The Passion of Jesus: A Test Case for Providence

Abstract

In this essay I should like to raise the question: In what sense could we say that God’s providence was active in the last events of the life of Jesus, that is to say at Gethsemane and on the cross? I will proceed in three steps. First, I shall characterise Jesus’ encounter with evil. Second, I shall reconstruct the meaning attached to his life and to his relationship with the Father. Third, from the clash of evil and meaning represented in the passion of Jesus, God will be portrayed as absent-present in the midst of human suffering.Before engaging in our reflections, a methodological note is in order. When we examine New Testament texts reporting Jesus’ words and actions, we find out that ‘the accounts are not mutually consistent either in detail or in the interpretation they offer.’ Each of the scriptural narratives or comments on the passion not only does not attribute the same words to Jesus, but casts the saving event into a particular theological vision. Therefore, most exegetes try very carefully to avoid concordism.Next, the Gospel narratives are not ‘historical’ in the sense we moderns ascribe to this adjective. Surely they have an historic basis, but each of them tells a story the purpose of which is to highlight what it entailed for the faith of believers several decades after the resurrection of Jesus. The New Testament texts are not meant to give us some information about the inner psychology of Jesus. The details and dialogues presented are not directly biographical, but they are part of a narrative whose organizing principles are, in a sense, closer to those of a novel.