A Brief Survey of the Earthly Life of Jesus Christ in Relation to His Last Days

In the three and a half years of Jesus Christ’s public ministry as Messiah among the Jewish people, the momentous prediction concerning Him spoken by righteous Simeon had already been entirely borne out—spoken at that time when He, being reckoned the supposed son of Joseph, was brought as an infant according to the Law into the Temple at Jerusalem, «to present Him before the Lord» (Lk 2:22). Day by day it grew more evident that the consolation of Israel was set not only for the rising, but also for the «fall … of many in Israel» — for a sign spoken against, «that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed» (Lk 2:34–36). The divine Offspring of David had not yet appeared in the guise of the dread Master of the house who, as His Forerunner said, had come to clear His threshing floor (the Jewish people), that He might burn up the chaff with «fire unquenchable» (Mt 3:12); the best of men saw in Him only the «Lamb of God» who takes away the sin of the world (Jn 1:29); in all His discourses there breathed only the gentle wind of the Spirit of grace—yet even this heavenly breath was unbearable to chaff long since parched by the heat of the passions: it stirred of itself and flew away from the Winnower; on the incurable among the Jewish people the very balm that the heavenly Samaritan poured upon their wounds turned to their harm (Lk 10:29–37). By the end of the three years of Jesus’s public ministry as Messiah, all Judea already stood visibly divided into two camps in regard to Him (Jn 11:48)—the one believing in Him and revering Him, the other at enmity with Him (Jn 12:37) with such malice that it did not shrink from lifting Him up on a cross.

A brief survey of this event—unique in the world in so many respects—will serve us as an introduction to the history of the Last Days of the Earthly Life of our Lord.

At first glance it seemed impossible that the Jewish people should fail to recognize their Messiah. Never had the Messiah been awaited with such impatience as in the days of Jesus Christ: prayers for His coming were offered in the Temple and in homes; He was debated in the Sanhedrin and in the synagogues; men strove to find the Messiah in every saying of the prophets that could be applied to His person, whether rightly or by any stretch1. Even the Samaritans, despised by the Jews for their heresy, firmly believed2 (Jn 4:25) that the greatest of the prophets would soon come, who would resolve every uncertainty over matters of faith then dividing the people of Israel. Among the pagans themselves a rumor had spread everywhere at that time of a coming, extraordinary reversal of things, when the East would once more gain the upper hand over the West, and out of Judea would come men to take possession of the whole world3. Some, out of frivolity and impatience, others out of flattery, already thought they saw the fulfillment of the universal hopes concerning the coming of the Messiah—now in Herod the Great4, now in one or another of the Roman Caesars5. There were even such dreamers and self-seekers who, exploiting the people’s expectation, dared boldly to pass themselves off as the promised Deliverer6 (Acts 5:36; Mt 24:24), and though they were soon exposed in their falsehood, they drew after them no small number of followers from the people.

To spare themselves every danger—whether of failing to recognize and rejecting the true Messiah, or of accepting a false one—the Jewish scribes labored to draw from the prophetic writings every indication of His person and the time of His coming7. On this foundation there arose an extensive teaching concerning the marks of the true Messiah8 (Mt 2:4; Jn 7:42)—that is, concerning His names, origin, nature, properties, works, and requirements, and so forth9 (Mt 24:3, Lk 21:7; 3 Ezra 4:51–52)—which was expounded in every synagogue with the refinements peculiar to rabbinic learning10. The common people took no part in such inquiries, reckoned the province of the scribes; but since the subject was of the keenest interest and weighed on everyone alike, many of the opinions and rumors about the Messiah passed imperceptibly from the schools to the people, and spread so widely that, should the need arise, the humblest commoner considered himself competent to pronounce on the person of the Messiah.

With such universal and ardent expectation of the Messiah, with such anxious care to guard against error concerning His coming—could it be thought that the true Messiah would go unrecognized, be rejected, condemned, crucified?… (Jn 12:37). Yet so it came to pass in very deed!..

