The most
startling moment in Mel Gibson’s film about the passion. was when the soldier
pierced the side of Christ and, as we are told in St John’s gospel,
‘immediately there came out blood and water’ (19.34). I had always imagined it
as a trickle but in the film it was a shower, bursting out to wash the faces of
those standing at the foot of the cross. It is the saving fountain spoken of in
the prophecy of Zechariah (13.1), what the liturgy refers to as ‘the fountain
of sacramental life in the Church’ (Preface
of the Sacred Heart), presented in the film in the tradition of Baroque
art.
The early
Dominicans were not afraid of the physical aspects of the passion of Christ.
When they prayed their preferred icon was the crucifix. We see this, for
example, in the 14th century illustrations of the ways of prayer of
St Dominic. Many of the frescoes of Fra Angelico show the blood of Christ
flowing from his side in great abundance and pouring down the trunk of the
cross to wash and irrigate the earth.
St Catherine of
Siena directed her prayer to Christ crucified and had much to say about the
power of his blood. The ways in which we dispose ourselves physically in
relation to the crucifix express different moments or aspects in our
relationship with Christ, she says. We may kneel to kiss his feet in the
attitude of the creature and sinner, fearful and still anxious, bowing before
her Creator and Lord. Or we may stand to kiss his side. This is the position of
one growing into the ‘perfect love which casts out fear’ (1 John 4.18) but
still looking to the gifts Christ can give and not yet simply at the giver of
those gifts, Christ himself. Kissing the lips of Christ crucified expresses the
love of friendship, Catherine says, that we are no longer servants but friends
(John 15.15). It represents maturity in the Christian life, when we come to
love God no longer out of fear and no longer for what he can do for us, but
simply for God himself.
Catherine
teaches that if we wish to learn how to make this journey then the school we
must attend is prayer. ‘We learn every virtue in constant and faithful humble
prayer’, she says. Thomas Aquinas said that he had learned more from gazing at
the crucifix than from all the books he had read. In one of his conferences on
the Creed he says that ‘the passion of Christ is sufficient in itself to
instruct us completely in our whole life’.
One of the
traditional practices of Lent is to meditate on the passion and death of Jesus
by following the way of the Cross. It is a simple and time-honoured technique,
a bit like the Rosary, as we move from station to station meditating on the
moments of the journey from his arrest to his burial.
Any wisdom that
is worth anything will have something to say about suffering and for us there
can be no reflection on suffering, just as there can be no reflection on evil,
that by-passes the suffering and death of Jesus. I am sure we will all want to
go further and say that there can be no useful reflection on suffering or evil
that does not place the suffering and death of Jesus at its centre.
This can be a
difficult one to get right. The Christian way at its best is not interested in
pain and suffering in a way that is perverted, queer or odd. And yet the
Christian way accepts that growth in love can only be by way of the Cross. Very
often though, perhaps always, our personal experience of suffering does not
seem to fit neatly into the story we preach about it. What I mean is that the
cross never comes in exactly the way we anticipate. If it did, it would not be
the cross. So we really suffer deeply because we do not see the point of
suffering in this way or in that, or because we do not see the point of it
going on so long, because it seems wasteful and meaningless, and so on. It
never comes in the way we would have chosen for ourselves and often attacks
those aspects and qualities in ourselves that seem most valuable.
Jesus suffered
for us and left us an example that we should follow the way he took. It is a
way that is not in the first place about suffering. In the first place it is
about love, but love necessarily entails suffering. To love is to be tender and
vulnerable. To love is to be open to the presence of another, giving priority
to their concerns. To love is to share the burdens and difficulties of another.
And so to love means to leave oneself open to the possibility, the likelihood,
we must say to the inevitability of suffering.
If ‘love’ is the
first word that discloses the meaning of Jesus’ sufferings then ‘sin’ is the
second. The career of Jesus follows the way of the cross not just because it is
love but because it is love in a sinful world. It is universal human experience
that the wise and just person excites envy, and perhaps hatred and violence in
this sinful world. The third chapter of the Book of Wisdom paints a prophetic
picture of envy and rejection:
Let us lie in
wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our
actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins
against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself
a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight
of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others,
and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base, and he
avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and
boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us
test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God’s
child, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.
Let us test him with insult and torture, so that we may find out how gentle he
is, and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death,
for, according to what he says, he will be protected.” Thus they reasoned, but
they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them, and they did not know
the secret purposes of God, nor hoped for the wages of holiness, nor discerned
the prize for blameless souls (2:12-22).
We believe that
Jesus, out of love and obedience, exposed himself to all this and gave his
flesh for the life of this sinful world. Any share in the mystery of his
sacrificial love is a strange joy for those who believe in Him. Far from
setting us one step back from human experience, the following of Christ in his
suffering, our attendance at the school of his suffering and death, brings us
straight to the heart of human experience, straight to the heart of God.
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