Good Friday (2026) - Fr Joseph Vnuk, OP

Jesus was crucified during the feast of Passover. Christians have always known this, and just in case anyone forgets, John slips a little reminder into his telling of the Passion: the priests were unwilling to enter the Praetorium lest they defile themselves and become unable to celebrate the Passover.

At first sight, however, John does not seem to take up Passover themes in his Passion narrative, except perhaps at the very end, his remark that not a bone of Jesus was broken could be an allusion to the Paschal lamb.

What dominates John’s telling of the Passion is the idea of kingship, but that, I would suggest, is very much a Passover theme. The very reason for leaving Egypt and setting off for the Promised Land was to leave the slavery of Pharaoh, King of Egypt and set themselves up as a nation of independent land-owners with no king. In fact, when they conquered each city in the Promised Land, one of the things they explicitly did was to kill the king. More importantly, to prevent any mere human from trying to become king, they declared that God alone was their king. The line “The Lord reigns” or even “The Lord will reign for ever and ever” that we hear again and again in the psalms are a constant reminder to anyone with political ambitions that the post is already taken and that God almighty, the Lord of angel armies, is not going to abdicate in favour of anyone.

If getting rid of earthly kings has not been high in the list of things you think of when someone mentions “Passover,” then you are not alone. At the previous Passover in John’s Gospel, Jesus feeds the crowds with five loaves and two fish, and the people want to make Jesus their king. They are just like the Israelites who kept complaining to Moses that they want to go back to Egypt to be slaves of Pharaoh because Pharaoh fed them well. They don’t see the irony of what they are asking, but John, who is a master of irony, makes sure that we do. Not only does he remind us that it is Passover time, he piles on the references: crossing the sea, Moses, manna, complaining.

So we come to this Passover with idea of kingship in mind. And John repeatedly presents Jesus as a king, while dismantling our notion of kingship on the way. It starts in an almost comical way, when Jesus triumphantly enters Jerusalem, riding not a warrior’s horse but a peasant farmer’s donkey. And when Mary anoints Jesus, kingship is turned upside down, and Mary applies the ointment, not to his head, but to his feet. Things then move to savage mockery, as Jesus is crowned with thorns.

Jesus does not say that he is King - in fact, when Pilate puts this question to him bluntly at the beginning of the trial, Jesus avoids giving a direct answer. Rather, Jesus gets others to say it for him, as Pontius Pilate does. “So you are a king, then” and to write it over the cross, using the word king for someone who seems as far from royal as possible. And Jesus acknowledges that if we are going to put it into human words, that is what we will say, but then goes on to say that he came into the world “to bear witness to the truth,” to the true meaning of “King,” for, as he says elsewhere, the truth will make you free.

After Jesus had fed the five thousand, he quite literally ran away from the title “king.” Here he accepts it, because he has made it safe, and made it god-like. If the psalms tried to prevent the ambitious from becoming kings by suggesting that God would send the angel armies to fight them off, here Jesus deals with the ambitious by making kingship too demanding, too frightening. Jesus is the man who makes people screen their faces and renders earthly kings speechless. It was only by accepting the worst sufferings imaginable that Jesus could cure us of our dangerous ideas about kings.

For Jesus is speaking not only to the few who seriously aspire to kingship, but to all those who support them. The five thousand men who had enough bread to eat needed to be told not to make themselves slaves for the sake of food that perishes. Even more striking are the words of the crowd to Pilate: “We have no king but Caesar.” They are uncomfortable about the way God’s reign is unfolding and they want to suppress it, but they need a king to carry out the violence that they are afraid or unable to carry out themselves. Thus they subject themselves to the Emperor Tiberius, a debauched gentile who allowed people to call him a god. And then, imagining themselves undefiled, they celebrate the escape of their ancestors from Pharaoh, King of Egypt. Alas, there are Christians throughout history who have fallen into the same trap.

A counter-example is given by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Whether they recognised Jesus as king or not, they at least recognised him as deserving a decent burial, and in handling his corpse they defiled themselves and would have been unable to celebrate the Passover ritual. But they celebrated the freedom the Passover promises. Overcoming the fears that had marked their following of Jesus thus far, they approached Pilate, the representative of the Emperor, and identified themselves as still committed to the man he had just executed.

As today we remember our crucified King, and venerate even the wood of his cross, may we experience that freedom that he won for us by his suffering and death, and so give true glory to the Father, through his Son who lives and reigns in the unity of the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever.

Fr Joseph Vnuk, OP is the Regent of Studies and the Chaplain to Monash University, assigned to St Dominic's Priory, Melbourne.