Holy Week Numbers

As of Sunday, Palm Sunday, the Church has officially entered Holy Week. Many Christians will spend this week pondering the last week of Christ’s death. Even in my own home, our dinner time devotions have shifted from what we were typically doing to focusing on the last week of Jesus’ life.

As my wife and I picked up Kevin DeYoung’s book, “The Good News We Almost Forgot: Rediscovering the Gospel in a 16th Century Catechism” I was struck by how he expounded on Lord’s Day 15 from the Heidelberg Catechism. If you were with us last Wednesday at our Lenten worship service, you would have heard Elder Michael Archbold expound on this very Lord’s Day.

Here is what the Catechism says:

Q&A 37

Q. What do you understand by the word “suffered”?

A. That during his whole life on earth,
but especially at the end,
Christ sustained in body and soul
the wrath of God against the sin of the whole human race.
This he did in order that,
by his suffering as the only atoning sacrifice,
he might deliver us, body and soul,
from eternal condemnation,
and gain for us God’s grace, righteousness, and eternal life.

Q&A 38

Q. Why did he suffer “under Pontius Pilate” as judge?

A. So that he, though innocent,
might be condemned by an earthly judge,
and so free us from the severe judgment of God
that was to fall on us

Q&A 39

Q. Is it significant that he was “crucified” instead of dying some other way?

A. Yes. By this I am convinced
that he shouldered the curse which lay on me,
since death by crucifixion was cursed by God.

Here is what struck me from DeYoung:

“Womb to tomb, that’s how quickly the Apostles’ Creed cover the life of Jesus. It skips His public ministry and goes right from His birth to His death. The Creed does not make this leap to denigrate Jesus’ teaching and miracles but because those who wrote the Creed, and the Catechism, not to mention Peter, John, and Paul in the Acts of the Apostles, understood that the main thing about Jesus’ life was His death.

It should be obvious: The Gospels are mainly about the gospel. Already in Matthew 1 we read that Jesus will save His people from their sins. Already in John 1 we read that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes aways the sins of the world. Three times in March and three times in Luke, Jesus predicts His death prior to the Passion Week. Nine of the twenty-eight chapters in Matthew deal with the last week of Jesus’ life – the events leading up to His execution, His death on a cross, and His resurrection from the dead. Passion Week accounts for six of Mark’s sixteen chapters, six of Luke’s twenty-four chapters, and nine of John’s twenty-one chapters. So our of eighty-nine chapters in the four Gospels, thirty (one-third) are about the climactic final week of Jesus’ life.

If we figure Jesus was thirty-three years old when He died, He lived around 1,700 weeks. And His four biographers spend a third of their time on only one of those weeks. Have you ever read a three-hundred biography where one hundred pages death with the subject’s death? Not even for Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, or Martin Luther King Jr. do we have such a lopsided attention paid to the end of the story. But for Jesus, the ending of His life is the story."

May these statistics and words not be "fun" information to just store up in your head. Rather, may it really shape and transform you to ponder, meditate, read over, and pray through Jesus' last week on earth. May his life, death, and resurrection stir you to a deeper place of worship to Him. May you be more conformed to the image of His son because of this week.