Homily for 24 March 2024 by Fr. Gerard Jonas

Passion Sunday

Isaiah 50:4-7; Psalm 21; Philippians 2:6-11; Mark 14,1-72.15,1-47

Now we enter the most solemn week of the Liturgical Year, the Holy Week, the culmination of our Lenten Journey to Easter. We now reflect on the Passion of Christ that leads Him to the cross. We begin with His triumphant entry to Jerusalem as the messianic king but riding a colt of a donkey – humble, peaceful, and with a servant’s attitude as the Prophet Isaiah tells. We end at the Cross, the throne from which Jesus the Christ reigns by love and humble obedience.

The Lord’s passion is His saving compassion.

In procession, we entered the church with palms as we accompanied Jesus toward the end of His salvific journey. But now we realize that it is Jesus who actually accompanies us through our life’s journey. We go through life in all its inevitable distress. We suffer invariably physically, emotionally, socially, financially, and spiritually – especially in our sinfulness. We suffer in prejudice and violence, in labor to make a living, in sickness and diminishment, in poverty and helplessness, in silent fears and anxieties, and especially in our sinfulness. We pray that Jesus may save us from all our struggles in life. But no, Christ saves us not from but in our sufferings. He accompanies us through all our distress. In His love and compassionate mercy as the Good Shepherd, Jesus leads the way through all these sufferings and distress.

We are saved by the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. What does Passion mean? It’s not just his suffering on the cross. PASSION comes from the Latin PASSIO which means passivity or non-activity. In his three years of public ministry, Jesus was preaching, healing, sharing meals, and arguing with authorities. But after the Last Supper until his death, the Lord assumed a passive role – He was no longer the ‘doer’ but the one having things done to him. Here, Jesus teaches us that we give as much in our passivity when we are no longer in charge. We still continue to serve, to love, to inspire in a very deep way. It’s not giving up. It’s giving in to the Lord’s leading, showing us how to abide by the Father.

The passion of Christ as part of the Paschal Mystery saves. We reflect on how Jesus saves in His humble obedience and love.

Jesus assumed our humanity with Mary’s obedient docility to God’s will – “Let it be done unto me according to your word.” This time, in the same manner, Jesus leaves our humanity in his supreme act of humble obedience to the Father. Jesus prayed at Gethsemane, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will.” Now Christ shows how to fully live by the prayer he taught his disciples, how to fully surrender the self to God – thus now in the ‘Our Father,’ may we also humbly pray: “thy will be done.”

And yes, how Jesus suffered distress and anguish for love! Jesus who loves was misunderstood, rejected, abandoned, betrayed, and falsely judged by those he loved. This love-drama will also end in another garden where the tomb lent by Joseph of Arimathea is.

The cross at Golgotha stands as the new tree of obedience – the reversal of the ancient tree from which the first of humanity, in disobedience, plucked the fruit that merited death for all of humanity. St. Ireneus remarks: “Through his obedience unto death, hanging upon the cross, he destroyed that ancient disobedience committed on a tree of wood.”

Yes, Christ’s Passion is Compassion, Jesus was fully active in passivity.

Jesus did not just watch humanity suffer. Jesus joined in our human suffering and turned our human distress into a saving act. He humbly surrendered and offered himself freely to all and the greatest of human distress.

Let us feel how the Lord accompanies us all through life and covers us with His prayers to sustain us in our faith, especially in challenging times, so we too, absorbed in prayer with Him, may cry out to God in anguish, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – Praying the Scriptures – praying Psalm 22. Even while experiencing the agony of the cross, Jesus was teaching the crowds and proving yet again that He was the Messiah who fulfilled the Scriptures. He teaches that the cry of distress is actually a cry of hope – of communion with the Father as one suffers- helping us make sense of our suffering as we choose to continue to be in communion with the Father. Yes, death is real, but love is even more real. What great love! – showing us how to die to self to fully live in God.

May we never become a cross to one another but instead, take it as our cross to lead each other to Christ who suffers for and with us for our salvation.

In deep solitude, let us continue to journey to Easter in these final days of the Sacred Season of Lent.