It’s always sobering to preach on Passion Sunday. The stunning effect of reading and hearing our Lord’s Passion makes words seem either forced or superfluous. In the face of death, words always fail. And Jesus died a real death.
Just as we have a tendency to discount God’s diversity, the divine tri-unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in favor of a kind of unitarianism, we tend to favor Jesus’ divinity at the expense of his humanity. We try to impose on God our all too human ideas about what divinity is or what we think it ought to be. When we reduce God to our own limited and, frankly, often warped ideas about divinity, we eviscerate or at least attenuate the Incarnation of the Son of God.
During Lent and Easter, all readings in the Sunday lectionary are harmonized. During this season, the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, the responsorial Psalm, the reading from the New Testament letters, along with the Gospel are meant to provide us with a deep appreciation of the unity yielded by the diversity found in Sacred Scripture that, from the first word to the last, testify to Jesus Christ.
Today’s reading from Isaiah is the third of four so-called Servant Songs found in what most Bible scholars identify as deutero, or second, Isaiah. Deutero-Isaiah was likely written during Israel’s Babylonian exile. So, even in their original context, these poems are messianic oracles that look forward not just to Israel’s redemption, its return from exile, but to redemption of the whole world.
This universal aspect of Israel’s election is a late development in ancient Judaism. It is the universal nature of the deliverance the Suffering Servant brings that shows a growing awareness that Israel’s unique calling among the nations is not just for themselves but for the whole world. In other words, God is works through Israel to bring about not merely the reconciliation of the world to himself but to bring the whole of creation to its completion. As Jesus said to the Samaritan woman at the well: "salvation is from the Jews."1
What still applies to Israel now also applies to the Church. The “new” covenant is simply an extension of the only covenant God has sought to make with humanity. There is no superseding of what we often call the “old” covenant or the “old testament.” The content of this covenant is simple: “I will be your God and you will be my people.” But there is a stipulation.
Rebuking ancient Israel through the Prophet Jeremiah, God said: “I will be your God and you shall be my people. Walk exactly in the way I command you, so that you may prosper…”2 In the Last Supper Discourse in Saint John’s Gospel, Jesus puts it this way: “You are my friend if you do what I command you” (italics added).3
Doing what God commands means loving God with all your being and loving your neighbor as you love yourself. It is on these two commandments, Jesus insists, that the “whole law and the prophets depend.”4 This “love,” in the original Greek agape, is really not about how much affection or tenderness you feel toward your neighbor.
Agape is self-giving, self-sacrificing love. Agape is what Jesus shows us through his passion and death. “In this is love [agape],” we read in scripture, “not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.”5
The Crucifixion, Cano Alonso, late 1630s
Today, in one liturgy, we go from hailing Jesus during his triumphal entry into Jerusalem to crying out for his crucifixion. This brings a deep truth to the forefront. In his book about life in the Soviet gulag, reflecting on his experiences there, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn states this truth succinctly: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart.”
How often is what we read in scripture true: “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing”?6 Or, worse yet, out of the same mouth comes praise of God and condemnation of one’s brother/sister! To bring this home, scripture also teaches: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar.”7 My dear friends, if God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, chances are he didn’t send you to do that either.8
Lent, which still has several days to go, is all about repentance. Lent is preparation for the renewal of your baptismal promises at Easter. Repentance starts with the recognition of your need to change and, with God’s help, to begin or continue the often painful process being more conformed to the image of Christ.
In our reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Philippians we hear the words of an ancient Christian hymn that the apostle appropriated, using it to teach. Kenosis is the Greek word translated as “emptied” in the phrase “he emptied himself.” This passage is often called “the Kenotic Hymn.”
Kenosis is the essence of agape. Hence, kenosis is the very nature of God. What Paul here is trying to show is that God’s true nature does not consist of all those human-imposed attributes, most of which are quite pagan, but of kenosis. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. He is the full and complete revelation of God. If it is contrary to Christ, it is contrary to God. He is, after all, "true God from true God."
If we back up three verses from the start of our reading from the second chapter of Philippians, we discover what the apostle is trying to teach by means of this hymn:
Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory; rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves, each looking out not for his own interests, but [also] everyone for those of others. Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus...9Self-emptying love, kenosis, is the essence of God’s tri-unity. Creation is kenosis, the self-emptying love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit poured out, bringing life from nothing. Christ’s Incarnation, his birth, life, passion, and unjust death, and the redemption these bring are kenosis.
When Jesus cries out, Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani, he is quoting the beginning of Psalm 22, which is our responsorial today. It’s not difficult to imagine that feeling alone and abandoned as he hung between life and death that these words would come to the lips of this devout Jewish man. Lest you despair, bear in mind the last verse of this Psalm:
The generation to come will be told of the Lord,So, as we enter upon this Holy Week, let us heed Thomas, known as the “Doubter,” who, when beckoned by Jesus to head south once again to Judea, from our Gospel last Sunday: “Let us also go to die with him.”11 As Jesus teaches over and again, you can only rise with him if you die with him.
that they may proclaim to a people yet unborn
the deliverance you have brought10
1 John 4:22.↩
2 Jeremiah 7:23.↩
3 John 15:14.↩
4 See Matthew 22:37-40.↩
5 1 John 4:10.↩
6 James 3:10.↩
7 1 John 4:20.↩
8 John 3:17.↩
9 Philippians 2:3-5.↩
10 Psalm 22:32.↩
11 John 11:16.↩
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