This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.
The term “passion” has multiple meanings: It can refer to strongly felt emotion, especially love, as in, “He felt passionately about her.” Yet it can also describe great suffering, especially the afflictions of Jesus in what we call “the Passion of the Christ.” I’ve always been intrigued by the Gospel of John, in which both these senses of “passion” converge in the account of the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus — a picture John paints, if you will, with the colors of a wedding! A wedding? Yes! Although at first it would seem that a funeral and a wedding have nothing in common, the apostle John insists that Jesus’ death was actually a marriage, one in which the divine bridegroom gives his body for his bride.
This idea of God being the bridegroom of his people has deep roots in the prophets of ancient Israel, such as Hosea, who spoke in the voice of God himself to describe a future in which “I will now allure her (Israel), and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her” (Hos 2:14), and again (Hos 2:16-20):
On that day, says the Lord, you will call me, “My husband” … And I will take you for my wife forever; I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will take you for my wife in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord.
Moving to the New Testament, we find that, of all the Gospels, it is John’s that most clearly portrays Jesus’ fulfillment of these beautiful prophecies. The fulfillment climaxes at the cross, but John prepares us to understand the cross by describing several events earlier in Jesus’ life that foreshadow his role as the divine bridegroom.
For example, Jesus’ first miracle in the Gospel of John is to change about 180 gallons of water into the finest wine for a wedding in Cana (2:1-11). In ancient Judaism, the bridegroom was responsible for providing wine for his own wedding party, so the point of this miracle is that Jesus did the job of the bridegroom … and did it on a massive scale: enough wine for a royal wedding!
In case we don’t realize at Cana that Jesus is the great bridegroom, John the Baptist makes the point absolutely clear in the following chapter, where he calls Jesus the bridegroom outright. When asked about his identity, John the Baptist says of himself (Jn 3:28-29):
You yourselves are my witnesses that I said, ‘I am not the Messiah, but I have been sent ahead of him.’ He who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. For this reason my joy has been fulfilled.
Jesus is the bridegroom, and the “bride” is the people of God. John likens himself to the “friend of the bridegroom” — in our culture, the best man. Jesus is Israel’s husband, returned to woo her back (Hos 2:14-23).
Courting at the well
In fact, almost immediately we have a kind of courtship scene in which Jesus decides to travel through Samaria (Jn 4:1-5). About noon he comes to a town called Sychar and sits down beside a well. Now, the Samaritans were descendants of the northern Israelites, the ten tribes that broke away from the sons of David who ruled in Jerusalem and went on to be unfaithful to God by committing a kind of spiritual “adultery” with many foreign deities.
When Jesus sits down by the well, we know a woman is going to show up, because that’s what always happens in the Bible when a man comes to a well! In Genesis 24, Abraham’s servant is out looking for a wife for Isaac. He comes to a well and meets Rebekah, who later becomes Isaac’s bride. In Genesis 29, Jacob is traveling in the same area and comes to a well where he meets Rachel, and it is love at first sight. Later, in Exodus 2, Moses is fleeing Egypt and comes to the land of Midian, where he stops at a well and meets Zipporah, who later becomes his wife. So wells are the biblical place of courtship.
Our expectations are not disappointed, because no sooner does Jesus sit down than a woman from Sychar shows up to draw from the well. Jesus asks her for a drink (Jn 4:7). There’s a deeper sense to Jesus’ request, though, because we remember that asking for a drink of water was the “pickup line” that Abraham’s servant negotiated with God while looking for a wife for Isaac (Gn 24:12-14). The servant encountered Rebekah and asked her for a drink; she responded very generously, and so she eventually became Isaac’s wife. Thus, when Jesus asks the woman of Samaria for a drink, our curiosity is piqued: Will she respond generously, like Rebekah?
Actually, no! “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” she responds (Jn 4:9). So history is not going to repeat itself, at least not exactly. The conversation that follows is a kind of spiritual courtship in which it comes to light that the woman has had five different husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband (4:16-18). The woman’s personal life is a striking picture of the history of her people, the Samaritans, who had intermarried with five different nations and worshiped their gods (2 Kgs 17:33-41) before returning to the worship of the Lord God alone, albeit in an improper manner: They worshiped on Mount Gerizim near Shechem, whereas the covenant with David declared Jerusalem in Judah as the proper place of worship (Ps 132:13-18).
The conversation between Jesus and the woman now takes a theological turn (Jn 4:19-24), and when the woman expresses hope in the coming of the Messiah, Jesus reveals himself as that hoped-for savior (4:26). Dumbfounded, the woman walks back into town and invites the whole village to come out and meet this amazing man she just encountered at the well (4:27-28). They do, and after two days of conversation with Jesus, they come to believe in him. Jesus has spiritually “wooed” these descendants of Israel back to himself, just as Hosea had said: “I will now allure her … and speak tenderly to her… . And I will take you for my wife forever” (Hos 2:14-19).
The birth of the Church
This courtship theme continues into John 12 and the anointing of Jesus at the supper in Bethany at the beginning of Passion Week. Mary, Lazarus’ sister, brings a jar of pure nard and anoints Jesus’ feet as he reclines at the meal. This recalls a line from the Song of Songs: “While the king was on his couch, / my nard gave forth its fragrance” (1:12). John even mentions, “The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume” (Jn 12:3).
Significantly, nard is only found in the Old Testament in the Song of Songs, where it is a romantic fragrance (1:12, 4:13-14). But Jesus insists that this romantic luxury should be kept for his death: “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial” (Jn 12:7). That’s a very provocative thing to say: What could possibly be romantic about a funeral?
