Our gospel today says, “He who saw this has testified so that you may also believe.” Our own St. Augustine commented, “he didn’t say, that you may also know, but that you may believe…”
The passion of our Lord Jesus Christ was not read today as information; and this liturgy is not for our education. I think we all already know the story. Today, is about belief; it’s about faith. It’s about standing at the foot of the cross in doubt and despair, in self-accusation, in anxiety for the future, but finding somewhere within ourselves, by grace, that we still believe that truly, Christ is the Son of God.
As I said in my homily on Passion Sunday: to profess belief in Christ as God is to proclaim faith in what Jesus Christ incarnates, makes flesh; that is, the principles of truth, love, and sacrifice as essential to our being, and ultimately, to our eternal life. That is, we can’t be human without these. Deprive us of truth, keep us in a fog of manipulated information; encourage an ethos of self-obsession, no better exemplified than in the mania for “identity” and a perverse autonomy that demands, indeed, shrieks the absurd assertion that “personal truth” trumps objective fact, and individuals and society lose their sanity.
Forget that there is no greater love than to desire, to will, and to work for the good of others, and we spiritually shrivel up, and withdraw into solipsism and paranoia.
Become fearful of sacrifice, that almost surely involves suffering, and we become weak and craven; those whom the great Christian writer C.S. Lewis described as being “without chests”; those whom the poet T.S. Eliot simply said were “hollow” – that is empty, soulless, beyond despairing.
On Monday I went, as usual, to the Chrism Mass at the cathedral – that is the great diocesan gathering of the clergy wherein we reaffirm our ordination vows. Parking at Fortino’s (do forgive me, but I did go shopping there afterwards), I walked over and, as you may know, one must wait for the light because Dundurn and King Streets are busy. At the corner waiting, a man next to me, without any prompting, looked over and asked, “Are the numbers up, Padre?” And I said, “Yes, actually.” “Trying times,” I added. To which he replied, “You said it, brother.”
There’s that sense out there, not only of things not going well, but an unease that we don’t know how to fix what is so obviously broken in our economy, our politics, our culture. Everything that I spoke of that are assaults on the principles essential to our human thriving, continue despite the growing numbers voicing their concern, and the volume with which they do it. Yet, I don’t think those in authority are in any true sympathy with this.
And I mean “sympathy” in the strictest sense. That is, they may share in the general anxiety, but see it arising from the restless and ignorant masses who must be kept from doing anything foolish, destructive; and they presume to know best what needs to be done. The authorities in Jesus’ day were much the same, they were afraid, and they looked on the people with disdain – the Romans afraid of rebellion, the local Jewish leadership, afraid of the Romans, but also of the loss of the little power they still had, of losing the little respect and deference they still enjoyed among their fellow Jews. The Romans put their faith in violence and the threat of violence. The Sanhedrin in Jerusalem didn’t know what to do; and they lashed out at Jesus the troublemaker who called them out for their incompetence and fecklessness.
Biblical scholars, and historians of the ancient world, write today about the general restlessness of those times, the creeping despair, the fracturing of the community that was Israel into a multitude of factions, some violent, others simply withdrawing out to the desert to get away from the moral decay of the cities. The Christians then were different in a fundamental way from everyone else. Not better, mind you. Christians looked around them and knew the situation as well as anyone, as we know about matters today – that is, no one is really sure of the facts, of the accuracy of their understanding. What they could know with certainty was that there is evil, cruelty, maliciousness at work in the world; and that it enlists the intelligent and the ignorant alike, turns the virtuous to vice, the righteous to injustice. The followers of Jesus, however, learned that turning away from it does not make it go away. That we must look on the face of pain in the visage of our Lord, regard with full attention the terrible cross, and by faith, know it is not the signpost marking our doom, but is rather the gate we pass through to his Kingdom. But the passage is not an easy one; it requires something more than belief in God, but a ferocious, fearless faith in truth, love and a willingness to sacrifice for these, for the sake of each other, and for the glory of God.
Amen.