Behold Our King (John 19:1-16a)

“Lev.17:11: ‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I, I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your soul…’ In the [Biblical] case of sacrifice, the offerer tends to think, ‘I am putting this blood on the altar for the Lord.’ But here, the Lord turns that idea on its head. As scholar Baruch Schwartz explains in his essay “Prohibitions Concerning the ‘Eating’ of Blood”: What our clause does, in its unique, metaphorically graphic way, is to take a set phrase, the ‘placing’ of the blood on the altar, and to reverse the conceptual direction of the action: ‘It is not you who are placing the blood on the altar for me, for my benefit, but rather the opposite: it is I who have placed it there for you—for your benefit."‘ In his mercy and grace, the Lord has provided a way for guilty sinners to be forgiven.”

— Jay Sklar

Pilot's Three Questions (John 18:28-40)

“The scale of the reversal cannot be exaggerated:  when Jesus stands before Pilate… he must seem from the vantage of all the noble wisdom of the empire and the age... merely absurd…  But in the light of the resurrection… the mockery now redounds upon all kings and emperors, whose finery and symbols of status are revealed to be nothing more than rags and brambles beside the majesty of God’s Son, beside this servile shape in which God displays his infinite power to be where he will be; all the rulers of the earth cannot begin to surpass in grandeur this beauty of the God who ventures forth to make even the dust his glory.”

— David Bentley Hart

Jesus's Prayer for Us: Unity (John 17:20-26)

“[There] is nothing so social by nature as man, nothing so unsocial by corruption.”

— Augustine of Hippo

“[R]edemption being a work of restoration will appear to us by that very fact as the recovery of lost unity – the recovery of supernatural unity of man with God, but equally of the unity of men among themselves.”

— Henri de Lubac

The Hour is Coming (John 16:25-33)

“The pac Romana (the Roman peace) was won and maintained by a brutal sword; not a few Jews thought the messianic peace would have to be secured by a still mightier sword. Instead, it was secured by an innocent man who suffered and died at the hands of the Romans, of the Jews, and of all of us. And by his death he effected for his own followers peace with God, and therefore ‘the peace of God which transcends all understanding’ (Phil.4:7).”

— D.A. Carson, The Gospel According to John