Sermon for Passion Sunday
“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place”
Passion Sunday. It is, perhaps, a curious and a rather perplexing term. What does it mean? What are we to make of Passiontide?
Suffering. That is what it means. Passion Sunday marks the beginning of our intense participation in the Passion of Christ; in other words, the sufferings of Christ. The suffering is for us and in us. The suffering is redemptive, even celebratory, and all the more so if we attend to the sufferings of Christ, which is what the reading from the Letter to the Hebrews is suggesting. The Gospel reading, too, points to the redemptive nature of this suffering and to the themes of discipleship and service and the idea of learning through sacrifice.
But suffering? Surely there is more than enough suffering and on a far greater scale than any of us can really imagine in our own world and day. It has been scarcely weeks since the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and already it is fallen off the front page and, indeed, was often eclipsed by the fears and worries about nuclear fallout. The loss of life and destruction of property along the coast of Japan was overwhelmingly huge, the magnitude of the earthquake and flood unprecedented. But humans can bear only so much truth, even the truth of suffering, it seems. And yet, suffering is the main concern of Passiontide.
Whose sufferings? Ours? Yes, in a way. Suffering here is seen as part and parcel of the human condition in its brokenness and fallenness; part and parcel, too, of a fallen world where things are not always as certain and stable and as safe as we would like them to be. Suffering in the Christian viewpoint is a result of sin, original and actual, personal and collective, but in Passiontide, all of it, I repeat, all of it, is concentrated on the figure of the Crucified.
