Question: Fr Felix Fernandez

What does the passion of Christ mean in daily life?

Answer: Subash Anand

The passion narrative we find the Gospels are the most abused text in the Bible. It lends itself for a lot of emotional appeals and melodramatic outbursts. We need to keep in mind two important guidelines to interpret the passion and death of Jesus. First, whatever we say about the suffering and death of Jesus is also a statement about God. Second, the passion and death of Jesus can only be fully understood in the light of Easter. Let us now examine a few traditional claims.

“God sent His Son to save us from our sins.” The mystery of incarnation seems to be consequential to our sin. This negates the explicit teaching of the New Testament. John says: “In the beginning was the Word… all things were made through Him” (1.1). The deuteron – Pauline author exclaims: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world…” (Eph 1:3-6). We have similar teaching also in Col 1:15-20, and Heb 1:1-4.

“Jesus took away the burden of my sins. By His death Jesus atoned for our sins, and reconciled us with His Father.” Here we have the Old Testament scapegoat theory. This theory takes away the seriousness of sin. Catholics have no problem in confessing the same sins again and again because Jesus takes them away. I remember Paul’s question “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” (Rom 6:1). From what I know, this practice of confessing our sins was indirectly encouraging child-abuse by the clergy: “You can always go to confession!”

“Jesus died in obedience to God!” This goes back to Paul: Jesus “humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phi 2:8). But Jesus insists that our heavenly Father is much more kind and loving than our earthly parents (Lk 11:13). I do not think any of our parents would want their children to die a horrible death, much less would the heavenly Father want His most beloved Son undergo such torture. I do not think God is a sadist. I also believe that God is powerful enough to save us without His Son undergoing a horrible death. For me the most powerful description of God is found in the parable of the lost son. “But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran, and embraced him, and kissed him” (Lk 15:20). The father does not wait for an apology; he does not even wait for the boy to reach home; he does not ask for any atonement, expiation or reparation. This is the Father of Jesus.

“Jesus died to save me.” I can understand how a person risks his life, and even dies, in an attempt to save a drowning person, to rescue a helpless child from a house on fire, etc. But I find it almost impossible to make any sense of the claim that a person, who lived two thousand years ago, has saved me by His death.

Incarnational Obedience
Death is not the consequence of sin. To be human is to be unto death. Even before the first humans sinned, God said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28). Now imagine, if death were really the result of sin, and if there were no sin, what would have happened to us. By now we would have been standing on top of one another, and even then there would not have been enough space on the earth.

Death is a natural consequence of being an embodied organism. Our body is bound to decompose and disintegrate. In accepting to be human, Jesus accepts all what it means to be human. He accepts the experience of hunger and thirst, of loneliness and death. In accepting all this, He brings added dignity to our human life with all its experiences. Our humanity, with all its innate weaknesses, now becomes the humanity of our God. Had there been no sin, humans would wait for death, for then they would be fully with the Father. With the advent of sin, human existence acquires a tragic dimension. Now hunger and thirst, loneliness and death can be demeaning. While being natural components of human life, now they can be aggravated by sin.

Prophetical Sacrifice
Jesus did not become obedient merely unto death, but even death on the cross (Phil 2:8). No earthly father would want his child undergo the torture of crucifixion. Jesus went about doing good. How could He die a brutal death on the cross? No! I just do not believe that the Father wanted His beloved Son to die on the cross. How, then, are we to understand the words of Scripture?

Imagine Nirmala working in a government hospital. She is very pretty. Many doctors want to seduce her. They offer her many things. She sees some of her companions coming to the hospital with a new saree every day! She understands what is happening. She shares her anxiety with her father. He tells her: “We are poor, and your mother and I are prepared to remain poor all our life, but we want you preserve your beauty, the beauty not only of your appearance, but also the beauty of your mind and heart… If you wish you may even resign that job, but never compromise.”

Nirmala goes through a lot of difficulties. Some of her companions tell her to be practical. Others even malign her. One day her father gets the news that she has been raped and strangled to death. He never wanted that such a horrible thing should ever happen to his beloved daughter. Yet knowing how things were, he had a dim premonition that it could happen. It did happen. He accepts her death as a sacrificial gesture. He is deeply pained, but also grateful to God for his child.

