmful. In fact, early Christianity was amazingly progressive for the ancient world. But as time went on one of the linchpins of that belief became unsteady, and they had to figure out how to make it more solid. They accomplished this by doing a little bit of a retcon, setting the stage for the entirety of DC Comics’ storytelling since 1986.