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

As is normal for us to do every year on Passion Sunday, which introduces us to Holy Week and to the celebration of Easter, the focus today is the Passion narrative. It is the story of the last days of Jesus, of his arrest and condemnation, of his crucifixion and death. It is the drama of Jesus left alone, with so many people on stage watching and helpless to do something about it.

If we take this narrative as a mere account of events past, then it will very easily lend itself to mere pageantry, without the least touching or moving us. But if we transpose it to today’s world stage and seek to read in it the stories we ourselves and the entire humanity are living, then it will become a totally different story. It will be a story still unfolding, given more content by whatever we endure as humans.

Reading these last chapters of St Mark’s gospel has even suggested to some the theory that this narrative could actually have begun as a kind of liturgy in Jerusalem, something like the Stations of the Cross as they developed in the later Church to our very days. This emphasises the idea that the story told is not just a narrative passed on from earlier communities, but that it suggests a practice of prayer, stages of a pilgrimage in the city of Jerusalem.

In the passion narrative, St Mark is not simply writing about the physical suffering of Jesus that eventually brought him to die on the cross. There is also the psychological suffering caused by the disciples who failed to enter the interior mind of their master. The disciples of Jesus are all very weak in their faithfulness to what they had believed in.

This unfaithfulness contrasts with St Mark’s highlight of all the narrative, which is the proclamation of faith in Jesus’ true identity by the pagan soldier at the foot of the cross. The confession of the pagan centurion is the climax of St Mark’s gospel and the key to the underlying so-called ‘messianic secret’ in St Mark. It is not the miracle worker, but the crucified one who elicits this confession. It is mostly in this pagan soldier, not in his own community of disciples, that Jesus is ultimately glorified at the moment of his death.

The basic truth underlying all the Marcan Passion story is that the Father’s love for Jesus is made manifest precisely in his being and feeling abandoned. This very negative aspect shakes the faith of the disciples, who are constrained to enter the night of his sufferings without being able to comprehend. It was only with hindsight and through the empowering Spirit that they grasp fully the mystery.

In this night of the soul, both of Jesus and of his community, the Father remains silent, and that silence risked proving his detractors right. On Golgotha, Jesus touches the bottom of the mystery which remains hidden behind his disfigured face. Revisiting this imagery of a disfigured person, evoked already and so early by the prophet Isaiah, St Mark is envisaging the mystery of humanity in its negativity, in the aloneness of so many people, while God seems to be at bay.

Everything is shaken with the death of Jesus. This death has a universal bearing, it is not an event that concerns Christians or those who look up to Jesus with admiration. The death of Jesus meant the death and the end of so many dreams and hopes of humanity in general and of so many people in particular, suffering and with no hope of salvation on the horizon.

St Mark, in these last moments of Jesus’ life, gathers together on stage all the characters of the drama that took place on the eve of that Jewish Passover. But his narrative is also an invitation to begin the story again, to rewind and rewind with the intent of discerning in it our own unending story.

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