What Happened During Holy Week? Day by Day (8 of 12)

Roughly a third of each Gospel covers one week. That proportion is the clearest statement the Gospel writers make about what they think matters.

Was the Triumphal Entry Spontaneous?

No. It was staged, deliberately, from a prophetic text.

The colt is arranged in advance, with a password of sorts: the Lord needs it. Jesus rides in on a donkey rather than walking, which is a change of practice.

Zech 9:9 is the script: see, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey. Every person in that crowd knew the verse.

A conqueror entered a city on a warhorse. A king coming in peace rode a donkey. Choosing the donkey was a public claim and a public qualification of that claim at the same time.

Luke 19:41-44 then has him weeping over the city as he approaches, saying that they did not recognise the time of God’s coming to them, and describing a siege in detail.

Why Did Jesus Curse a Fig Tree?

Because it was an acted parable, and Mark makes the connection unmistakable.

Mark 11:12-25 splits the story around the temple. He curses the fruitless tree, then goes into the temple and overturns the tables, then the next morning they pass the tree and it has withered.

Sandwiching the temple action inside the fig tree story is Mark’s way of telling you they interpret each other. A tree in leaf with no fruit, and a temple in full operation not doing what it was for.

The charge in the temple is a combination of two prophets: a house of prayer for all nations, from Isaiah, and a den of robbers, from Jeremiah. The Jeremiah phrase is not about overcharging. A den is where robbers retreat to feel safe.

What Was the Day of Controversy?

Every faction taking a turn, and every trap failing.

The chief priests and elders challenge his authority and he answers with a question about John’s baptism that they cannot afford to answer either way.

The Pharisees and Herodians bring the tax question, which is designed so that either answer is fatal. He asks for a coin, asks whose image is on it, and gives it back to them.

The Sadducees bring the woman with seven husbands, meant to make resurrection absurd. He tells them they know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God, and answers from the passage about the burning bush, since the Sadducees accepted the books of Moses.

A scribe asks which command is greatest, and gets the two that carry everything.

The day closes with the seven woes in Matt 23, and then with a widow putting two small coins into the treasury, which he says is more than all the rest.

What Is the Olivet Discourse?

The temple’s destruction and the end of the age, and separating the two is the hard part.

Matt 24 and 25, Mark 13, Luke 21. It begins with a disciple admiring the temple stones and Jesus saying not one will be left on another.

The prediction was accurate. The temple was destroyed in AD 70, within the generation, and it has never been rebuilt.

Woven through that is language about the coming of the Son of Man that reaches further than the first century. Christians have disagreed about which parts refer to which for a very long time, and the disagreement is honest rather than the product of bad faith on any side.

What Happened at the Last Supper?

Passover was reassigned, and the reassignment was the point.

The meal follows the Passover pattern, and every element in it pointed backward to the exodus. Jesus takes the bread and the cup and points them forward, at himself.

The foot washing is in John 13, where he takes the role of the lowest servant in the house, and Peter objects until told he will have no part otherwise.

The new commandment follows, and the extended farewell discourse, and the prayer in John 17.

Judas leaves during the meal, and John adds four words that do more than any description: and it was night.

What Happened in Gethsemane?

He asked to be released and then went anyway.

Mark 14:32-42. He takes Peter, James, and John further in, tells them his soul is overwhelmed to the point of death, and goes on alone.

The prayer is the cup: take this from me, yet not what I will but what you will. Luke adds the sweat like drops of blood.

John has no Gethsemane scene, and Wright argues that is because he moved it. In John 12, in Jerusalem and before the arrest, Jesus says his heart is troubled and asks whether he should pray to be saved from this hour, then answers his own question. Same struggle, same refusal, staged earlier and in public rather than at night among sleeping friends.

Three times he comes back and finds them asleep. The men who had promised to die with him could not stay awake for an hour.

Then the arrest. A crowd with swords and clubs, a kiss as the signal, a sword drawn and rebuked, and the desertion. Mark alone adds the young man who fled naked, leaving his linen cloth behind.

How Many Trials Were There?

Six, in a matter of hours, and the process was irregular at nearly every stage.

Three Jewish hearings: Annas, then Caiaphas with the assembled council, then a formal condemnation at daybreak.

Three Roman ones: Pilate, then Herod Antipas, then Pilate again.

The irregularities are numerous and they are specific.

Capital cases required daytime proceedings. This one ran at night.

Trials were prohibited during festivals, and this was Passover week.

A capital case could not be concluded in a single sitting, and twenty-four hours were required between sentence and execution. Neither rule was observed.

Trials could not be held on the day before the Sabbath.

Sanhedrin proceedings were to take place in the Hall of Hewn Stones on the temple grounds. The preliminary hearing was held in the house of Annas and then moved to the high priest’s private residence.

Prosecution witnesses were meant to appear on notice rather than be assembled in haste, and the ones produced contradicted each other, which under the law was fatal to the case.

And Jesus was given no opportunity to mount a defence or call witnesses for himself.

Then the charge shifted when it crossed to Rome, from blasphemy to sedition, because blasphemy was not a Roman offence.

Pilate declares him innocent repeatedly and sentences him anyway. The Barabbas exchange puts an actual insurrectionist in the place of a man charged with insurrection.

What Were Peter’s Denials?

Three, in the courtyard, and he was the only one close enough to be asked.

The rest had scattered. Peter followed, which is why a servant girl was in a position to recognise him.

Luke adds the detail the others leave out: the Lord turned and looked straight at Peter. Then the rooster, then the weeping.

Underneath it sits Luke 22:31-32, spoken hours earlier. Satan has asked to sift you, but I have prayed for you, and when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers. The failure was foreseen, the return was foreseen, and the assignment on the far side of it was already given.

Part of a series following the Life of Jesus timeline.

Footnotes2

1. The Jeremiah phrase about a den of robbers is regularly explained as a comment on dishonest exchange rates. That is not what a den is. Robbers do not rob in the den; they retreat to it. The charge is that the temple had become a place where people felt safe while behaving otherwise elsewhere.
2. The trial irregularities are worth listing precisely rather than gesturing at, because the point is not that the authorities were villains but that the process was rushed past its own safeguards. Several of those safeguards existed specifically to prevent what happened.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: Matt 21-27, Mark 11-15, Luke 19:28-23:25, John 12-19, Zech 9:9, Isa 56:7, and Jer 7:11.

N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part Two: Chapters 11-21 (SPCK, 2002). Supports the argument that John relocates the Gethsemane struggle to chapter 12, in public and before the arrest. Supplied in full.

Myron S. Augsburger, Matthew, The Preacher's Commentary (Thomas Nelson, 1982), 24:18. Supports the itemised list of legal irregularities in the trial.

Where the sourcing stops: the passion is dated to Nisan of either AD 30 or AD 33 and both are held by serious scholarship. The argument runs through the calendar, since the crucifixion fell on a Friday during Passover week with Passover on Nisan 14, and on the lunar-solar calendar then in use only those two years put a Friday on that date. Which one follows depends on the length of the ministry and on how Tiberius's regnal years are counted. The division of the Olivet Discourse between the fall of Jerusalem and the end of the age is a long-running interpretive dispute and is described here rather than resolved.