Daily Reading for April 30
The followers of Jesus came very early to the conclusion that he had lived in order to die, that his death was not the interruption of his life at all but its ultimate purpose. Even by the most generous reading, the Gospels give us information about less than a hundred days in the life of Jesus; but for the last two or three days of his life, they provide a detailed, almost hour-by-hour scenario. And the climax of that scenario is the account of Good Friday and of his three hours on the cross. The Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed recognized this when they moved directly from his birth “from the Virgin Mary” to his crucifixion “under Pontius Pilate.” What was said of the thane of Cawdor in Macbeth was true preeminently of Jesus: “Nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving of it.”
From Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture by Jaroslav Pelikan (Perennial Library, 1985).