Day: April 6, 2025

“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place”

Passion is an ambiguous word, richly suggestive and evocative. We often think of ‘Passion’ in terms of our appetites or desires, our feelings and emotions, sexual and physical. We associate Passion with a deep and emotional attachment to some object of our longing. Yet the word seems inescapably bound up with the things of the body. How can this have anything to do with the things of the spirit? Because in the Christian understanding, the things of the spirit are altogether bound up with the things of the body. Christian spirituality is not a flight from the body or from the world. It is altogether about the redemption of the whole of our humanity and of the entire order of creation. Anything less than that sense of the whole is spurious and false, an incomplete kind of spirituality; in short, pseudo-religion, and as such, de-humanizing.

Passion Sunday marks the beginning of deep Lent, a two-week period of intense concentration upon the Passion of Christ. The whole of the Christian religion is concentrated into the scope of these two weeks and, within these two weeks, into Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday and ending with Easter, and, within Holy Week, into the Triduum Sacrum, the three great Holy Days of Maundy Thursday through to Easter Eve, and, within the Triduum Sacrum, concentrated upon the Passion of Christ which we call Good Friday, without which we can make no sense of Easter and the joy of the Resurrection. There is a remarkable intensity to Passiontide. It concerns our participation in the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

What do we mean by the Passion of Christ? We mean his willingness to suffer for us. Passion signifies “being acted upon”; hence, suffering. It is inescapably part and parcel of the human condition, part and parcel of the finite reality of our lives. It requires a body, though suffering is by no means restricted to the body. There is an intense interplay between body and soul in human experience; sufferings that are at once physical and mental; anguish of the soul and body. The interplay between them belongs to the understanding of what it means to be human and it is no less so with regards to the reality of suffering which seems so destructive of human personality, of the human community, and of human life.

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