Yet when we fast-forward to the account of Jesus’ passion in John, we find many nuptial motifs. First, Jesus is crowned with thorns, which calls to mind the wedding crown of the royal son of David (Song 3:11):
Look, O daughters of Zion,
at King Solomon,
at the crown with which his mother crowned him
on the day of his wedding,
on the day of the gladness of his heart.
Some scholars think this may have been a crown of flowers and vines, made for the occasion of the royal wedding. By contrast, what fine foliage we use to crown our bridegroom king, Jesus!
As we move toward the cross, the soldiers remove Jesus’ clothing, as a bridegroom undresses to enter the wedding chamber (Jn 19:23-25). Jesus, looking down from the cross, sees his own mother and the apostle John standing nearby: “Woman, behold, your son!” he says, and to John: “Behold, your mother!” (Jn 19:26-27 RSVCE).
When in real life is it ever necessary to tell a woman that she has a son, or to introduce a mother and a son to each other? Only in the birthing chamber, when a midwife would clean and clothe the newborn child and then bring him back to his mother, announcing, “Look! You have a son!” and cooing to the boy-child, “Look, this is your mama!” So some spiritual authors have seen here a kind of spiritual birth of the apostle John, describing him as the first son of the Church, the first offspring of the fruitful love of the New Adam (Jesus) and the New Eve (Mary).
Holy thirst
Not long after, Jesus speaks from the cross and says, “I thirst” (Jn 19:28 RSVCE). This calls to mind the only other place in this Gospel where he was thirsty — at the well at Sychar, where he also asked for a drink, recalling the courtship of Rebekah. St. Teresa of Kolkata saw what this request was all about: “He thirsts for our love!” she said, and had “I thirst” written near the tabernacles in all the homes of her spiritual daughters. St. Teresa was right: These words from Jesus are a request for our love, for us to enter into a spousal relationship with him.
When we, God’s bridal people, were thirsty at Cana, Jesus gave us 180 gallons of the finest wine. But when he, the bridegroom, is thirsty on the cross, we give him nothing more than a sponge soaked in wine vinegar, held up on a hyssop branch (Jn 19:28). It’s not much of a response of love, but Jesus accepts it, and then says his last words from the cross: “It is consummated” (Jn 19:30, Douay-Rheims). In that older translation, we hear the connotations of the completion of marriage, and indeed, the words in the original Greek of the Gospel of John can carry this meaning.
The soldiers come and pierce the side of Jesus to ensure his death, and out flows a stream of blood and water. St. Augustine saw marital imagery in this event, whereas other fathers emphasized the parallel with Adam: As Eve came forth from the cut side of Adam, so the Church comes forth from the wounded side of Christ. The first readers of John, however, would have thought first of the Temple: During Passover, an enormous stream of blood and water flowed from the Temple. Thousands of lambs were slaughtered in the courtyard, and all their blood was washed with buckets of water down drains that flowed to a pipe in the side of the Temple Mount. From there, it gushed down the hillside into the Kidron Brook. It is a sign that Jesus’ body is the true Temple, as John had said earlier: “He spoke of the temple of his body” (Jn 2:21). That, in turn, connects back to Adam, whose body was a temple, since the word for the rib taken from his side refers to a sacred beam or post used to build the sanctuary, like Moses’ tabernacle or Solomon’s Temple (Gn 2:21).
The virginal tomb
Adam’s “mother” was the earth herself (Gn 2:7), and in the rest of John’s Passion account we see more Adam-Jesus connections. Joseph of Aramathea and Nicodemus take Jesus’ body down from the cross (Jn 19:38-39). Nicodemus brings an enormous amount of myrrh and aloes — a hundred pounds! This would have cost a fortune! Myrrh and aloes are only mentioned together in the Old Testament in strongly romantic contexts, like in the royal wedding psalm (Ps 45:8) and the Song of Songs (4:14; cf. Prv 7:17).
They were romantic fragrances in ancient times, associated with the marriages of the very wealthy. Jesus goes to his grave with fragrances fit for a royal wedding. Then they laid him in “a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid” (Jn 19:41). In other words, a virginal tomb. How appropriate! He took flesh from the virginal womb of his mother, then his flesh was laid in the virginal tomb, the “womb” of mother earth. At least half a dozen passages of Scripture compare the mother’s womb with the grave or the earth, such as Job’s famous line, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there” (Jb 1:21), or David’s memorable poetry: “You knit me together in my mother’s womb … when I was being made in secret, / intricately woven in the depths of the earth” (Ps 139:13-15; cf. Jer 20:17, Sir 40:1).
Just as the virginal womb of Mary gave birth to Jesus at Christmas, so the virginal tomb gives re-birth to him at Easter. Notably, it is Nicodemus who places Jesus’ body in the virginal tomb, the same Nicodemus who earlier asked Jesus, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” (Jn 3:4). Yes, Nicodemus, each of us will enter a second time into the womb of mother earth! But if we have been baptized — the new birth of water and Spirit (Jn 3:5) — we will share Jesus’ second birth from the grave when he comes again!
The whole drama of Jesus’ passion is the story of the bridegroom giving his body to and for his bride. In his death, Jesus gave us his body so that we could be saved for eternal life. And every time we celebrate Mass, that gift of his body is renewed. At Mass, he thirsts for our love, even as he satisfies our thirst for God’s grace. And we should return his love to him, satisfying his thirst as he satisfies ours. This is why the Mass is called the wedding feast of the Lamb.
John has painted Jesus’ passion with the colors of a wedding, as I said above. That is because God is “passionate” in his love for humanity: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son … ” (Jn 3:16). Jesus experiences “passion” in the sense of suffering because of his great “passion” for his people. No other world religion or philosophy dares to suggest that the divinity, the God who created the universe and all that is, humbled himself to take on the nature of his creatures in order to love them and enter into a spousal covenant with them. Indeed, if it were not true, it would be blasphemous to propose it.
