The final week of Jesus' ministry is an alabaster jar full of the richest hints of transcendence. All creation cohesively acts out a drama for which none of the actors--save God alone--could have been provided a script.
The animal Kingdom bears strange witness—colts tied up in just the right spot…cocks strangely crow at precisely the predicted moment. The vegetation, too, is part of the special effects department with national fig trees withering as if on cue. Jesus even threatens that the mineral deposits in the stones of the temple might cry out. Perhaps they did—at least the Temple curtain malfunctioned with unforgettable synchronicity with other elements of the story-line.
There were reverberations in the individual psyche. From the great subconscious deep of Pilot's wife the Eternal Word of the script surfaces. And when they bring to her husband the very righteous man about whom she has just suffered much in a dream, she senses how nothing will ever be the same after this fateful Friday morning.
Jesus' street theatre enlists diverse parts of humanity's collective consciousness. Israel's memory hearkens from the past—the words of Jeremiah, of the Shema, even Davidic Psalms re-sound with all the old familiarity but with renewed resonance and heart-rendering power.
Don’t forget that the veteran political operative, Pilot seems very scared—searching for any way to wash his hands of a…carpenter was it? Don’t forget how every verbal trap for Jesus failed and that it was in the night that he was taken. Jesus was walking in the earthly sunlight of the Temple Compound, but he was playing on a far brighter and higher intellectual plane.
Don’t miss that the children were singing a song about him—the significance of which they could not have calculated but which they seem mysteriously prompted to sing.
All the principalities and powers seem even more involuntary in their roles in the drama than the children who are participants in the chorus. There's a murderous high priest who can’t stop saying things that are ironically true. There's a betrayer so lost in his own thoughts about what he's about to do that he obliviously dips into the bitter dish with tragically perfect timing. There's the legionary executioner making what would become the good confession, and a contingent of guards stepping back and falling to the ground at the sound of the Divine Name. Oh, and there's another set of guards who fall asleep on their assignment. All of them. At the same time.
Don’t forget the tectonics –deep within the foundations of the earth, there is a strange shaking which is only surpassed by the weird atmospherics-- voices from heaven—some said it was surely just thunder? But what about the timing of that weird darkness?? And that crazy bunch that keeps insisting that a plethora of dead have burst forth from the grave and were running around Jerusalem???
Forget the resurrection appearances of Jesus for a minute. In the week before the resurrection the animal, vegetable, mineral, socially symbolic, and psychic worlds are in enacting the same drama. The collective consciousness, the principalities, the powerful, the children, the dead-- all these realms harmoniously shout "glory" as Malchus keeps rubbing his ear.
Oh, and never forget that whether you want to read these narratives on their own terms or not, only a short time later it's a historical certainty that thousands of the people, who claimed to have witnessed the play, believed that a crucified and the dead prophet was King of everything.
I used to wonder how it was that this many would come to Jesus so quickly. These days I wonder why there were not more who named the name of one who unites and enlists all of the cosmos in this perfect drama of recreation.
