Painting by Salvador Dali
PASSION
SUNDAY - B
Today
is Passion Sunday. According to Henri
Nouwen passion happens when things are being done to a person over which he has
no control and becomes the recipient of other people’s initiatives. Jesus embraced his passion when starting in
Gethsemane he was “handed over” by Judas, then later on by the Jewish religious
leaders, by Pilate and ultimately by his Father. In the last three years of his
life Jesus, he was in full control of his action in his public ministry:
teaching, preaching and performing miracles.
In the last three days of his life, when he was “handed over”, he was under
the initiative of the action of other people.
At the end the Son handed over
his life in utter abandonment to the One he called Father and God who abandoned
him: “My God, my God why have you
abandoned me?”
Today
as the Church processes with Jesus into Jerusalem, he invites us once again to
enter into his Paschal Mystery. We
embrace the “Boundless God” as he empties himself into the “mystery of love” that
defines his divinity and our humanity as well.
We enter into the “doors of the sacred” to see the countenance of
God. Through the liturgical celebrations
of this Holy Week we do not only commemorate the great events in the life of
Jesus but as active participants we “make them present” by the virtue of our paschal character.
The
Paschal Mystery of Jesus can be viewed in two ways: we can either see him as he
“died for our sins” and/or as he “entered his glory”. The atonement theory is the expression of
the juridical character of the salvific events that Jesus had to go
through. Because humanity sinned against
God, somebody had to pay the ransom, the price of which was suffering and death by the Messiah. The only way to expiate the debt was
through a sacrifice that required the shedding of blood. This is why Jesus had to go through all the
horrendous passion: the agony in Gethsemane, scourging at the pillar, the
crowning of thorns, the carrying of the cross and eventually the dying on the
cross. Most of us commemorate the Holy
Week by reflecting the events more as the sacred works of Jesus that saved
us. “By his wounds we were healed” (Is.
53).
The
Paschal Mystery is not only redemptive but also revelatory. Whilst the
atonement theory of his passion is focused more on the juridical aspect of
suffering and death, another way of seeing the Paschal Mystery is in its
revelatory nature. All that happened in
the passion are the “unveiling” of the countenance of God when Jesus “entered
into glory”. We don’t normally see it
that way because we are more attuned to seeing glory as a shining splendour and
immaculate perfection. Glory in the
passion takes on a different twist that shakes the worldly standard of beauty
and form. We see Jesus naked, crowned
with thorns, bruised, spat upon, despised, mocked and died as a criminal. This is the “divine beauty” that continues to
shakes and confronts the world. In this beauty the glory of God shines more in the
Person of God who manifested himself as "Love-in-action".
The paschal character of Jesus’ Paschal
Mystery is shared to us in every aspect of our being so that we can say that the life of every Christian is “paschal” in nature”.
It means that we always carry within us the passion, death and
resurrection of Jesus that continue to transform us as God’s children unto the
being of the Son. “Though it belongs to one precise moment of our time it has an eternal
actuality because never for an instant Jesus leaves the moment of redemption, the
moment of death in which he is raised and glorified” (Francois X. Durwell). We do no only commemorate the Passion of
Jesus as an event that happened as part of human history, but rather we re-live
it as actors with chosen roles to play in this on-going, eternal drama of
Trinitarian self-emptying.
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