Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. 

- John 13:1

Starting this Sunday, our readings for the season of Lent are all drawn from John’s Gospel and its account of the days right before the crucifixion of Jesus. In fact, we’ll spend the next five weeks with readings that cover only two days: the Thursday that we know as Maundy Thursday when he washed his disciples’ feet and shared in the Last Supper with them and prayed for them and was arrested, and the Friday that we know as Good Friday, when Jesus was interviewed by Pontius Pilate and crucified and died. That’s a lot of Sundays spent on just a few days of Jesus’ life! 

It might seem odd, but the gospels spend a lot of their time focused on the events of Holy Week. John’s Gospel alone spends nine out of twenty-one chapters focused on just that week. When asked why the gospel writers wrote so much about Jesus’ death and the events leading up to it, one of my seminary professors responded, “Because they never got over it.” In other words, the stories of betrayal, service, love, death, burial, and resurrection were so compelling and distressing and transformative that the disciples kept telling them over and over.

People use story-telling to make sense of our lives. When we introduce ourselves, we often tell stories about our growing up, our jobs, our families. When we are grieving a loved one’s death, we tell stories about what they meant to us in their life. When we reflect on important moments in our lives, we tell stories about ourselves and our history. Researchers have even studied this, and time and again they find that story-telling is a universal way that humans connect and make meaning.

Could you take time this Lent to focus on the story of Jesus’ last week in a special way? Try this: read the story in one sitting, from chapter 12 through chapter 20, remembering that the reason we have these stories is that the very first disciples found them so important that they repeated them and shared them again and again. Then, a few days later, go re-read it! See what you notice a second time through. As we journey through the story this Lent, you’ll find a deeper appreciation for the parts of the story we hear in worship if you spend some time reading the whole story yourself.