Commenting
on the Lamb of God Christology in the Gospel of John and how it offers a reason
why Jesus’ suffering in Gethsemane is not mentioned therein, Eric Huntsman wrote:
Paschal imagery and the higher Christology of
John may also explain other differences in the Fourth Gospel’s Passion
narrative, which lacks any reference to Jesus’s suffering in the Garden of
Gethsemane and provides different details about the Crucifixion. This may be
because the Passover lamb was not primarily a vicarious sin offering but rather
a sacrifice that brought the hope of new life to the children of Israel, who
were passed over by the angel of death because of the lamb’s blood. Perhaps rather
than seeing Jesus shoulder the crushing burden of sin in Gethsemane and carry
it to the cross, where he died as a vicarious sacrifice for sin, John focused
on Jesus’s death as a source of life. Passing over reference to Jesus’s feeling
abandoned by the Father, with whom he is always at one with in John, this account
has Jesus declare “It is finished” and voluntarily “g[i]ve up the ghost” (John
19:30). Then, just as the blood of the paschal lambs was spread on the
doorframes of the Israelites in Egypt, so the blood of the Lamb of God pours on
the wood of the cross when a solider pierces Jesus’s side with a spear to make
sure he is dead. Linked with the blood is a stream of water (19:34), recalling
the fountain of living water of John 4:10 and the rivers of living water of John
7:38. To complete the Passover imagery, John 19:36-37 stresses that the soldiers
did not break Jesus’s legs, a requirement of the paschal lamb being that none
of its bones could be broken. (Eric D. Huntsman, “The Gospel of John” in Lincoln
H. Blumell, ed. New Testament History,
Culture, and Society: A Background to the Texts of the New Testament [Provo/Salt
Lake City: BYU Religious Studies Center/Deseret Book, 2019], 304-21, here, p.
317)