The story of Nirmala is the story of many innocent people, who had the courage to be loyal to truth: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, etc. They had a mission to fulfil and they refused to compromise, and they paid the price. Their death was the source of courage and empowerment for the people for whom they were fighting.

The incarnation carries with it a mission: to bear witness to the truth (Jn 18:37). Truth is not always acceptable. It invites opposition. It does not surprise me that the chief priests opposed Jesus the most. The person who stands for the truth becomes vulnerable. Jesus too was tempted to abandon His mission, to compromise with earthly powers, to be more practical (Mt 4:1-11). A prophet chooses to distance himself from the crowd, not because he is arrogant, but because deep down he thinks that God is making different demands of Him and through Him. He is not being with the crowd makes Him vulnerable. People find Him a nuisance and can even clamour for His blood.

By raising Jesus from the dead, the Father sets His seal on His life, ministry, message and sacrificial death. The cause of Jesus is the cause of God Himself. God cannot fail. The death and resurrection of Jesus empowers us in our struggle against the powers of darkness, against injustice, against all dehumanizing structures and programs.

Compassionate Love
Imagine a village inhabited by people who are all affected by AIDS. Others shun that village. Even doctors do not attend to them. Some sisters of Mother Teresa go there. They try their best to befriend the people in the village, and attend to their medical needs. The people think they have come to convert them. They have been brainwashed by some fanatical group. The sisters put themselves to a lot of inconveniences and even face ridicule; but they also redeem the people of that village. They slowly rediscover their dignity. The good Samaritan became doubly vulnerable. The Jews could stone Him for polluting one of their companions. The Samaritans could thrash Him for helping their enemy. So too with sin entering human life, the incarnation of God’s Word acquires an additional dimension: now He comes also as our redeemer. By being with us, He assures us that God still loves us.

Vulnerable Freedom
Compassion implies freedom. Freedom is the capacity to determine oneself. If I am absolutely the same before and after I exercise my freedom, then it is difficult to see how I have exercised my freedom. Imagine some great person telling you: “I love you deeply. Your joy is my joy, your pain is my pain. But whether I love you or not, I remain the same.” What would you think of this love? What would you think of a person who claims to have such a love? Will you come to Him for help when you are in need? Do you think He will adjust His plans to offer you the help you need? Love-songs from all over the world tell us that there is a deep longing in our gift of love—the best human expression of freedom—that it be for ever. This means that “what happens really matters only if it matters everlastingly. [But] What happens can matter everlastingly if it matters to him who is everlasting.” Hence for a God who is not really affected by human joy and pain this experience does not really matter and then the human condition becomes absurd.

God remains, God not like a stone, but like a faithful lover. I suggest that God who is love itself, decides in complete freedom to create us, and in doing so He also creates within Himself a real emptiness that can be filled only by our response. He freely makes Himself vulnerable. In creating the universe He experiences a history within Himself. All this sounds nonsensical, the talk of a mad man. But it is the madness of love. Hence I suggest that creation implies a real self-emptying (kenosis) within the heart of God. Without this real self-emptying there cannot be real affirmation of the other as other and much less real compassion: not just feeling for the other but also suffering with the other.

I believe that in the mystery of Incarnation the divine kenosis receives an historical expression. Jesus is Emmanuel: God with us (Mt 1:23). In Him God comes to be with His people, even going to Egypt to share their tragic experience (Mt 2:14). The mystery of Incarnation is “the mystery of God and the final word on reality. God draws history to Himself, submerging Himself in the horrors of that history.” An authentic lover always participates in the tragedy of his beloved. In Jesus God makes His own our hunger and thirst, our loneliness and death. With us He undergoes the pain and humiliation of being exploited and oppressed. Thus the passion of Jesus is a faint reflection of the compassion of God, a God who is faithful love. God, who freely bestowed on us the most sacred gift of freedom, Himself becomes the victim of our violence when we abuse our freedom to inflict pain on others. But He refuses to be totally crushed by our violence. The crucified Jesus is the Risen Lord. Authentic compassion gives us hope: “I am really with you, and together we can go beyond this tragedy.” Jesus is the ‘becoming-visible’ of the mysterious divine self-emptying, the effective sacrament of the compassion of God, because in Him we personally experience the God of compassion. The cross is the symbol of divine compassion and fidelity.