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Introduction

I gave a series of meditations on the passion according to Saint John in 1997 during the three-hour Good Friday service at the renowned Trinity Church, Boston. When they were issued as a book, Love Set Free, in the following year, they were welcomed by a wide readership as a resource for prayer and deep reflection on the meaning of the Cross of Christ for individuals and groups. It is a great joy to offer this new edition for a wider public.

It used to be the convention that the addresses in this kind of Good Friday service should focus on the ‘seven last words’ of Jesus from the cross, gathered from all four Gospels. Instead of following this tradition, I chose to lead the worshippers in meditation through the passion narrative of a single Gospel, the Gospel of John. One reason was that, at that time, I belonged to the Society of St John the Evangelist, a religious order whose spirituality is rooted in the fourth Gospel and whose members frequently draw on its riches in retreats and preaching. In addition, I also wanted to be more faithful in meditative preaching to one of the most significant advances in biblical interpretation of the twentieth century.

In recent decades scholars have become sharply aware of the distinctive character of each of the Gospels. In the past Christians have tended, usually unconsciously but sometimes deliberately, to underplay the differences in style and content among the Gospels and to blend them together. In the early centuries writers produced harmonies of the Gospels, composite works that wove stories and sayings from all four Gospels into one narrative. The same instincts were at work in Christian art, storytelling, preaching, liturgy, drama and theology, so that by now this blending of the four sources has become second nature to us. For example, even though strict examination shows that the stories of Jesus’ birth in Luke and Matthew are really different traditions, rather than elements that simply slot together into a whole, Christmas devotion in all its expressions quite happily combines these alternative traditions. In the same way, when we think of the passion narrative, our minds instinctively weave together elements from all four of the Gospels.

Now it has become startlingly clear that each Gospel writer brought to the work a unique artistry. Each Gospel has a set of distinctive religious standpoints and emphases, partly reflecting the different character of the community for which it was written and partly the theological artistry of the writer. (More accurately, we should speak of writers and editors in the plural – there is evidence, especially in the case of the fourth Gospel, that the book has gone through several stages of composition.) Treating each Gospel separately in our study of the Bible, learning to compare and contrast them and differentiating among them allows us to appreciate much more vividly the urgent religious intention of each writer and the distinctive situation and mission of the community to which each belonged. Harmonizing the Gospels is second nature to us, but if we reverse that trend to heighten our sense of their uniqueness we begin to see that harmonizing can have the effect of blurring and diluting their impact. If someone were to take a computer image of a biblical scene by Rembrandt and another of the same scene by El Greco and ‘morph’ them into a composite image, we would recoil from the grotesque result and condemn the project as perverse. That is because works of art communicate with us in very rich and subtle ways by the innumerable elements of style that are distinctive to the artist.

Far from being chiefly of interest to scholars, the great gains of the last few decades in identifying the distinctive characteristics of each Gospel are a great gift to our religious experience, our spirituality. Meditation as a spiritual discipline is above all the art of focused receptivity. It is the discipline of suspending our tendency to control and censor, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to the impact of images and symbols so that they can bring grace to bear on our inmost selves. In contemplating the images and scenes and words of Scripture, we allow the same kind of process to occur as when we place ourselves before a great work of art, not to criticize or analyse it, but to be open to its transforming power.

If you are not familiar with the differences between the four Gospel accounts of Christ’s final days, you may find it helpful to compare them. It makes a fascinating Bible study for a group of people to do together. For example, it soon becomes apparent that Luke’s account of the final events of Jesus’ life bears the fingerprints of the evangelist’s particular interests. Luke emphasizes Jesus’ ministry as a healer, so we find that alone among the evangelists he mentions that Jesus healed the ear of the high priest’s slave after one of the disciples had cut it off in the scuffle to prevent Jesus’ arrest (22.50–1). Luke is especially interested in Jesus’ relationship with women, so he alone describes how on the way to execution Jesus spoke with a group of grieving women (23.27–31). Mark grimly records that the two bandits crucified with Jesus taunted him, but Luke, wishing to depict Jesus as compassionate reconciler, shows him promising the fellow sufferer who asked to be remembered in Jesus’ kingdom, ‘Truly I tell, you, today you will be with me in Paradise’ (23.43). Unlike Mark, who has Jesus uttering a final agonizing cry of desolation, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15.34), Luke prefers to show Jesus as the faithful Son who surrenders himself to God in death, saying, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’ (23.46).

John’s account of Jesus’ last days also differs in many ways from the other Gospels. Jesus’ cleansing of the temple is not the climactic event that it is in the other Gospels, because John daringly chose to transfer it to the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Nor does his account of the last supper make any mention of Jesus’ actions and words over the bread and wine that were the origins of the Eucharist. Instead, the evangelist makes the dramatic sign of self-giving love in Jesus’ washing of the disciples’ feet the focus of the event, and pictures the supper as the final opportunity for Jesus to instruct and initiate the disciples. It concludes with the serene and magnificent prayer in which Jesus offers to God a summary of his mission and prepares for his return to God’s presence.

Throughout the Gospel John portrays Jesus not as the victim of a plot, but rather as one who retains the initiative right to the last. ‘For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again’ (10.17–18). Jesus is able to discern when ‘the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’ (12.23). He is not immune to pain and horror in the face of his betrayal and rejection – ‘Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say – “Father, save me from this hour”?’ (12.27) – but he remains aware of his union with God and this carries him through his arrest, interrogation, torture and death. The awesome authority with which this awareness invests Jesus is conveyed dramatically in the thrilling simplicity with which he identifies himself to the soldiers who have come to arrest him: ‘I am’ (18.5). As on all the other occasions where Jesus identifies himself in this way, John wants to remind us of God’s disclosure of his identity to Moses in the burning bush, I AM WHO I AM. So John has the soldiers stepping back and falling to the ground at these words, as if instinctively recognizing that in Jesus they are dealing with more than a mere mortal.

The following six meditations are not meant to be read through at one sitting. Each one is best appreciated and used when it can be followed by a time of reflection and prayer. The first meditation is based on the beginning of Chapter 19. In preparation you might find it helpful to read the whole of John’s Gospel up to that point, or at least from Chapter 12, verse 20 on, when the movement towards the cross begins to gather momentum. Some of you will spread your use of these meditations over a long period, perhaps during the whole season of Lent, allowing several days for each one to sink in. Others may want to set aside periods of reflection during Holy Week. If you are unable to take part in worship on Good Friday, you may want to find some time alone that day and use all the meditations together as the vehicle for your prayer.

The meditations are not exercises in biblical interpretation. Rather, they are invitations to allow the images that John has gathered together in a unique way to resonate deeply in your imagination. Think of them as similar to the comments that an art critic would write for the catalogue of a show of paintings, which are intended not to dictate the response of the viewers, but rather to help stimulate and clarify the feelings to which the paintings give rise. My hope is that these short meditations, with the scripture passages and poetry selections, will bring the images of Jesus’ passion into sharper focus for you and act as a stimulus to prayer.

At the very end of his Gospel John himself says that no account of the mystery of Jesus can ever be complete: ‘There are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written’ (21.25). These meditations are offered in the belief that all of us who are prepared to be caught up in the story are the authors of these unwritten books, using the language of prayer.