“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.
We worry ourselves sick. Our mental anguish results in physical ailments and complaints. Conversely, the agonies of the body can unhinge our minds. We cannot not speak of soul and body; we have always to speak of their inter-relation.
Passion suggests our being acted upon; suffering means the hurtful things which happen to us in body and soul. Yet we have already alluded to our own activity in this. For example, we can worry ourselves sick; worrying is something which we are very good at doing. Our acting upon our feelings can have disastrous consequences for us individually and collectively.
When we contemplate the bloody, sorry state of our world (same old, same old), we contemplate not the absence of God but the evil of our own doings. The troubling events in our world and day are about the disorders of our humanity. They show us exactly what we are capable of doing and actually do. To blame God is to deny the freedom and responsibility which belongs to human dignity, something which is actually God-bestowed. The Passion of Christ allows us to see suffering as belonging to our redemption: to see ‘passion’ in a double sense, passive and active.
We are at once actors and those who are acted upon. Our actions have deadly consequences for ourselves and for others. The reality of action, either our own or someone else’s, is present in the reality of our sufferings. Will they be for good or for ill? Will they be good thoughts or evil? Will they be good words or malicious words? Will they be good deeds or bad?
The Passion of Christ illuminates the potentialities which belong to our souls for good and for evil. Our humanity is on display in the Passion of Christ. “A sword shall pierce through thine own soul also,” Simeon had prophesied about Mary by reference to 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 what he wills to suffer for us so that we can learn and so discover the grace of redemption that is greater than the sin of destruction. Sin 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 – into which holy love we have been drawn by the crucified Christ. This is the love which seeks our good and reveals that good to us.
This is anticipated in the first lesson at Morning Prayer in the story of God’s Revelation of himself to Moses in the Burning Bush as “I Am Who I Am” which transcends but without negating the idea of God as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Passion reveals to us in all of its fullness “the most burning love of the crucified,” as Bonaventure so wonderfully puts it. Christ’s love speaks to the redemption of our loves encapsulated, we might say, in the passionate desire to know, the eros of Plato. A movement from us to God at the same time as the movement of God to us, a double movement which is us and God in us without which there is only suffering in a passive sense.
Passiontide focuses on the cross. At the cross all sin and all love is revealed. Yet the cross is veiled. Why? Because the full meaning of the cross is hidden from our eyes by the veils of our ignorance. It is present and yet not fully understood. We see but only “through a glass darkly,” as Paul puts it.
Jesus told us about the Passion on Quinquagesima Sunday. There, in the reading from Luke’s Gospel, “they understood none of these things.” That is recalled this morning along with what we heard in Matthew’s Gospel just now but also in the second lesson at Morning Prayer lesson from Mark. Through the first four weeks of Lent we have struggled to understand something about the nature of our pilgrimage, contemplating the forms of demonic denial and the disorders of human personality, yet contemplating the power of God who makes provision for us even out of our barren, empty nothingness; crumbs from the table, fragments gathered up in the wilderness. Nonetheless, we remain uncertain and confused. We know but only in part.
Like the mother of Zebedee’s children in today’s gospel, we want what is best for our children and for ourselves without really or clearly knowing what that is. “Ye know not what ye ask”, Jesus says ever so gently and yet ever so devastatingly both to her and to James and John. What will it take for us to learn? Nothing less than our constant attention to the Passion, to the things that unfold before us in what Christ wills to suffer for us and with us.
Hebrews offers the theological understanding to what we contemplate in Passiontide. We are able, Christ suggests in the dialogue and questions with James and John, “to drink of the cup” of which Christ drinks and “to be baptized with the baptism” with which he is baptized, because of his identity with us, for such things belong to the conditions of our humanity. Yet the further meaning of that suffering requires our waiting upon the will and judgment of the Father just as it does for Jesus. The Passion of Christ is our waiting upon that judgment made visible in the sufferings of Christ. The Passion makes known those “two vast, spacious things, … sinne and love,” as Herbert puts it.
“By his own blood, he entered in once into the holy place”; blood which he has from Mary, blood which belongs to his incarnate reality with us in the fullness of our humanity through her. Hebrews teaches about the Resurrection through the Passion. The Resurrection ultimately culminates in Christ’s Ascension; the holy place is at once Jerusalem and the Trinity. We find our holy place in the love of the Son for the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Eternal redemption is accomplished and obtained for us. “By means of death” for our redemption, “he is the Mediator of the new covenant,” and for what end? That we “might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.”
We know the story but to grasp its fuller significance requires our constant commitment to what is heard and seen. Such is the paradox of the Passion. The Resurrection deepens our understanding of the Passion even as the Passion intensifies the joy of the Resurrection. Both moments belong to human redemption. The interplay of soul and body complements this interplay of Death and Resurrection. We enter into the Passion of Christ in all of its intensity that we might learn the fullness of the joy of our redemption. To know even as we are known, embraced in the love of Christ.
“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place”
Fr. David Curry
Passion Sunday
April 6th, 2025 (2002 reworked)