There is a moment near the beginning of The Passion of the Christ where Mary pensively asks her companion, Mary Magdalene, “why is this night so different from others?” This is one of the four questions (ma nishtana) recited at Passover each year, and as is answered at every Seder table for centuries: “because once we were slaves, but now we are free.” I absolutely love the placement of this, coming just as Jesus is arrested, because it quietly sets the scene of a night that will lead to a new kind of deliverance.
The arrest of Jesus, as detailed in the gospels, is chaotic, to the point where during the scuffle between the disciples and those who had come to make the arrest, Peter cuts off the ear of the servant of the high priest. In amongst this commotion, Jesus remains the same as we saw Him at the Passover table: steady and unmoved. He quietly reaches down, picks up the ear and restores it back to Malchus. He doesn’t leave it. He doesn’t allow it to stand. He undoes what has just been done, and then says to Peter, “shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?”
From there, He is taken and moved through a series of accusations and questioning, eventually brought before Pontius Pilate. The pressure builds, the tone around Him becomes more forceful, but He doesn’t meet it. There is no defence. No attempt to correct anything. No effort to take control of the situation. He remains the same. As everything continues, the mocking, the beating, the public nature of it all, it doesn’t look like anything is going to change. From the outside, it looks like things have gone in the opposite direction to what had been hoped for.
But sitting alongside all of that, it’s hard not to notice how closely it follows the pattern of Passover. A lamb chosen, set apart, and then given. Something that, in the moment, does not look like victory.
And I think that’s what makes that opening question sit differently. Why is this night different from all other nights? Because what looks like loss…is not without purpose. Because what doesn’t look like deliverance…is not separate from it.
And because sometimes what is happening doesn’t match what we expected to see, it becomes very easy to miss what is actually taking place. The coming King, who was welcomed into Jerusalem only a few days earlier, heralded with palm branches and carrying the hope of a new Israel, is now crucified and dead.
And yet, nothing about Him has changed.
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