The causes of so ruinous a blindness had long existed among the Jewish people, though the terrible effect they were to produce could hardly have been foreseen beforehand in its full extent11 (Lk 20:16; Jn 9:10). And first: to recognize Him who had come from heaven to raise all men up with Him from earth to heaven, the Jewish people needed to possess—even in some small measure—a sense of the heavenly, a thirst for the eternal, a striving toward what is holy and sanctifying. But in these precious qualities the Jews, save for a small number of the chosen, were in the utmost want (3 Ezra 4:27–28; Mt 3:7–12). Worship of the true God no longer consisted, as once it had, in the abandonment of idolatry, but lay merely in the performance of outward rites; it did not penetrate the heart, nor produce any wholesome effect on morals or on life (Mt 23:23–31). For the greater part, the true god of soul and heart was not Jehovah but the belly (Jn 12:37, 43; Lk 12:45–47) and gold. For this reason alone the Messiah could not but demand, the very moment He appeared, a complete change of thought, feeling, and whole manner of life from those who wished to be His followers (Jn 3:3). But how were they to renounce their cherished prejudices and passions? For from childhood they had grown accustomed to found their claim on God’s blessing on nothing but their fleshly descent from Abraham, their circumcision under the Law, and their keeping of the sabbath rest. Worse still, the leaders of the people of God—the elders and scribes, on whom above all others lay the duty to recognize the Messiah at His appearing and to receive Him—were themselves, by their very impurity of soul, first among those incapable of entering the Kingdom of God (Mt 23:13).

Second: notwithstanding the endless discourse concerning the marks of the true Messiah, there was in the rabbinic teaching on this weighty subject no proper unity nor exact definition12. The ruinous discord of the sects, from which the Jewish church suffered, showed itself here too, to its own great harm: when, for example, according to the opinion of some—resting on a plain indication of the prophet—the Messiah was to come forth from Bethlehem (Mt 2:4)13, others, following certain oral traditions, maintained that He would appear from no one knew where14.

Finally, a distorted notion of the kingdom of the Messiah, and of the purpose of His coming, completed the mischief, rendering the greater part of the Jewish people ill-suited to recognize the true Messiah15.

To see in what this wretched, distorted notion consisted, and how it came to be formed, we must call to mind the teaching of the ancient prophets concerning the Messiah. Depicting Him as the greatest of Prophets, as High Priest, as the Angel of the covenant, as the Righteous One (Deut 18:15; 1 Macc 14:14; Ps 109:4; Mal 3:1; Wisd 3:7, 8, 18; 5:16–17; Acts 7:52), they very often—that the conception of Him might come nearer to the people’s understanding—portrayed the Messiah also under the figure of a king like David (Is 11:1–6; Ezek 34:23; 36:24, 28), one who would «raise up again the fallen tabernacle of David» (Amos 9:11), who would reign in the house of Jacob forever, and be Lord of all nations from sea to sea, in whose kingdom «they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks» (Is 2:4). In speaking so, the prophets by no means understood the kingdom of the Messiah in a worldly sense—otherwise they would have contradicted themselves without end, ascribing to that same kingdom other properties wholly incompatible with the nature of earthly kingdoms. Nor did the prophets confine the blessings of the Messiah’s coming to the Jewish people alone, but extended them to the whole human race (Gen 12:3; Ps 96:10–13; 97:1–6; Is 49:7; 45:23–24; Zech 9:9, 16–17).

In general, the goal they set for His coming was not something temporal but a spiritual and eternal blessedness, consisting in redemption from sin, in purity of morals and of life at peace with God, in the restoration of man’s primordial likeness to God and his dignity, and so forth (Acts 10:43; Is 2:2; 11:1–10; Jer 33:15–22)16. And if the prophets do mention, alongside this, an earthly prosperity for those who honor the Messiah, it appears in them not as the fruit of any civil upheavals, battles, and victories, but as the natural consequence of their spiritual and moral perfecting and their faithful keeping of the commandments of the new, higher covenant with God made through the Messiah17—as indeed came to pass among the followers of the Christian religion, who, having surpassed all other nations in moral formation, at length surpassed them decisively in earthly power as well, so that now the fate of all other nations visibly depends upon Christians.

Finally, in promising the Jewish people, as the first of the nations and the chosen heir and keeper of God’s revelations, a special share in the blessings of the Messiah’s coming, the prophets promised it not unconditionally, but only on condition of unwavering fidelity to the God of their fathers, purity of morals, and labor in the Messiah’s kingdom for its spread by preaching to the whole human race. Otherwise they threatened this people with a punishment and calamities still greater than any it had suffered in the most wretched times of its history (Mal 3:3–5; 4:1–6)18.

