This Sunday, the fifth in Lent, is traditionally called Passion Sunday. It marks a slight change in gear as we move towards Holy Week which begins on Palm Sunday (13 April) in a week’s time. The Gospel for Passion Sunday begins ‘Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany …’. For we who already know the story, the tension mounts because we know that it is in Jerusalem that the events of Holy Week will be played out and that Bethany is only a couple of miles over the Mount of Olives from Jerusalem.
In some traditions, the Saturday before Passion Sunday is called Lazarus Saturday because the Gospel for the day is the story of the raising of Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha in whose home at Bethany Jesus often stayed. The raising of Lazarus was of course a resuscitation rather than a resurrection and Lazarus had in due course to die a death like the rest of us. But it was Jesus’ raising of Lazarus to life that led the chief priests and Pharisees to call a council at which the decision was taken that Jesus must die and, John tells us, ‘from that day on they planned to put him to death’. (John 11.53) It was at the council meeting that we heard those words of Caiaphas, the high priest: ‘…it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’ (John 11.50) John inserts his own commentary on those words: ‘He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God.’ (John 11.51,52) Caiaphas’ words were (inadvertently) prophetic and one might say that he was being pragmatic, but they are also sinister and chilling, the sort of remark that one expects to hear in a gangster movie.
We sometimes admire pragmatism and, in recent times, pragmatism has been used to justify what are often euphemistically called ‘difficult decisions’. For Jesus, however, the individual is never expendable. Matthew’s version of the parable of the lost sheep (Matthew 18.12-14) emphasises the importance of the individual, especially a child who might otherwise have been considered insignificant in the society of Jesus’ time. As Holy Week comes nearer, we thank God that Jesus died ‘not for the nation only’ but for each one of us as an individual, that his death has redeemed us and that we are known so individually that ‘even the hairs of [our] head are counted’. (Luke 12.7) God uses the most unexpected people as his agents: Caiaphas plotting, Pilate capitulating, the soldiers carrying out their duty to execute and so on. But ‘the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.’ (John 1.3). God remained in control and brought good out of evil. And so he does, and will, today as the light continues to shine in what can often seem to be the darkness of the world which is nevertheless God’s world even though we mistreat it and each other.