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Next week is Passion Sunday, and then comes Palm Sunday and Holy Week. As we approach these solemn feast days, which are at the heart of the Christian year, we ask how it is that the final days of Jesus of Nazareth are of such central significance for Christian faith.

During the Roman occupation of Palestine there were countless unfortunates who were put to death by the cruel torture of crucifixion. Why is it that Christians give such unique significance to the death of this one man?

The traditional answer has been: because this man demonstrated by countless miracles during his ministry, and by the climactic miracle of rising from the dead, that he was truly God’s Son, so that his death, which seemed to be the death of a common criminal, was in reality the redemption of the world.

Historical critics have picked away at the gospel narratives, which are our only account of Jesus’ life and death, and rationalism has long declared that the resurrection of the dead is a strict impossibility. And yet the power of the drama which we revisit during these weeks remains unabated. The rational dissection of the Biblical text is powerless to destroy its uncanny ability to engage our emotions and so produce change in our lives.

The early church writer Tertullian believed that the statements made in Holy Scripture are utterances of the soul. The world of religious ideas is based on an emotional foundation which is unassailable by reason. Theology is not simply knowing divine things, but also experiencing them. For experience is not limited to observable phenomena in the outside world; it includes the world of inner experience, which is an essential part of what it means to be human.

Inner reality is something which always demonstrates itself and is experienced on its own merits. It is, I believe, the congruence between the story of Jesus and something deeply embedded in every human heart that makes this story so powerful. It is a sacred icon which guides us to a vision of the divine kingdom where past, present, and future are one: “Jesus Christ the same yesterday and today and forever.”

Even though we have heard the story many times, and even though we know how it ends, we hear it again today as if for the first time. The death of God’s only Son fills us with dread, and yet we need to hear it once again, because we sense that in it lies the mystery of our own death—and life!

Christianity is the only religion I know of that focuses with such intensity on the fate of one human being. In Judaism the central symbol is the land which God gives to Abraham and Isaac and to their descendants after them, the land which, even today, is the bone of contention between Jews and Arabs, and over which so much blood has been shed.

But Christians “have here no lasting city but seek the one which is to come” (Hebrews 13:14). The Christian crusaders who spilled so much blood seeking to occupy the earthly Jerusalem ought to have pondered that verse of scripture. Our search is for the heavenly city, and the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth show us the way.

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