But the sensual Jewish people, sunk into the depths first of moral and then of civil degradation, could not for long keep pace with the lofty, pure, and luminous teaching of the prophets concerning the Messiah and His kingdom, especially after the Babylonian captivity. It swiftly began to grow debased and dim in the understanding of the Jews. The general impoverishment of the spirit of faith and of moral purity then prevailing, the multiplying of sects opposed one to another, the formation of a new popular dialect and the gradual forgetting of the ancient sacred tongue—above all of the manner of prophetic expression—the alteration of morals through intermixture with other peoples, willing and unwilling participation in the impure designs of the kings of Syria and Egypt and later of the Romans, and many other causes19, brought it about that the Jewish people, making no effort to penetrate to the true spirit of the prophetic sayings concerning the kingdom of the Messiah, stopped short at their letter—and clung all the more to interpretations of that letter, the more they offered food for the imagination and the senses, for national self-love and earthly advantage.

Instead of the angel of the covenant, who was to inscribe a new law of life upon men’s hearts; instead of the High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, who was to redeem the whole human race from sin and death by His own Blood; instead of the great Prophet, who was to establish truth, virtue, and faith throughout all the earth; instead of the Son of God, who was to give those who believed in His name «a new heart and a new spirit» (Ezek 36:26)—almost everyone began instead to look for, in the person of the Messiah, a world conqueror, who would appear in the full might of God’s Envoy, surrounded by signs and wonders, in order to overthrow and abolish all the kingdoms then existing on earth and form out of the whole human race a single dominion, in which the Jews were to hold the first place and be His confidants20. The great oppressions suffered from the kings of Syria and Egypt and from the Romans21 only strengthened such expectation among the Jews the more: the more they suffered in the present, the more they hoped to receive in the future22. Among other things, they imagined that the coming of the Messiah was to be preceded by the appearance of Elijah (Mt 17:10, Mk 9:11)23, who would anoint Him to the kingship24; of Jeremiah (2 Macc 15:14; Mt 16:13–14; 3 Ezra 2:18); of Isaiah (3 Ezra 2:18); and of many other prophets (Mt 16:14; Mk 6:15, 8:28; Lk 9:8). Regarding the person of the Messiah, many held a crude error, supposing that He would be a man like other men25, only with extraordinary powers and gifts from God. Others pictured Him as a higher being, yet not God (Jn 10:33)26, stumbling blindly over the words of Moses: «The Lord our God, the Lord is one» (Deut 6:4). The Messiah, in the opinion of the Jews, was not subject to death (Jn 12:24)27. Among the fruits expected from the Messiah’s coming were reckoned: an immediate, miraculous28 gathering into Palestine of the Jews scattered throughout the whole world, not excluding the ten tribes of Israel (3 Ezra 13:13, 39, 40); the bringing up out of hades and the resurrection of all the dead of Israel29; the restoration of the kingdom of David (Acts 1:6); the renewal of Jerusalem and the building of a new and magnificent temple; the subjection of all nations to the Jews30; the holding of magnificent feasts (Lk 14:15; 3 Ezra 2:38)31; the extraordinary fruitfulness of the earth; the abolition of sickness and death; and so forth. The best and most virtuous among them granted that entrance into the kingdom of the Messiah would be opened not to all Jews indiscriminately, but to the worthy (3 Ezra 2:37–40), and that this worthiness must consist in true piety and blamelessness of morals, or in sincere and total repentance (Lk 1:76–77)32; but the greater part grounded their hope of entering the kingdom of the Messiah solely on their fleshly descent from Abraham (Lk 3:8; Rom 2:28–29, 9:6–8), holding it impossible that God, having promised Abraham’s descendants His everlasting favor, should deprive any one of them of the very first of blessings—a share in the blessed kingdom of the Messiah (Rom 11:1, 3:3).

