Passiontide begins

This Sunday, the fifth in Lent, is traditionally kept as Passion Sunday, when we particularly think of the Passion of Christ that we will be remembering over the coming two weeks.

Christ’s Passion is his suffering, the unimaginable mental and physical pain he went through in being condemned and executed in a horribly painful and shameful way. It might seem odd or morbid to have services and festivals and events to meditate on such a terrible event. Indeed, Christians have down the ages sometimes been accused of following a death cult, or being masochists. The earliest depiction we have of a crucifix is a piece of Roman graffiti which mocks Christians for worshipping a man on a cross. In modern terms, it would have seemed like a religion based on a picture of a man in the electric chair.

Suffering and faith

And yet, we cannot get away from this central symbol of our faith, a tortured, suffering, dying human being. We do not meditate on Christ’s Passion in order to be morbid or make ourselves miserable. We do so because we know it reveals a great truth to us: that God so identified with us that he became one of us even to the extent of going through terrible suffering and pain.

The Passion narratives also remind us that the Christian story is a description of how the world really is. We do not get far in life without encountering pain and suffering, our own or that of someone we love. And whenever we do it changes us. We realize that avoiding or denying or seeking to get rid of pain does not always work. We somehow have to find a way to live in a world that, for us, now contains such pain and suffering.

God with us

Sometimes when I sit with people who are suffering or dying I feel helpless. What can I do to make things better? And the answer is often nothing – all I have to offer is my presence, my witness, my solidarity as a fellow human being, holding them in prayer. And it is precisely that presence and solidarity of God with us as a fellow human in our suffering that the Passion stories celebrate. By meditating on Christ’s Passion we can grow in the instinctive understanding that God is with us and holds us through whatever we need to face. And as Christians there is always a glimmer of hope even in the darkest hours: the Passion of Christ led him, and leads us, onwards towards resurrection.

 

Rebecca Lloyd

2 April 2017