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.   

Working Out With God

Passion Sunday

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Two Thursdays ago I met up with Sgt. Anthony Dent to work out with him and some other Troopers and Cadets of the Michigan State Police.  Anthony likes to push me when we work out, and I think one of his proudest moments working out with me is when his workout made me throw-up.  This particular workout was in the cross-fit style, and had us paired up, going against other pairs of Troopers and Cadets.  For the workout, each pair would share the following exercises in this order, not moving on to the next exercise until the previous was completed: 100 burpees; 100 calorie row; 100 barbell thrusters; 100 ab-mat sit-ups; 100 push presses; 100 box jumps; 1-mile run with a 14-pound medicine ball.  The first set was a challenge.  The second set started to kick my butt.  The third set and following got much harder, until I couldn’t even do the box-jumps, but had to substitute 2 box step-ups for every 1 box jump.  As each set progressed, Anthony did a greater percentage of the exercise.  I even had another sergeant help me with the box step-ups, because I was very gassed.
    When it comes to salvation, we might feel like we just have to muscle through and do it ourselves.  God gives us the rules (the workout), and we have to do it in order to get to heaven (rest).  While I’m loathe to compare Anthony to God, because he already has a very-healthy sense of self-worth, what we often find is that the harder we try to keep up, the more we fall behind.  We give it our all, but get more and more tired, until we are exhausted and don’t feel like we can do anything else.  And, unlike working out with others, you can’t have someone else do the exercise for you.
    So today’s first reading provides a great reminder for us: Christ already saved us!  His sacrifice, not ours, however good they may be, won reconciliation for us and the Father.  Before Christ, we tried all sorts of things to be saved: living according to the law, offering different sacrifices that God Himself had told us to make.  But that old covenant, written in stone, could not bring us into right relationship with God.  As the Apostle says elsewhere, it was only a tutor for us, to know how wrong our passions led us astray.  The new covenant, sealed in the Precious Blood of Christ, opened for us our eternal inheritance of heaven.  
    But so often, we try to do it all ourselves.  We live as if our entrance into the heavenly Temple depends only on us and our moral rectitude.  But if we live that way, we become more and more tired, are able to do less and less, and end up in failure.
    So, does that mean we can say that we simply believe in the Lord, confess that the Savior died for our sins, get baptized, and then never worry about going anywhere other than heaven?  While that is what some of our Protestant brothers and sisters seem to espouse, that is the other extreme, which we also need to avoid.  Rather, virtue lies in the middle between trying to earn our salvation (which we cannot do) and presuming our salvation (which we should not do).  Our response is to put faith in what God has done (which we could never do) while also working out our salvation with fear and trembling, to paraphrase St. Paul.
    Our good actions find their goodness inasmuch as they are connected to Christ.  By themselves, they do no more than the blood of goats or calves.  But if we unite to the cross our daily efforts to live in according with the covenant written in our hearts, prophesied by Jeremiah and fulfilled by Christ, then we will get somewhere.  We will advance in holiness because our efforts are now connecting to the “effort” that truly made a difference, the sacrifice of the unblemished Lamb of God.  To go back to my cross-fit analogy, it’s as if God has already done the entire workout and won us the prize.  But He wants us to engage in it because it will help us become more like Him.  Still, He knows we cannot do it all on our own, so He’s right there, by our side, picking up our slack, doing what we can’t, and encouraging us to do more than we think is possible, because all things are possible with Him.
    That is the day that Abraham saw from afar and in which he rejoiced.  Abraham longed for the day when God would close the gap that we had created by our disobedience.  He looked forward to a time when he would not simply have to act by faith, and presume his own efforts would be enough.  He rejoiced in God accomplishing what no mere human could: defeating sin and death and opening up eternal salvation.  And Abraham’s faith was not disappointed.
    So, by all means, in these last two weeks of Lent, may we not slack off on our Lenten disciplines and penances.  Work hard to put to death all within us that is not of God.  But do so knowing that God has already saved us; salvation doesn’t depend on us.  But God does want us to cooperate with Him in the work of salvation, complete the race, and enjoy the prize of eternal rest with the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.