As a consequence of these and similar errors, the Jewish high priests and the other elders naturally hoped that the Messiah, if He did not turn to them first with His divine embassy (Jn 1:19), would at least not leave them afterward without particular regard. He would call them to serve and assist Him, and they, having handed over to Him authority over the people, would remain the first and most trusted servants of His new heavenly-earthly kingdom. To the Pharisees, proud of their pretended holiness and of the power they held in the Sanhedrin and among the people, it seemed especially impossible (Jn 1:24, 7:48) that the great work of establishing the Messiah’s kingdom on earth should be accomplished without their participation, or that they should not be received into His particular favor and become the nearest instruments of His universal dominion. No doubt the other Jewish sects dreamed likewise: the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Herodians—each of them finding in itself precisely what, in its own view, was especially needful and useful for the future great King of Israel33.

With minds and hearts so ruinously blinded, what was bound to result when Jesus Christ appeared among the Jewish people not with the sword, with earthly majesty and glory, but in the simplest and humblest guise of a popular Teacher, surrounded not by legions of soldiers but by twelve simple and poor disciples—with nothing but a preaching of the nearness of the Kingdom of God (Mt 4:17–23; Mk 1:14; Lk 4:21, 43; Mal 3:2) and the healing of the sick, without any promise of freedom from the yoke of foreign rule, without any offer of earthly advantage whatever, without even an approach to the heads of the people, to persons of weight and influence in society? A Messiah out of Galilee, whence, by the false notion of the scribes of that day, not even an ordinary prophet «comes» (Jn 7:52)—out of Nazareth, a town so poor and so thinly peopled that nothing of importance or public use was thought to come from it (Jn 1:46); a Messiah who, instead of glory and victories, preached poverty and self-denial (Mt 5:3–12), who had nowhere to lay His head (Mt 8:20), who not seldom foretold for Himself a shameful death on a cross, and who at the same time claimed for Himself existence before the birth of Abraham (Jn 8:56–58), exalted Himself above all the patriarchs (Jn 4:12, 8:53), and even made Himself equal with God Himself (Jn 10:24–33); a Messiah who spared neither the passions nor the vices of the Pharisees and the chief priests (Mk 7:6; Jn 8; Mt 23:21, 31–32), who counted their supposed righteousness as nothing (Mt 5:20), and yet at the same time kept company with publicans and sinners (Mk 2:16); who promised to bring the Gentiles into the Kingdom of Heaven while casting out many Jews into outer darkness (Mt 8:11–12; Lk 13:24–30); a Messiah who commanded that tribute be paid to Caesar without question (Mt 22:17–21; Mk 12:13–17; Lk 20:20–26), who thought to found, without weapons or earthly force, by preaching alone, some spiritual, invisible kingdom (Lk 12:31–32), without any part played by the Sanhedrin at all (Mt 21:23–27). A Messiah proceeding in everything contrary to the people’s most cherished expectations, contrary to every notion of the scribes, against the very dominance of the Sanhedrin itself—such a Messiah could not but seem, to Caiaphas, devoted as he was to worldly views and ambition, self-serving and proud, and to his confederates in the Sanhedrin, a strange and unacceptable figure, repugnant and dangerous.

Those who did not accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah were divided, as is usual, in their opinions concerning His person and His acts. One of the more indulgent judgments was that the extraordinary Teacher of Nazareth was a devout man, a lover of truth and righteousness, wishing good to his neighbors and to his fatherland, but given over to fancy, too confident in the power of good over men, and so contriving the greatest undertakings with the smallest means, blind to the dangerous side of His position and to the impossibility of His designs (Jn 12:48). When the God-man, in the full consciousness of His divine dignity, spoke and acted as the Son of God to whom the Father had committed all authority, He seemed at such times, to men of this sort, to be beside Himself, and so in need even of warning and of a friend’s watchful care over Him (Mk 3:21). Such was the view of Jesus’s case and condition held by those of whom the evangelist Mark says that, «when they heard it, they went out to lay hold on Him, for they said, He is beside Himself» (Mk 3:21).

Others, judging no doubt by themselves, allowed themselves to go still lower in their opinion of Jesus, and thought to see in Him a man given over to secret ambition, who, under the mask of zeal for righteousness, intended to turn the people’s expectation of the Messiah to His own advantage. These are they of whom the evangelist testifies: «that He is good … no, but He deceives the people» (Jn 7:12).

Finally, there were also those who, whether deliberately or not, repeated after others that the new Teacher and Wonderworker was, as it were, a confidant of the spirit of darkness—that if He cast out demons and worked wonders, He did all this not by the power of God, but «has Beelzebul … by the prince of the demons» (Jn 10:20; Mk 3:22).

