“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us”
We are like the mother of Zebedee’s children in today’s gospel. We want what is best not always knowing what that is. “Ye know not what ye ask,” Jesus says ever so gently and yet ever so devastatingly. There can be no greater commentary on the nature of human desire than this. What will it take for us to learn? Nothing less, it seems, than our constant attention to the things of the Passion of Christ, to the things that are unfolded before us and which are explained to us, even more, the things with which we are involved, perhaps more intimately than we realize.
This Sunday is called Passion Sunday. It marks the beginning of deep Lent, a more intense focus on the nature of redemption. The word, ‘passion’, signifies our being acted upon. When we think of suffering we think about the hurtful and painful things which happen to us in body and soul. Yet we are active in this, as well. For example, we can worry ourselves sick; worrying is something which we do and rather well. Our acting upon our feelings can have disastrous consequences for us individually and collectively.
When we contemplate the bloody, sorry state of our world, we contemplate not the absence of God but the evil of our own doings. God is not the author of the horrible events that belong to the record of the day-to-day of our contemporary world, from torture to battles, from killings to shootings, from accidents to even the mysterious disappearance of airplanes. Troubling and horrifying events are about what we are capable of doing and what some actually do; they are also about accident and circumstance, the collision of events undertaken for different purposes. Yet, to blame God denies the freedom and responsibility which belongs to human dignity, something God-bestowed. The Passion of Christ allows us to see suffering in another light, namely, as belonging to our redemption, to our being at one with God, all the troubles and the sorrows of the world and our souls notwithstanding.
The passion of Christ illuminates for us the very potentialities which belong to our souls for good and for evil. In a way, our humanity is on display in the passion of Christ. “A sword shall pierce through thine own soul also,” Simeon prophesied of Mary about the passion of Christ. Through the eyes of Mary, we contemplate the horrible things which we are capable of doing to ourselves, to one another and, most astoundingly and most foolishly of all, to God. They are all made visible in the crucified Christ.
The Passion of Christ is about what he wills to suffer for us so that we can learn this and so that we can discover the grace of redemption that is greater than the sin of destruction. Sin, after all, destroys. All sin is death: it is the death of God in the soul. That Christ wills to suffer for us signifies the true meaning of sacrifice. It has altogether to do with love – the love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. In other words, we learn through suffering. Yet the Passion of Christ is about something even greater; the idea of learning through sacrifice; in short, through love. The two great lessons of Passiontide are about sin and love.
The Passion of Christ reveals the divine will which seeks our atonement, our being at one with God and with one another. It costs, as Jeremy Taylor puts it, “the heart-blood of the Son of God for us.”
The Letter to the Hebrews offers the theological understanding for what we contemplate in Passiontide. We are all able, Christ suggests in the interrogatories which follow in the Gospel, “to drink of the cup” which Christ drinks and “to be baptized with the baptism” which he is baptized through his identity with us, for such things belong to our humanity. Yet the further meaning of that redemptive suffering, namely, our place in glory, requires our waiting upon the will and judgment of the Father. The Passion of Christ is about our waiting upon that judgment made visible in the sufferings of Christ. His sufferings are his sacrifice, his love.
“By his own blood” – blood which he has from Mary, blood which belongs to his incarnate reality with us in the fullness of our humanity – “he entered in once into the holy place.” So The Letter to the Hebrews teaches, reworking the ancient Jewish insight about the Temple in Jerusalem and “the holy of holies” into which the High Priest on the day of Yom Kippur would enter on behalf of sinful Israel and name the Holy Name; the day of atonement. The ancient insight of recalling God’s seeking our good has its ultimate fulfillment in Christ’s Passion. He enters into the holy place which is nothing less than his eternal place, his place in his love for the Father with the Holy Spirit. What has changed is that our humanity is drawn into the intimacy of the holy place, the place beyond all place, the place which is the heart of God himself.
All our sufferings, in one way or another, are about our separation from God, a separation which arises from our own self-awareness and our limitations, our sins and our follies. What the Passion of Christ reminds us is that God seeks to be reconciled with his sinful creation. He seeks our atonement. The theological word simply means being at one with. Passiontide is all about atonement. It is redemption in bold print. We enter into the passion of Christ in all of its intensity that we might learn the fullness of the joy of our redemption.
The letter to the Hebrews emphasizes the theology of the atonement. We cannot achieve oneness with God or with one another on our own power. We need what comes from God to us for that alone is the truth of our own wills. In the long end of the day, we can only will what God wants for us. Such are the deep lessons of Passiontide. What God wants is that we go with him and learn the intensity of his love for us. His sacrifice for us is the way of humble service. Our atonement can only be found in our willing the path which Christ wills for us.
“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us”
Fr. David Curry,
Passion Sunday, 2014