‘Medicine of immortality’

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

John Bunyan’s classic The Pilgrim’s Progress depicts Bunyan’s pilgrim as someone struggling under a burden of sin that forces him to his knees. Many people are burdened with guilt and find it so difficult to live properly until they know they are forgiven. Entering Holy Week demands of us to come to terms precisely with this.

It is one of the central themes of what we will be celebrating these days that God heals a broken world and restores damaged people. In the late first century, Ignatius of Antioch spoke of the “medicine of immortality”, referring to the Gospel as a remedy for humanity’s fatal illness.

Celebrating and adoring Christ crucified puts us all face to face with a double challenge: first, how to bring out and deepen the message of the cross beyond its significance as mere history for believers, and secondly, how to focus on outsiders. We need to beware of simply transforming the Holy Week narratives to mere folklore or reducing them to a tourist attraction.

There were mixed feelings and attitudes in the crowds accompanying Jesus towards Jerusalem and throughout the days when Jesus was accused, put to trial, and condemned to crucifixion. So much time has passed, and crowds, particularly in a culture like ours heavily marked by religion, still pour in to re-enact those events.

That Jesus died is history; that Jesus died for the forgiveness of our sins is the Gospel. The message is that the cross of Christ is the gateway to discover God’s love for humanity. But that needs to be grasped and communicated. It is not self-evident. The message of the cross is not restricted to the simple fact that Jesus was crucified, but extends the significance of this event to what we endure daily.

If we fail to bring this out in a world which is broken and in need of healing, then we would simply be repeating even ad nauseam a narrative that bears no mark on life as it is. Many people, believers and non-believers alike, know that things are not right in the world as it is. But what is it that needs to be done?

We are all called to take time and review the meaning we give to all this. There are different ways of entering the spirit of Holy Week and we can very easily miss the point if we do not really and duly distinguish between folklore, religiosity, and spirituality. Isaiah in the first reading puts it bluntly, as if there is no neutral ground in this.

You either accompany Jesus uphill as a disciple, absorbing and assimilating the deep lessons about right living that he proposes, or you may so easily be carried away with the crowds accusing God and eventually condemning Him as being guilty of keeping aloof and silent for all that is going on.

Kenosis is the Greek technical word we normally use to depict how Jesus emptied himself, accepting death on a cross. It is this self-emptying as portrayed by St Paul in the second reading that is the pre-condition of true discipleship and worship.

Among the Passion narratives, Mark’s is the most ancient. It was meant in the first place to recount things as they happened, lending itself as a historical basis to be completed by later narratives in the other gospels and making possible deeper catechetical instruction. The underlying line of thought in Mark’s narrative of the Passion is the need to demonstrate that the Father’s love manifests itself in the total abjection and failure of the Son.

What is mostly significant and peculiar to Mark’s passion story is that towards its ending, from among those standing at the foot of the cross, the centurion was the one to acknowledge Jesus as truly the Son of God. This provokes us to venture beyond the boundaries of the Church closet and explore ways of speaking to the cultural mood and to the aspirations and concerns of ordinary people and of our times.