The Passion and the Cross

Ronald Rolheiser

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473626690
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'Full of profound insights... These meditations on Christ's Passion culminate in a completely convincing understanding of the Resurrection. Rolheiser's great gift is to make faith real. This deserves to become a classic.' - The Tablet Daily readings from Lent, from one of today's most influential spiritual writers. When we think of Jesus' passion and crucifixion, we often think of his physical suffering and death. But the Gospels themselves do not emphasise Jesus' physical sufferings; instead, the Gospel writers want us to understand Jesus as a faithful lover of humanity, who undergoes moral and emotional suffering without resentment or bitterness. Drawing from Scripture, story, theology, contemporary culture and his own life, Fr Ronald Rolheiser - one of the most influential spiritual writers of our day - invites us to a new understanding of redemption, and offers profound insights into the meaning of our own loss and suffering.

CHAPTER ONE

The Passion and the Garden of Gethsemane

1. THE PASSION AS THE GIFT OF JESUS’S PASSIVITY

WE SPEAK OF ONE SECTION of the Gospels, that which narrates Jesus’s life from the Last Supper until his death and burial, as chronicling his “passion.” On Good Friday, the lector begins the Gospel reading with the words: “The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to John.”

Why do we call Jesus’s suffering just before his death his passion?

Generally, this is not properly understood. We tend to think that passion here refers to intense sufferings, as in “passionate suffering.” This is not wrong, but it misses a key point. Passion comes from the Latin passio meaning passiveness, non-activity, absorbing something more than actively doing anything. The “passion” of Jesus refers to that time in his life where his meaning for us is not defined by what he was doing but rather by what was being done to him. What is being said here?

The public life and ministry of Jesus can be divided into two distinct parts: Scholars estimate that Jesus spent about three years preaching and teaching before being put to death. For most of that time—in fact, for all of it except the last day—he was very much the doer: in command, the active one, teaching, healing, performing miracles, giving counsel, eating with sinners, debating with church authorities, and generally, by activities of every sort, inviting his contemporaries into the life of God. And he was busy. He is described at times as being so pressured by people that he didn’t even have time to eat. For almost all of his public life Jesus was actively doing something.

However, from the moment he walks out of the Last Supper room and begins to pray in Gethsemane, all that activity stops. He is no longer the one who is doing things for others, but the one who is having things done to him. In the garden, they arrest him, bind his hands, lead him to the high priest, then take him to Pilate. He is beaten, humiliated, stripped of his clothes, and eventually nailed to a cross where he dies. This constitutes his “passion,” that time in his life and ministry where he ceases to be the doer and becomes the one who has things done to him.

What is so remarkable about this is that our faith teaches us that we are saved more through Jesus’s passion (his death and suffering) than through all of his activity of preaching and doing miracles. How does this work?

Allow me an illustration: Ten years ago, my sister, Helen, an Ursuline nun, died of cancer. A nun for more than thirty years, she much loved her vocation and was much loved within it. For most of those thirty years, she served as a den mother to hundreds of young women who attended an academy run by her order. She loved those young women and was for them a mother, an older sister, and a mentor. For the last twenty years of her life, after our own mother died, she also served in that same capacity for our family, organizing us and keeping us together. Through all those years she was the active one, the consummate doer, the one that others expected to take charge. She relished the role. She loved doing things for others.

Nine months before she died, cancer struck her brutally, and she spent the last months of her life bedridden. Now things needed to be done for her and to her. Doctors, nurses, her sisters in community, and others took turns taking care of her. And, like Jesus from the time of his arrest until the moment of his death, her body too was humiliated, led around by others, stripped, prodded, and stared at by curious passersby. Indeed, like Jesus, she died thirsty, with a sponge held to her lips by someone else.

This was her passion. She, the one who had spent so many years doing things for others, now had to submit to having things done to her. But—and this is the point—like Jesus, she was able in that period of her life, when she was helpless and no longer in charge, to give life and meaning to others in a deeper way than she could when she was active and doing so many things for others.

There’s a great lesson in this, not the least of which is how we view the terminally ill, the severely handicapped, and the sick. There’s a lesson too on how we might understand ourselves when we are ill, helpless, and in need of care from others.

The cross teaches us that we, like Jesus, give as much to others in our passivities as in our activities. When we are no longer in charge, when we are beaten down by whatever—humiliated, suffering, and unable even to make ourselves understood by our loved ones—then we are undergoing our own passion and, like Jesus in his passion, have in that the opportunity to give our love and ourselves to others in a very deep way.

2. A Lover’s Pain

The passion of Jesus, as we just saw, refers to the helplessness he had to endure during the last hours of his life, a helplessness extremely fruitful for him and for us.