All this appeared and became fully and sharply marked only toward the end of Jesus’s ministry; but at the beginning, owing to the simplicity of His life, His poverty, and His lack of any connections in society, He long failed to attract the attention of the proud elders of the Jews. Indeed, notwithstanding the wondrous events that accompanied the first days of Jesus’s earthly life (the appearance of the wise men from the East in Jerusalem and of the miraculous star, the prophecies of Simeon and Anna, the opening of the heavens at the Jordan and the voice from heaven that accompanied it)—events which no doubt afterward became known among the people (Jn 1:15–20; Mt 3:1–12; Lk 3:4–17)—and notwithstanding even the solemn testimony of John the Baptist, repeated several times before those sent from the Sanhedrin (Jn 1:29–34; Mt 3:16; Mk 1:10), before the people (Jn 1:35–36, 3:27–36; Mt 21:26), and before his own disciples, that Jesus, who had received baptism from him, and no other, was the true Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world—a testimony that ought to have carried great weight, given the reverence everyone held for John—we see no sign whatever that any embassy was sent to Jesus, or that He was asked, as John had been asked, whether He was the Messiah. To the senseless pride of the Sanhedrin, scandalized by the lowly condition of Jesus Christ, such an inquiry seemed altogether needless and useless. Only afterward, when the holiness of Jesus’s life, the extraordinary power of His word and His discourses (Lk 4:32, 15–22; Mt 7:29, 13:54; Jn 7:15), the preaching of the Twelve and the Seventy disciples, who went about all the cities of Israel proclaiming the Kingdom of God (Mt 10; Mk 6:30), and above all the fame of His signs and wonders (Lk 4:36, 5:9; Mt 8:27, 9:8, 26:33, 12:23, 15:31) had turned the heart of the greater part of the Jewish people toward Jesus (Lk 5:15, 4:14, 42, 37; Mt 4:24; Mk 6:54–56) and made Him the object of the very best hopes of well-disposed people of every rank (Jn 12:42)—only then did the Pharisees and scribes, who watched closely everything that took place among the people, begin to gather in ever greater numbers around the new Prophet and Wonderworker (Lk 5:17; Mk 7:1), each with his own impure views and purposes, many with a personal hatred of Him for His preaching and His rebukes, almost all with a heart deaf to truth and virtue, and with a desire to find in Him something reprehensible and to turn it to His harm. There opened a continuous series of cunning questions, malicious interpretations of Jesus’s words, censures of His acts and those of His disciples, even outright slanders and incitements of the people against Him—all of it described by the evangelists with such simplicity and fidelity. At first they acted separately, without any particular plan, from time to time—but always with cunning and malice (Mt 9:3, 11; 12:38; 16:1; 19:3; Mk 8:11; Lk 11:53–54). To diminish and weaken the general goodwill of the people toward Jesus Christ, they tried to bring His manner of acting and His way of life under suspicion: they repeated to everyone that He was a friend of publicans and sinners, an enemy of the Law and the traditions, a violator of the sabbath rest, a well-wisher of the Gentiles—especially of the Samaritans—even a confederate of Beelzebul and of the powers of darkness (Mt 11:19, 12:24, 15:2; Mk 2:18, 24; Jn 8:48, 10:20). This last slander was especially venomous and effective in its action upon the simple-hearted people; for by it the most striking and irrefutable proof of the divinity of Jesus’s person and teaching lost all its force in their minds, and even produced the opposite effect, working in place of love and respect for Jesus a revulsion from His person as an instrument of the powers of darkness.

It was the consequence of just such slanders and instigations that some of the common people devoted to the Pharisees, in the heat of fanatical irritation, more than once attempted to take the life of Jesus Christ: now they wished to cast Him down from a hill; now they took up stones to stone Him as a blasphemer (Jn 10:31–33); now they wished to seize Him with their own hands (Jn 7:30), in order to hand Him over to His enemies.

