Facing helplessness

Today’s readings: Isaiah 50, 4-7; Phil. 2, 6-11; Luke 22,14 – 23, 56.

The best way to live these days is to pay attention to human suffering in real life and try to bring hope. The way of the cross and Golgotha happen over and over again. There is still too much suffering in our world which is not followed by the signs which accompanied the death of Jesus. The suffering continues, the signs of the resurrection are not always tangible.

Graves remain sealed. Victims keep weeping. Violence remains unanswered. On this day, March 24, 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated in San Salvador. Before him and after him, many, too many, have been killed for reasons that are perverse or futile, or even for no reason at all.

That is why we can identify with the Passion and death of Jesus. Yet, thinking in terms of the resurrection may at times sound excessive. In Lent, we are invited to look at the Passion and resurrection face to face, allowing them to impinge upon us and disturb us in their naked reality.

The fact that today some have the luxury of denying the obscenity of the Holocaust during World War II may be proof of how far we can go in the banalisation of evil and suffering. George Steiner, author and leading critic of Western culture, clearly sees the crisis precipitated by the Holocaust as both intellectual and existential.

Unfortunately, we read through the Passion of Jesus with devotion and we easily get used to other visual forms of passion and of suffering which are always soon forgotten and succeeded by what comes next, be it entertainment or commercials. Lent is necessary because we tend to ignore all this, to hide it, to forget about it.

Christ crucified and the suffering people each refer to the other. Jesus was a man who identified with the people to the point where biblical interpreters cannot tell whether the one we read about in Isaiah is the suffering people or Christ himself.

It is the crucified people who make Christ’s passion a living memory today, completing what is lacking in Christ’s passion.

We read from Luke’s account of the passion that the people on Golgotha stayed watching, with the sun eclipsed, and a darkness that came over the whole land from the sixth hour until the ninth. These are all signs that still surface in the way we face life and endure it.

In the first reading today Isaiah says: “I offered my back to those who struck me, my cheeks to those who tore at my beard.” Even Paul in his Letter to the Philippians, in a text that is held to be emblematic for Christian living, speaks of the self-emptying of Christ Jesus representing our own daily self-emptying that creates within us the sacred space where God Himself can dwell.

But all this implies a choice on the part of the one suffering and enduring. It is a violence embraced not imposed. When violence is imposed it is abuse. And for the abused, the hope of resurrection is not always a given. Even for us, when we believe in Jesus’ resurrection and when we hope for ours, it never cancels the demands of justice for abuse and violence inflicted.

As Jon Sobrino writes, God’s action is necessary for the miracle of resurrection from the dead, but it is also necessary to enable us to live in the midst of death. It is a good thing, he says, that the Church goes on giving us this time of Lent year after year, as long as we do not confuse crosses of agony with solemn gestures or urgent hopes with triumphant rites.

Luke in his account of the trial of Jesus goes further than the other gospels and challenges us not only to stand with those powerless and excluded, but to find in ourselves the poverty and exclusion we fear and run away from in others.

The suffering of Jesus and the suffering of others provoke us to confront our own inner regions of helplessness and speechlessness.