And the first component of that helplessness is apparent in the Garden of Gethsemane, immediately after he celebrated the Last Supper. The Scriptures tell us that he went out into the garden with his disciples to pray for the strength he needed to face the ordeal that was now imminent.

It’s significant that this agony should take place in a garden. In archetypal literature, a garden is not a place to pick cucumbers and onions. Archetypally, a garden is the place of delight, the place of love, the place to drink wine, the place where lovers meet in the moonlight, the place of intimacy. The garden is paradise. That’s why Adam and Eve in their paradisiacal state are described as being in a garden.

So it’s no accident that Jesus ends up having to sweat blood in a garden. And it’s precisely as a lover that he’s in agony there. The Jesus who sweats blood in the Garden of Gethsemane is not the great king, full of pain because the sheep will not heed the shepherd; nor is he the great magus, full of sorrow because nobody wants to pick up on the truth he’s revealed; nor is he the great warrior, frustrated in his efforts to defeat the powers of sin, death, and darkness. These pains and frustrations mostly take place elsewhere, among the crowds, in the Temple, in the desert. The garden is for lovers: not for kings, magi, and warriors.

It is Jesus the lover—the one who calls us to intimacy and delight with him—who sweats blood in the garden. That’s why, in describing his suffering during his passion, the evangelists do not focus on his physical sufferings. Indeed, Mark puts it all in a single line: “They led him out to crucify him” (Mark 15:20). What the Gospel writers focus on is not the scourging, the whips, the ropes, the nails, the physical pain—none of that. Rather, they emphasize that in all of this Jesus is alone, misunderstood, lonely, isolated, without support. What’s emphasized is his suffering as a lover: the agony of a heart that is ultrasensitive, gentle, loving, understanding, warm, inviting, hungry to embrace everyone; but which instead finds itself misunderstood, alone, isolated, hated, brutalized, facing murder.

That’s the point that too often has been missed in both spirituality and popular devotion. I remember as a young boy being instructed by a wonderful nun who told us that Jesus sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane because, in his divine nature, he was saddened when he foresaw that many people would not accept the sacrifice of his death. That’s a wonderfully pious thought, but it misses the point of what happened in Gethsemane.

In Gethsemane, we see Jesus suffering as a lover. His agony is not that of the son of God, frustrated because many people will not accept his sacrifice; nor even the all-too-understandable fear of the physical pain that awaits him. No; his real pain is that of the lover who’s been misunderstood and rejected in a way that is mortal and humiliating. What Jesus is undergoing in Gethsemane might aptly be paralleled to what a good, faithful, loving, very sensitive, and deeply respectful man or woman would feel if he or she were falsely accused of pedophilia, publicly judged as guilty, and then made to stand powerless, isolated, misunderstood, and falsely judged before the world, family, friends, and loved ones. Such a person would surely pray too: “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me!” (Matthew 26:39).

The agony in the garden is many things, but, first of all, it’s Jesus’s entry into the darkest black hole of human existence, the black hole of bitter misunderstanding, rejection, aloneness, loneliness, humiliation, and the helplessness to do anything about it. The agony in the garden is the black hole of sensitivity brutalized by callousness, love brutalized by hatred, goodness brutalized by misunderstanding, innocence brutalized by wrong judgment, forgiveness brutalized by murder, and heaven brutalized by hell. This is the deepest black hole of loneliness and it brings the lover inside us to the ground in agony, begging for release.

But, whenever our mouths are pushed into the dust of misunderstanding and loneliness inside that black hole, it’s helpful to know that Jesus was there before us, tasting just our kind of loneliness.

3. A Lover’s Drama

Several years ago, Mel Gibson produced and directed a movie which enjoyed a spectacular popularity. Entitled The Passion of the Christ, the movie depicts Jesus’s paschal journey from the Garden of Gethsemane to his death on Golgotha, but with a very heavy emphasis on his physical suffering. The movie shows in graphic detail what someone who was being crucified might have had to endure in terms of being physically beaten, tortured, and humiliated.

While most church groups applauded the film and suggested that, finally, someone had made a movie that truly depicted Jesus’s suffering, many Scripture scholars and spiritual writers were critical of the movie. Why? What’s wrong with showing, at length and in graphic detail, the blood and gore of the crucifixion which, indeed, must have been pretty horrific?

What’s wrong (or better yet, amiss) is that this is precisely what the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s death don’t do. As we saw, all four Gospels take pains to not focus on the physical sufferings of Jesus. Their descriptions of his physical sufferings are stunningly brief: “And with him they crucified two bandits” (Mark 15:27). “After flogging Jesus, [Pilate] handed him over to be crucified” (Mark 15:15). Why the brevity here? Why no detailed description?

