timing during Holy Week - Turning to God's Word

This week we celebrate Holy Week, which includes the Triduum services on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and finally Easter. In this three-day celebration (from a Jewish point of view, evening Thursday is considered Friday), we walk through Jesus’ last conversation with his followers, his Passion, death, and Resurrection. Because of where the Church liturgy places these events, we typically don’t give much thought to this sequence and timing, but interestingly, the timing varies a bit between the synoptic Gospels (the Gospels According to Matthew, Mark and Luke) and the Gospel According to John.

In order to understand this timing, we need to recall how the Jewish feast of Unleavened Bread works. During this eight-day feast, the first day is the Passover. The second day is called the Feast of Unleavened Bread (also the name given to the entire eight-day period) and is a moveable sabbath day, which means that a sabbath is observed even when this day doesn’t fall on Saturday. The Passover meal is prepared on Passover and eaten at sundown, which then technically falls on the Feast of Unleavened Bread. The eighth day of the feast then also is a mandatory sabbath. The regular sabbath is observed during the feast whenever it happens to fall. Christmas works much the same way today in our Church.

The synoptic Gospels orient events in essentially the same way. Events kick off on the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Passover. The last supper Jesus shares with his disciples is the Passover meal. For reference, see the Gospel According to Matthew 26:17–19, the Gospel According to Mark 14:12–16, and the Gospel According to Luke 22:7–13. (All links are to the NABRE.) By these accounts, Jesus’ capture in the evening, trial the next morning, execution, and death at roughly 3 p.m. all necessarily happen on the day following the Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which is a sabbath. The next reference to time can seem a bit confusing. After Jesus has died, all three synoptic Gospels mention that occurred on the day of preparation and that the next day is a sabbath—see the Gospel According to Matthew 27:62, the Gospel According to Mark 15:42, and the Gospel According to Luke 23:54. (All links are to the NABRE.) This creates a bit of a timing problem since we saw earlier that Jesus died on a sabbath day, the Feast of Unleavened Bread. One possible explanation here for what look to be two sabbath days is if in the year that these events took place, the day following the Feast of Unleavened Bread fell on a Saturday, the typical sabbath. This would lead to the sequence of days we celebrate with Thursday being the Passover, Friday the Feast of Unleavened Bread, Saturday a standard sabbath, and Sunday, the fist day of the week, the day of Jesus’ Resurrection.

The Gospel According to John handles this timing a bit differently. There is no indication from that Gospel when during Holy Week the supper with the washing of the feet occurs. It deliberately is not described in the context of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and so it should not be considered the Passover meal. We see in the Gospel According to John 18:28 (NABRE) that the morning of Jesus’ trial is on the Passover, the day of preparation. This timing places Jesus’ death at 3 p.m., roughly the time lambs would have been slaughtered for the feast. The Evangelist emphasizes this point again in the Gospel According to John 19:31 and 19:42. (Both links are to the NABRE.) Jesus is crucified and taken down from the cross while it is still the day of Passover before the sabbath feast. We then rejoin events after the Saturday sabbath in the Gospel According to John 20:1 (NABRE), which clearly is a Sunday. In this account too, it’s possible and even likely that the Feast of Unleavened Bread did not fall on the typical sabbath day and that the following day was also a standard sabbath, in which case, Jesus actually died on Thursday, the Passover, and rose on Sunday, the third day.

While the timing around a potential two-day sabbath on Friday and Saturday is a hypothetical and this possible scenario can help to explain some traditional views of the timing of Jesus’ Resurrection, it’s certainly not required to make sense of either account. More difficult seems to be the irreconcilable contradiction surrounding when Jesus died in relation to the Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread. Because this story is being told in many cases after the fact by people struggling to recall all of the details, the exact timing is left a bit unclear, but the overall meaning and import of events remains the same. Which version of events do you think fits better?

you also may like our study of the Gospel According to John
The Gospel According to John: An Encounter with Grace & Truth, a 25-lesson Catholic Bible study with an imprimatur, examines the Fourth Gospel’s view of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, with special emphasis on the institution of the sacraments of the Church as the means by which Christians are purified and made holy. This recently revised study includes maps and additional commentary, and takes a closer look at the way in which Jesus relates to individual men and women. Click on the book’s cover to view a sample lesson.

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