Amid such an agitation of minds, all naturally awaited the judgment of the supreme Sanhedrin (Jn 7:26), upon which lay the right and the duty to watch over the purity of faith and morals, to distinguish true prophets from false, and still more to guide the people in judging the Messiah (Mt 2:4)34. This judgment did indeed soon become known to the people; but being founded on open partiality and contradicting plain experience, it produced everywhere, instead of tranquility, a fresh agitation of conscience. In vain did the well-disposed members of the Sanhedrin propose (Jn 7:51) to examine the case of Jesus according to the Law, to hear out His teaching and His proofs, and then to judge Him impartially. The Pharisees and the Sadducees, of whom the supreme council of the Jews for the most part consisted, would not even entertain the thought that the Galilean whom they despised could be the Messiah. Under the mask of love for their fatherland, it was resolved to pursue Him by every means as a man dangerous, among other things, to the public peace, so that at the first opportunity they might seize Him into their own hands and destroy Him one way or another.

It may seem strange that they failed to find such an occasion in the course of more than one year; but here it must not be forgotten that Jesus Christ spent the greater part of His time journeying about Galilee (Mk 7:31, 6:53, 5:1, 4:1, 8:10; Mt 19:1), which lay under the rule of Herod Agrippa, who did not much favor the authority of the chief priests and the influence of the Pharisees; that during His visits to Jerusalem He was surrounded by a multitude of people devoted to Him, and at night withdrew to the surrounding places, to those who revered Him, especially to Bethany; and that under Roman dominion the Jewish elders could not, without the Roman procurator, dispose of military means on their own, and were in general compelled to act more by cunning than by open force. But above all it must not be lost from view that the time and the duration of the great ministry of the Savior of the world depended not on blind human caprice but on a direct dispensation from on high; and since the great hour of the world’s redemption, appointed in the Eternal Council, had not yet come (Jn 7:30), all the schemes of Jesus’s enemies fell apart of themselves, like a spider’s web. Meanwhile, the Sanhedrin did all it could. After the failure of certain private measures, it was publicly proclaimed that whichever of the Jews should acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue—a fearful threat (Jn 9:22). This meant binding men’s consciences and striking terror into His reverers; for one who fell under excommunication from the synagogue was reckoned as it were cut off from the offspring of Abraham, doomed, like a Gentile, to eternal perdition beyond the grave. Not content with this, the Jewish elders sought to seize Jesus Christ into their own hands; during His last stay in Jerusalem (Jn 10:23)35 the nearest servants of the high priests were deliberately sent for this very purpose. Only the heavenly sweetness of His discourse, which touched to the depths of the soul these simple and therefore unprejudiced men, rendered this measure void; for they dared not lay hands on Him who spoke as no man ever spoke (Jn 7:45–46). The inventiveness and malice of the Pharisees warrant the certainty that other measures too were employed to the same end, though the evangelists, from their characteristic brevity, make no mention of them (Mt 12:14; Jn 10:39, 7:19). In general, by the beginning of the fourth year of Jesus’s ministry the hatred of His enemies had already fully ripened: His disciples, as we shall see, dreaded even the thought of going into Judea (Jn 11:8), and among the people themselves men were afraid even to speak of Him, lest they suffer persecution from the Pharisees.

After this, what remained for Him to do, who, in proclaiming judgment and truth to the nations, had to conduct Himself so as «not to wrangle, not to raise His voice … not to break off the cracked reed, nor put out the smoking flax,» until His truth—truth alone—should win the «victory» (Mt 12:18–21; Is 42:1–3)? Formerly, in case of danger from His enemies in Jerusalem, Jesus Christ could at least withdraw unhindered into Galilee (Jn 12:1), where they had no power. But toward the end of the third year of His ministry, danger opened up there too. Herod, who ruled Galilee after putting John the Baptist to death, turned his bloody suspicions upon Jesus as well, and plotted to take His life at the first opportunity, just as he had destroyed John (Lk 13:31). Hence, to escape the malice of His enemies, He would either have to avoid appearing in Jerusalem, and even leave Palestine altogether, going to foreign peoples to begin teaching the Gentiles (Jn 7:35)—which would not accord with the purpose of the Messiah’s ministry, He who was «sent … to the lost sheep of the house of Israel» (Mt 15:24)—or He would have to preserve His own life and that of His disciples continually by some miraculous means, which, however, would not correspond to His state of humiliation (Mt 26:53–54). Judging by such bitterness and scheming on the part of Jesus’s enemies, one could foresee that the Lamb of God, hunted by savage boars, would not prolong His stay on earth, but would hasten, to finish His work, to the altar of the cross, which had long since been raised for Him in their mind and heart.

