Guiding Light

As we enter into the Holy Week, we tend to look for a spiritual emotional “fix,” a “shot in the arm,” by re-enacting the passion of Our Lord. We are a people so celebrity-oriented that even in our re-living of the passion and death of the Lord, we focus on the external, the special effects. That’s why we see crowds gathering to watch the flagellants, and the crucifixions of “kristos.” 

These phenomena are now part of the tourist attractions of the Holy Week. Are we missing something very important if this is all there is to Lent and Holy Week observance –  a “palabas” (show)?

I feel kind of sad when I listen to the radio and watch the TV in the past few days.  The anticipation communicated by the media about this coming Holy Week is that it’s a time to get away for the holidays – an escapade. “Book early for Boracay, or Palawan, or one of the hundreds of resort places to have your summer fun! “

In fact, even during the Holy Week Triduum, the attendance on Holy Saturday is usually much fewer because the people already go to the beaches on Holy Saturday. I recall a group of people playing mahjong the whole day on Good Friday. When three o’clock in the afternoon struck, one of them said, “It’s three o’clock.  Let’s observe three minutes of silence for Good Friday.” After three minutes the mahjong continues. 

Perhaps, Jesus would say, “I did not come to die the terrible agony on the cross for your three minutes of silence.” Like the people who drive Jesus Christ out of Christmas, are we banishing Jesus from Holy Week? A Holy Week without Jesus and the Cross?

We don’t seem to behave like a Catholic or a Christian people. You may know that in the first few centuries, the cross and crucifixion were hardly depicted. The cross had too terrible a connotation.  People could not bear the thought that Jesus ended his life upon a cross. But by the Middle Ages the suffering Jesus was portrayed on the cross, and that image was multiplied, in wood, stone, and painting. We see it everywhere today.  But still we ask why?

The Protestants prefer the plain cross to the corpus (or body) placed on the cross, which technically is what the word “crucifix” means. The Protestants wish to emphasize the resurrection.  Jesus’ body is no longer there.  He is risen. Catholics wish to emphasize the price Jesus paid for our redemption,  the suffering, which he freely accepted. Both approaches are justified. There are many ways to try and explain what God has done for us in Christ.

The crucifix brings a message to the universal condition of suffering and death. All that is simply a part of the way God made us, the fact that we have a body.  When death comes we need a sign, constant reminder                that there can be a meaning to it all, there’s some sense to the senseless. The crucifix is that sign.

There is a passion and death in everyone’s future, and Jesus, being one of us, knew it also. But on the other side of that ending there is the beginning of a new life, even a new creature, even a new creation. God proclaims in the Book of Revelation, “Behold, I make all things new.”(Rev. 21:5)

All this raises an important question.  Why did Jesus allow himself to suffer death by crucifixion?  Why did he submit to such a horrible death?  The answers people give to that question boil down to three main ones.

First, Jesus wanted his death to be a sign. He wanted it to say, in a dramatic way, what he told his disciples so often during his life: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Second, Jesus wanted his death to be an invitation.  He wanted to invite us to do what he told his disciples to do soften during his life: “Love one another as I love you.” Finally, Jesus wanted his death to be a revelation. Again, he wanted to tell us what he told his disciples so often during his life – that love entails suffering: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”

And so the crucifixion of Jesus makes important statements. First, it’s a sign of Jesus’ love for us. Second, it’s an invitation for us to love as Jesus loved. And finally, it’s a revelation that love entails suffering. Of these three statements, the final one is the one we need to hear most in our day.

In our modern era of painkillers and instant gratification, we tend to forget that life entails suffering. During the First World War, a British Episcopalian Minister composed a poem he entitled “Indifference.”  The poem ran like this:

When Jesus came to Golgotha,

They hanged him on a tree.

They drove great nails through his hands and feet,

And made their Calvary.

They crowned him with a crown of thorns;

Red were his wounds and deep.

For those were crude and cruel days,

And human flesh was cheap.

When Jesus came to Birmingham

(We might substitute Cebu),

They simply passed him by;

They never hurt a hair of him,

They only let him die.

For men had grown more tender;

They would not cause him pain.

They only passed him down the street,

And left him in the rain.

Still Jesus cried, “Forgive them,

For they know not what they do!”

And still it rained a winter rain

That drenched him through and through.

The crowds went home and left the streets

Without a soul to see,

And Jesus crouched against a wall

And cried for Calvary.

How can we pass Jesus “in the rain?” To pass Christ “in the rain” is to pass by his crucified images, those he called “least of my brothers and sisters.” Not that Christ is to be found only in the hungry or the thirsty, only in the stranger and the naked, only in the sick and the imprisoned. Rather these needy reflect more obviously the helpless Christ of Calvary.

To be a genuine disciple of Jesus is to be profoundly engaged with the mystery of the cross, and that mystery is, as Jesus puts it, a life given in “ransom” for others. I am not a genuine disciple of Jesus if, like Luke’s priest on the road to Jericho, I see a human “half dead” and “pass by on the other side.”

As we enter this Holy week, let us pray that we may come to sense deep within us the helplessness of Christ, the helplessness of so many christs among us, and ultimately our own helplessness with Christ. For therein lies our salvation.

In conclusion, the crucifixion of Jesus tells us that Jesus loves us with the highest love. It invites us to try to love others in the same way. It reminds us that love will always involve suffering. This is the practical lesson of love that Jesus wants us to carry home from this liturgy. This is also the practical lesson of love that Jesus wants us to share with the world.

Let us close by paraphrasing a familiar prayer. Please bow your heads and pray along with me in silence:

“Lord, teach us to love.

Teach us to love others as you love us.

Teach us to love and not keep score;

Teach us to love and not to heed the pain;

Teach us to love and not to insist on an equal return;

Teach us to love and not to ask for any special reward,

Except to know that we are doing your will.”

Amen.