The Passion Gospel, which we have just heard, is a very sober account, with little appeal to our emotions. Our culture tends to make much of emotions: how we feel about things. The story of the Passion is like someone in shock saying what happened. It’s so big that the emotions are numb; it’s more than they can handle. This is something that not only overwhelms our emotions, but also our imagination and our intellect.  This is a story that ends today in a death and a burial. In some ways it is just an ordinary tale of judicial murder, real-politik and innocent suffering. In the story, the actual person of Jesus is almost irrelevant. He is being sacrificed to a fear of the loss of the Temple on one side, and pressure from the Emperor on the other. Injustice prevails and an innocent man dies, as usual.   But we don’t tell the story because an innocent man died (and he did die!) We tell it because death and burial are not the end of the story. Injustice and evil did not win. Death and burial did not finish the tale. Jesus rose from the dead. Death is no longer the ultimate end.   Judas, the chief priests and Pilate all act to bring about Jesus’ death. Jesus suffers death. But in John‘s Gospel, it is also as if Jesus is in charge; not only that he is in charge, but that he is acting according to the Father’s will. Jesus gives himself to death so that death will no longer be the ultimate triumph of sin and evil.   John, and the other evangelists and writers, present this event to us in terms of Jewish culture, Scripture and worship. But this event is the lens through which they now see that Scripture, culture and worship. This is what makes sense of it all. This is why we have the reading from Isaiah today, and why we see the worship of the Temple as we do in the Letter to the Hebrews.   Jesus as the son of God receives all that he is from the Father. In the Spirit he offers all that he has received back to the Father. This is his life in the Trinity, and he lives this out on the cross, as the Son of Man. And therefore the children of men can go through death, as he has done, to our own Resurrection. This gives us the way to view the world, to worship God, and to hope for the victory of justice and the fullness of life in God. 