Strength in weakness

Today's readings: Isaiah 50, 4-7; Philippians 2, 6-11; Mark 14, 1-15, 47.

Mark's Passion narrative today opens the doors for Holy Week. The one who raised people from the dead, who restored the sick to health, who offered solace to the distressed, is from here on no longer protagonist. "He saved others, he cannot save himself."

In this ancient story, Jesus's body represents every person who has suffered and died as the result of injustice, oppression and violence. Mark says that at the moment of Christ's death, "darkness came over the whole land". It is a sort of cosmic protest, nature's moment of silent grief.

Year in, year out, the Passion drama continues to provoke new questions as to what happened. For example, what actually moved Judas, one of the Twelve, to hand Jesus over to the Romans? Judas's deed was certainly shameful; but no less shameful than Peter's denial or the three disciples sleeping in the garden of Gethsemane.

As Dostoyevsky puts it in The Idiot: "The causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex than are our subsequent explanations of them, and can rarely be distinctly discerned."

During his ministry, Jesus spoke with authority and was acclaimed as prophet whose words were mighty. Here, he is silenced; he endures everything humbly; he offers no resistance.

What happens when Jesus is handed over is that he changes from doing, to receiving what others do, from the role of subject to that of object and, in the proper sense of the phrase, from action to passion, as W. H. Vanstone writes in his book The Stature of Waiting.

Now he is left alone even by his closest friends. Even the Father, whose voice was heard loud and clear in the River Jordan and on Mount Tabor, here remains silent. It is a deafening silence which results either in adoration or rebellion. There are moments in life when we praise God but at other times we can be angry at him, and it is not easy to keep the faith.

Elie Wiesel writes that, after Auschwitz, words have lost their innocence. The Nazis poisoned language; they polluted it. They were masters at finding poetic words for the most hideous things.

Christ's death on the cross is simply scandalous. But taken in its deep Eucharistic significance, it is a gift. The scandal of the cross, as that of Auschwitz, of child abuse, of modern-day violence in all its forms, bring only fragmentation in the body of Christ. But this same broken body is recomposed in the Eucharistic sign which puts fragments back together in the whole.

The dispersion after Jesus's crucifixion, continues to narrate the history of the Christian community, which in its dark nights of crisis continues to disintegrate, finding the hidden wholeness only in the risen Lord.

While Jesus was in distress in Gethsemane, his disciples just fell asleep. His solitude was total. This is the real depth of the mystery of his death. It is humanity at its deepest. We try to dress this up so it may not look so bad. We react devotionally, pitying Jesus in his suffering, when actually it is we who we should be pitying.

Twenty-nine years ago at this time of year, Archbishop Oscar Romero was gunned down while celebrating Mass in San Salvador. This murder, like that of Jesus himself, exposed the weakness of oppressive power rather than its strength. Romero was part of a liberation theology movement. His story and Mark's Passion narrative reveal that the worlds of imperial power today are no different from yesterday.

In Jesus on the cross, all our humanity is depicted. On Golgotha, roles change. Peter swears "I do not know the man", whereas a non-believer acknowledges that Jesus "was really the Son of God". It's a narrative that should continue sending shockwaves to all that we seem to be certain of.