Today’s readings: Is 50, 4-7; Philippians 2, 6-11; Matt. 26, 14 – 27, 66.

In the 16th century, Martin Luther said music should be the partner of theology. Since then, a long tradition evolved which had its culmination in Johann Sebastian Bach’s monumental Matthew’s Passion. This work remains one of the most challenging and ambitious musical compositions in western tradition.

Reading Matthew’s passion narrative with Bach’s composition in the background can help to bring out in a clearer light the deep mixture of feelings in the narrative, putting together the theological, philosophical, religious and psychological.

The truth is we find it easier to rewind and enter Christ’s story with detachment, than to fast-forward and discern with honesty what we face today, including God’s silence and helplessness in the stories that surround us. As Benedictine nun Dame Aemiliana Lohr wrote in her book The Great Week, “Today men have forgotten how to mourn and how to sing praises, because they have in great measure lost God”.

Seeing with horror and a deep feeling of helplessness the sufferings of thousands across the globe, makes our entry in ‘The Great Week’ look very similar and equally fearful to the entry of Jesus in his night.

Jesus’ night can throw more light on our night today. Both are dramatic in nature, inviting us to read our contemporary story in between the lines of the Jesus narrative.

In this narrative from Matthew, there is constantly the haunting presence of the mysterium of the night. The night on which Jesus passes from the Passover meal to the garden of betrayal and arrest.

There is fear of the dark, which symbolically for the other evangelists engulfs the universe during the light of day from the sixth to the ninth hour of Jesus’ death.

There is likeness between the trial of Jesus and the way God is still being put in the dock by a heavily secularised culture. Even as believers we find it difficult to decide transparently whether we are on the side of Jesus or Pilate, or the mob. We may discover patterns of behaviour and speech that put us on the side of those who made Jesus face his trial to make possible his exclusion.

The North African political unrest and the entailing drama of boat people in search of paradise, many of them refused and even dead at sea, demonstrates our lack of political will to come to terms with injustice, violence and inequality in the world.

In our culture, there is a danger of reducing the re-enactment of the passion play as a work of fiction. There is still much to be highlighted in the passion narrative which in turn serves as a powerful metaphor or framework to explainandunderstand the highlights of life today.

Isaiah in the first reading represents the epitome of God’s weakness manifested in Jesus as the crucified Messiah. Matthew, in his passion narrative, is concerned mainly to show that the Spirit of God is fully active in Jesus in the ways the prophets promised. His gospel establishes the connections between the Old Testament wisdom and what was finding fulfillment in Jesus.

Yet we constantly fail to grasp these hidden connections between Jesus and ourselves. Very often we are incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world at large. So we become complacent with all that happens around us, and there is not enough depth in us for such words to be credible.

As Rowan Williams observes, the refusal of the Jewish majority to accept the preaching of Jesus overflows in the symbolic self-denunciation by the people when, outside Pilate’s palace, they shout ‘His blood be on us and on our children’.

This week may be the last call for conversion from complacency which is too costly for our civilisation and the emerging generations.