The evangelists don’t focus us on what Jesus endured physically because they want us to focus on something else, namely, on what Jesus endured emotionally and morally. The passion of Jesus is, in its real depth, a moral drama, not a physical one; the suffering of a lover, not that of an athlete.

Thus we see that when Jesus is anticipating his passion, the anxiety he expresses is not about the whips that will lash him or the nails that will pierce his hands. Rather, he is pained and anxious about the aloneness he is facing, about how he will be betrayed and abandoned by those who profess to love him, and about how he will be, in the wonderful phraseology of the author and theologian Gil Bailie, “unanimity-minus-one.”

That the passion of Jesus is a love-drama is also evident in its setting. It begins with his sweating blood in a garden, and ends with his being buried in a garden. This is significant because in archetypal symbolism, as we saw, gardens are not for growing vegetables or even for growing flowers. Gardens are for lovers, the place to experience delight, the place to drink wine, the place where Adam and Eve were naked and didn’t know it, the place where one makes love. And so the evangelists place the beginning and the end of Jesus’s passion in a garden to emphasize that it is Jesus-as-lover who is undergoing this drama.

And what precisely is the drama? When Jesus is sweating blood in the garden and begging his Father to spare him having to “drink the cup,” the real choice he is facing is not: Will I let myself die or will I invoke divine power and save my life? Rather the choice is: “How will die? Will I die angry, bitter, and unforgiving; or will I die with a warm, forgiving heart?”

Of course, we know how Jesus resolved this drama, how he chose forgiveness and died forgiving his executioners, and how, inside all that darkness, he remained solidly inside the message that he had preached his whole life; namely, that love, community, and forgiveness will ultimately triumph.

Moreover, what Jesus did in that great moral drama is something we’re supposed to imitate rather than simply admire, because that drama is ultimately the drama of love within our own lives also, presenting itself to us in countless ways. That is: At the end of our lives, how will we die? Will our hearts be angry, clinging, unforgiving, and bitter at the unfairness of life? Or, will our hearts be forgiving, grateful, empathic, and warm, as was the heart of Jesus when he said to his Father “not my will but yours be done”? (Luke 22:42).

Moreover, this is not a one-time major choice we face at the hour of death; it is also a choice we face daily, many times daily. Countless times in our daily interactions with others—our families, our colleagues, our friends, and with society at large—we suffer moments of coldness, misunderstanding, unfairness, and positive violation. These moments range from the indifference of a family member to our enthusiasm, to a sarcastic comment intended to hurt us, to a gross unfairness in our workplace, to being the victim of a prejudice or abuse. Our kitchen tables, our workplaces, our meeting rooms, and the streets we share with others—all are places where we daily experience, in small and big ways, what Jesus felt in the Garden of Gethsemane: unanimity-minus-one. In that darkness, will we let go of our light? In the face of hatred, will we let go of love? That’s the real and central drama of the passion of the Christ: not the ropes, whips, and nails.

4. The Agony of the Ultimate Athlete

Luke’s account of Gethsemane says this of Jesus: “In his anguish [agonia] he prayed more earnestly” (Luke 22:44). The word agonia as it is used here doesn’t just describe the intensity of Jesus’s suffering; it especially describes his readying of himself for the painful task that waits. How?

At the time of Jesus, the word agony had a double sense: Beyond its more obvious meaning, it also referred to a particular readying that an athlete would do just before entering the arena or stadium. An athlete would ready himself (in those days the athlete normally was a he) for the contest by working up a certain sweat (agony) with the idea that this exercise and the lather it produced would concentrate and ready both his energies and his muscles for the rigors that lay ahead. No athlete wants to enter the contest unprepared.

The Gospel writers want us to have this same image of Jesus as he leaves the Garden of Gethsemane: His agony has brought about a certain emotional, physical, and spiritual lather so that he is now readied, a focused athlete, properly prepared to enter the battle. Moreover, because his strengthening brings a certain divine energy, he is indeed more ready than any athlete.

Gethsemane teaches us that to enter the spiritual arena, we too first must be properly warmed up. Cold muscles are a hazard here as well: We cannot walk from self-pampering to self-sacrifice, from living in fear to acting in courage, and from cringing before the unknown to taking the leap of faith, without first,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise For The Passion and the Cross
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One: The Passion and the Garden of Gethsemane
• Chapter Two: The Cross as a Moral Revolution
• Chapter Three: The Cross as the Deepest Revelation of God
• Chapter Four: The Cross as Salvation—“Being washed in the blood of the Lamb”
• Chapter Five: The Resurrection—Every Grave Opens Up!
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Also by Ronald Rolheiser
• About the Author