Compassion in Passiontide

Passion Sunday
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  When we hear the word “passion,” the first thing that comes to most of our minds is probably a strong emotion or desire.  We talk about a person driven by his or her passion.  Or we say that something was done in the heat of passion.  Sometimes passion even takes on a sense of lust, like the phrase “passionate kissing.”  

    But today’s celebration of Passion Sunday has nothing to with a strong desire or emotion.  And it certainly has nothing to do with lust.  Instead, Passion Sunday takes its name from the Latin word passio, which means suffering (very different from the way we often use the word passion today!).  When we talk about a martyr’s death in the Church, we often speak about the saint’s passio.  Today begins our two-week special focus on the suffering of Christ, leading up to and including His Passion, which happened beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane and culminating by His suffering on the cross as the Roman soldiers crucified Him.
    We start to get a sense of this from the Gradual and the Tract today, as we hear about the enemies of Christ and those who fight against Him, as prophesied by the psalmist.  The Gospel account surely starts this sense in which some of the Jews turned against the Lord.  They even sought to stone Him to death in today’s Gospel passage.  And our epistle from the Letter to the Hebrews draws for us the comparison between the death of Christ and the death of a sacrificed animal, and how much more efficacious Christ’s sacrifice was.
    How do we approach Passiontide, this time of the Passion of the Lord?  We start with compassion.  Compassion comes from two Latin words, cum meaning with, and passio, meaning, as I said earlier, suffering.  We suffer with Christ.  Hopefully we do not start suffering with Christ only today.  All of our Lenten practices should be a way that we suffer with Christ.  St. Paul talks about how he suffers with and in Christ in the first chapter of his epistle to the Colossians, verse 24: “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church.”  Christ’s suffering on the cross forgave all the sins of the world for all time.  However, because Christ joins us to Himself through Holy Baptism where we become a member of His Mystical Body, the Church, when we suffer, Christ suffers.  Paul had heard this message earlier, when the Lord spoke from the heavens and asked Saul (as he was called then) why Saul persecuted Christ.  Those who had been baptized, whom Saul persecuted, were part of Christ, and so Christ suffered through them.
    But suffering with Christ doesn’t happen by default.  Suffering with Christ means that we purposefully offer our pain, our frustration, our fatigue, our stress, our penances with Christ’s suffering on the cross so that they can be salvific: vehicles of God’s grace.  This is what the sisters (or maybe your parents) meant when they told us to “offer it up.”  We offer our sufferings to Christ for our own holiness, or for the holiness of others.  If we don’t offer it up, then our pain, our frustration, our fatigue, our stress, our penances are simply lacks of goodness, fullness, or wholeness, but provide no benefit to us.
    Suffering with Christ also means offering our love to Him as we think back on what He endured for us.  When someone we loves suffer, sometimes we try to take that suffering away.  But when the suffering cannot be taken away, we simply stay with the person to assure them that they’re not alone.  When a young man breaks up for the first time with his girlfriend, there’s nothing his parents can do to stop that suffering.  But they can be there for the man to help him through the heartache and help him realize that he is still loved, even if it’s no longer by that young woman.  We cannot take Christ’s sufferings away, but we can remain with Him to let Him know that He is not alone.  
    On the cross, Christ called out with the words of Psalm 21: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  As Christ took all sin from all time upon Himself, He felt the consequence of sin, alienation from God, even as He remained united to God in His Divinity.  But Christ also felt the loneliness of knowing that most of His closest friends, the Apostles, had abandoned Him in His time of need.  As we walk through Passiontide, may we be more like the Blessed Mother, St. John the Apostle, St. Mary Magadalene, and the other righteous women, who stayed with Christ at the foot of the cross, letting Christ know that He is not alone.
    This Passiontide, our goal is to be compassionate.  Certainly suffering with Christ through His sufferings and crucifixion, but also suffering with those with whom Christ identifies: the different members of His mystical body, our brothers and sisters, especially in the Church.  May we not be impassible, incapable of suffering, but unite our sufferings to Christ on the cross, and sharing our love and devotion to the one who suffered agony for our salvation: Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.   

A Strong Eighth Grader

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

This past Wednesday at our school Mass, we celebrated the Feast of Conversion of St. Paul.  And in my homily I was talking about how God chose St. Paul, even though he had started out persecuting Christians, and trying to arrest them.  And in part of the homily I referenced both what we heard in our second reading today, as well as when St. Paul says that he was given a thorn in his flesh, but God assured St. Paul that God’s power is made manifest in weakness.  To illustrate the point between being strong and weak, I asked one of our eighth grade students to come forward (he didn’t know he was going to be called forward, either).  This was one of our students who plays football and basketball, and is pretty athletic.  Once he was forward, I asked him to flex.  He looked at me for a second, turned a little red with embarrassment, but then flexed and showed off his guns (that’s how some young men talk about their muscles).  And I’ll be honest, I didn’t realize how strong he was!  After Mass he told me that he benches 200 lbs.  I can barely add any weights to the bar, so I was the demonstration of one who is weak.

St. Paul reminds us today that we don’t have to be the wisest, we don’t have to be the most powerful, we don’t have to be nobly born in order to follow Jesus.  God so often chooses those who are not considered strong or powerful or wise to be the vessels of His power.  That’s the way our God works.  More often than not, God’s choices don’t make sense in our modern understanding, whether modern is in the time of Jesus, the first millennium, the second millennium, or even now in the third millennium since the birth of Christ.  

As strange as Jesus’ teaching sounds to us, it probably sounded as weird for the people listening to Jesus.  Now, as then, we don’t tend to think of the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who desire righteousness, the merciful, the clean of heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness as people who are blessed.  Those people, in fact, seem like the ones who are the victims of society, and those who get run over by everybody.  But Jesus calls them blessed.  

How are they blessed?  They are attentive to God and His will, rather than the will of the world.  They are the ones who spend their attention and energy on serving God and bringing about His reign, rather than trying to hoard money, grab after power, cheat people, seek after vengeance, or look for and act on the desires of lust.  

And though Jesus taught on the mount in Galilee some 2,000 years ago, those words still apply to us today.  If we want to be blessed we have to rely on God, work for justice and peace, be meek and merciful, and be clean of heart.  Clean of heart may be one of the hardest in today’s world.  There are so many groups that make purity difficult: every second over $3,000 is being spent on lewd web pages.  Lack of purity can lead to addictions, can rewire the brains of our youth not to appreciate what is truly good and truly beautiful, can destroy marriages and families, and promote human trafficking.  It is an enslaving force in general.  But Jesus desires us to be free.  He wants to unshackle us from this uncleanness, so that we can live in true blessedness.  If you or someone you know struggles with lack of purity, like pornography, the Diocese of Lansing website has resources on its Marriage and Family Life webpage.  

No matter what beatitude strikes you as the most difficult, being weak is not a problem.  God chooses “the weak to shame the strong,” as St. Paul reminds us in our second reading.  All of us have weaknesses.  And so all of us can be chosen by God to show that God does great things, not by human accomplishment, but by His grace.