The very same conclusion, though by a different path, could be reached by looking at those most favorably disposed toward Jesus Christ themselves.

The number of His reverers, drawn by the universal expectation of the Messiah, by John the Baptist’s repeated testimony concerning Jesus (Jn 10:41), and in general by the fame of His wonders and the power of His preaching, was very considerable and grew36 day by day. Their esteem and love for Him were deep and sincere; but their way of thinking was for the most part beneath its object, and did not correspond to His plan for the salvation of the human race (Lk 2:34–35). Only a few pure and holy souls (John the Baptist, Simeon, and others), illumined by light from above, penetrated fully to the lofty purpose of the Messiah’s coming—they foresaw, and revealed to others, that for the salvation of the world from sin Jesus Christ, as the Lamb of God, must be slain upon the cross, and only then, through suffering, enter into His glory, and that this very glory must consist not in an earthly dominion over Judea joined to the subjugation of other nations, but in a spiritual, invisible, gracious reign over the whole human race (Lk 2:31–32). The rest of Jesus’s followers, being more or less clouded by the popular expectation of the Messiah as a king and conqueror, thought otherwise. Some of them reckoned Him not even to be the Messiah Himself, but only one of His forerunners—that is, one of those prophets who, in the opinion of the Jews, were to rise from the dead before the Messiah’s coming (Mt 16:14; Jn 7:40–41). In this way they resolved, in their own minds, a contradiction otherwise insoluble for them: that Jesus Christ was exceedingly holy, endowed with divine power, and yet possessed none of the earthly grandeur of the Messiah. Those who did acknowledge Jesus Christ to be the Messiah Himself likewise did not entirely abandon the pleasant dream of His earthly kingdom, imagining that He had only for a time assumed the appearance of humiliation and poverty, but would soon show Himself the true descendant of the victorious David (Mt 20:21), the exalted King of Israel, at the foot of whose throne all kings and nations must fall. To their number, notwithstanding all the goodness of their hearts, belonged even the twelve disciples of Jesus, until by the grace of the Holy Spirit everything earthly and carnal was consumed in their souls—which followed only after the Lord’s resurrection and the descent of the Comforting Spirit on the day of Pentecost. But until that time, throughout the whole of their time with their Teacher, and especially before His sufferings, and even after the resurrection, we see the opposite: the more sacrifices were brought for His sake, the more zealously they dreamed of their Teacher’s earthly greatness, and the more important, for that very reason, they hoped the benefits would be that they would enjoy in His kingdom (Mt 19:27; Lk 18:28).

The God-man employed every means to free His followers, and especially His closest disciples, from the unrealizable hope of His earthly dominion over the world. Already His first discourses plainly showed everyone that the kingdom whose nearness He proclaimed, and of which He announced Himself the founder and head, was a kingdom of truth, of virtue, and of peace with God and with oneself, and not an earthly dominion (Mt 5:6)37. Besides constant private hints and indications of this truth, He repeatedly and directly declared to His disciples that this Kingdom of God would not come, as the Jews unreasonably expected, in any sensible, splendid, and solemn manner (Lk 17:21); that it lies, in general, not outside but within each person; that it bears no resemblance whatever to the dominance of earthly rulers (Lk 22:25); and that it consists in freedom from sin and the passions, in mastery over one’s own heart and inclinations, and in the restoration within oneself of primordial perfection and likeness to God38. His frequent announcement of His coming sufferings and death, as the chief purpose of His coming into the world, was always directed straight against the popular dream of an earthly kingdom of the Messiah; and, what is most remarkable, Jesus Christ makes this announcement precisely at those times when His disciples, for one reason or another, gave themselves over especially to imaginings about this kingdom. In general, all His discourses and deeds made plain that if He sometimes allowed Himself to be called the Son of David, it was not from any designs on the Jewish throne of that day, but solely because He was descended in the flesh from David and had been foretold by the prophets under that very name.

