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The Catholic Telegraph
March 22, 2002Every year the Church’s liturgy offers us two readings of the account of the passion and death of Jesus. One is on the Sunday of Holy Week (which the new Lectionary calls "Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion"), the other on Good Friday. These are long readings because each of the evangelists offers an extended treatment of what happened to Jesus in His last days on earth. The evangelists recount the events of those days at great length because they were so important to the story of Jesus’ life and mission. And the Church has us read the accounts twice in one week because what happened to Jesus is so important to us.
What’s important for us in the passion narratives is not just coming to know the sad facts of the end of Jesus’ life, but grasping the significance of those facts in Jesus’ life and in our life. What do the passion and death of Jesus really mean?
The answer to that question comes in this Sunday’s second reading from the letter to the Philippians, a reading that the Church assigns to this Sunday each year of the three year cycle.
Paul is encouraging the Philippians to be humble and generous to one another. They should imitate Christ, he says. Now comes our reading. The reading seems to be an early Christian hymn that Paul cites (and embellishes a bit) in order to make his point. If you want to imitate Christ, you have to know what Christ was and is all about.
Christ was God’s Son, equal to the Father, but He didn’t see that as something to be hung on to at all costs. He became a human being in order to offer the Father humility and obedience. He carried obedience to its most demanding extreme in His willingness to die the death of a criminal. Because He was God, His humility and obedience were unique, totally surpassing anything that human beings had been capable of before. In view of that, the Father raised Jesus in His humanity to a position of honor that demands reverence and adoration from everyone everywhere ("in heaven, on earth, and under the earth"). All creatures are called to acknowledge the gift of universal dominion that the Father has conferred on Jesus because of His humility and obedience.
The implications of the hymn for the Philippians are clear: if you want to share in the glory and the kingdom of Jesus, you have to participate in His humility and obedience.
But the hymn also offers us an explanation of Jesus suffering and death. It tells us that Jesus didn’t take advantage of His being God’s Son in order to escape any part of His human mission. His mission was to exemplify and demonstrate what love and service to the Father are all about, and thus to exemplify and demonstrate the purpose and goal of every human life. In His affection for His friends and followers, Jesus showed how God’s love translates into human love. In His concern for the poor, the outcasts, the sick, the sinners, Jesus demonstrated that the love of a human being for God entails a universality of love for all those whom God loves. In His faithfulness to His mission in spite of rejection and hostility and hatred and even death, Jesus taught that nothing in human existence is more important than humble and obedient response to the loving will of God. The life of Jesus was a life of obedience, obedience to what God asked of Him in the human mission He had taken on. That obedience is what brought Him into conflict with the powers of His time. That obedience brought Him to the death of a criminal. The humiliation and suffering and death of Jesus were a direct result of His life. The significance of the passion narratives, therefore, does not lie merely in the facts they preserve, but in their reflection of the humility and dedication and obedience of Jesus that lie behind the facts and that were the reason for their occurrence.
Our mission and Christ’s mission are the same: faithful obedience to the implications of God’s love for us and for all His human creatures. This is what we committed ourselves to when we accepted the life of Christ in baptism. We may not be destined to suffer public humiliation and the death of a criminal. But we are called to deal with the demands of faith in a godless society. We are called to be loving and generous to other human beings who may not be loving and generous in return. We are called to be faithful to the commitments we have made in marriage or parenthood or priesthood. We are all called to put absolutely everything we have into the acceptance of God’s will in our lives, even when His will is dark and painful and frightening. We are all called to absolute obedience to the Father, cost what it may. Our life plan is to be the same as Christ’s life plan, and the passion and death of Christ show us what that life plan can involve.
Jesus is not our Savior because He suffered a lot. Jesus is our savior because He showed us and taught us and enabled us to carry out the obedience and humility that all human life was meant to express.
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Conversation Questions.
How do I participate in the passion of Christ?
What does it mean to me to say, "Jesus Christ is Lord?"
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