But the disciples of Jesus, «because of the hardening» (as one of them puts it) «of their heart» (Mk 6:52), preferred not to understand their Teacher’s words rather than, understanding them rightly, part with the universally cherished popular prejudice of a Messiah’s sensible kingdom. His other reverers were still less able to exchange the notion of a Messiah who conquers the nations for faith in a Messiah crucified (Jn 6:66–70)39. From such a way of thinking, was it far to actions corresponding to it?.. How long would it have taken one of Jesus’s ardent admirers to raise, in His name, the standard of revolt against the Sanhedrin, which at that time enjoyed no respect whatever from the people? And how contrary this would have been to the divine character of Jesus’s ministry!

To avoid this—one might call it—calamity, it served greatly that the Savior did not form His followers into any visible society outwardly bound together by anything, in which a spirit of civic self-assertion and resistance to the then Roman dominance over Judea might have taken shape. Only the twelve disciples stood in constant union with one another and with Him; all His other reverers, even the so-called seventy disciples, gathered around Him only from time to time; they listened to His discourses, received healing from their infirmities, and showed Him and His disciples various tokens of respect and assistance (Mt 27:55); but once the heavenly Teacher had withdrawn (for He was constantly passing from one place to another — Acts 10:38), all of them at once returned to their own dwelling places and their ordinary occupations, without thinking of themselves as members of any newly founded society, or considering themselves subject to any new obligations beyond those that had long lain upon each of them under the Law of Moses and by the prompting of their own conscience. Nevertheless, many of Jesus’s followers thought that He ought to have united His reverers into one body and, declaring Himself head of a new society, begun a transformation of Judea in defiance of all its authorities, both Roman and native. Some of these, in the heat of a devoutly worldly enthusiasm, attempted themselves to lay the very foundation of what they awaited with such impatience from Jesus—to proclaim Him king of Judea (Jn 6:15)—no doubt in the expectation that He would then be obliged, willingly or not, to accept this zeal of theirs; that the rest of His followers would lose no time in joining them; and that the throne of David would be restored to the comfort and glory of the whole people of Israel. As time went on, still more such occurrences were to be expected, for the people, agitated by conflicting opinions about Jesus Christ, could not judge coolly, and passed easily from disputes to violent measures. The Roman government, exceedingly suspicious everywhere, and all the more so in Judea (Lk 13:1)40, which was notorious for the restless character of its inhabitants41, would soon have taken note of such popular agitation, and the heavenly Messenger of peace, contrary to the very purpose of His coming into the world, would have become the occasion and the object of civil unrest and popular tumult.

For this reason too, looking at the greater part of Jesus’s followers, one could foresee that their childish fancy and their zeal not according to knowledge would soon compel the Son of Man, once He had finished His earthly course, to ascend to that place from which He had come down, and to which their dreams of an earthly kingdom—dreams so contrary to His purpose—could not follow Him (Jn 13:33, 8:21).

Yet the most attentive observer of events could not have said with certainty when and how the great movement of minds and consciences, which had arisen throughout Judea from Jesus Christ’s appearance in preaching with signs and wonders, would come to an end. It was plain only that the chief priests and scribes would not abandon their malicious prejudice against Him who so relentlessly exposed their morals and their lives; still plainer, that the Son of David would not exchange the dread voice of His rebukes for flattery of Caiaphas and his confederates; and so, sooner or later, one of two things had inevitably to happen: either Jesus’s enemies would of their own accord fall before the greatness of His holiness, or He would become the victim of their malice and treachery. But it could not be affirmed that this would necessarily happen the following year, still less at the following Passover. For besides the fact that there was no impossibility in the Divine ministry of Jesus continuing yet for an undetermined time, this very thing seemed required also by the good of Jesus’s disciples, who had not yet succeeded in weaning themselves entirely from the popular prejudices and entering fully into the spirit of His religion (Jn 16:12); it was required, too, by the very nature of His ministry, for He had not yet declared Himself openly and publicly to be the Messiah (Jn 10:24)—something necessary both for the Jewish people and for the fulfillment in His person of the prophecies concerning the Messiah.

It was only the events that followed—which, moreover, lay within the will of Jesus Christ Himself, such as the raising of Lazarus, the entry into Jerusalem, and the rest—that gave a decisive direction to the course of events, till then undetermined, and brought Him near to the cross, which, save to Himself alone, was as yet perceived by none of His followers to be so near and so inevitable. It is with these events, then, that we, with the help of God, shall begin our account of the last days of the earthly life of our Lord, seeking not merely to add to the sum of knowledge on this weighty subject, but the edification of soul and heart as well.