Today’s readings: Isaiah 50, 4-7; Philippians 2, 6-11; Luke 22, 14 - 23, 56.
Luke is a gospel aimed at the world of those who do not belong. From the very beginning of this gospel, as in Mary’s Magnificat, God is presented as turning the world’s assumptions upside down.
Being the counter-cultural prophet that he was, it is understandable that Jesus was grossly misunderstood, that he was accused and condemned to death. He did not fit into the conventional religious and political setting of his day. He questioned many of the core beliefs of his time.
This Jesus story continued for the initial centuries to be the platform for conflicts within Christianity itself and between Christianity and the mainstream culture.
Until the days of Constantine, with Jesus being re-baptised as the Pantocrator, an image of kingship quite distant from that of the ‘revolutionary’ condemned to crucifixion.
As Diarmuid O’Murchu writes in his book Christianity’s Dangerous Memory, from then on we have over-spiritualised Jesus. Luke instead places Jesus’ witness in the tradition of the suffering prophet, with figures like Isaiah and Jeremiah, who were punished precisely because they challenged the assumptions of royal and priestly authority. Suffering, rejection and death were the consequence of a prophetic ministry that calls the people to repent.
The fear of humiliation drives us to conform because it is easier to cling to models of power and to forget the strength that lies in humility
From the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus is consecrated to bring the good news to the poor and to revolutionise, rather than spiritualise, the social reality. He came to bring freedom to captives, sight to the blind, and liberty to the oppressed.
Many, hearing these words, would have imagined a different ending to his story. But the power of Jesus was of a suffering prophet. That was what he preached all through, and that was the manner how he gave up his life that we may have life in abundance.
In the passion narrative Jesus is humiliated. Throughout his ministry he had manifested openly his power in healing, in bringing the dead back to life, and particularly in the way he encountered and embraced people on the margins of society and religion.
Now, hanging on the cross, people were understandably jeering at him: “He saved others, let him save himself if he is the Christ of God”. But he remained there, silent and suffering.
This brings to mind the 2010 film Of Gods and Men, which retells the tragic fate of nine Trappist monks of Tibhirine in Algeria, who lived in deep harmony with their Muslim neighbours until 1996, when Islamic fundamentalist forces ordered them to leave.
They chose to stay, and seven of them were kidnapped and murdered. They did not stay because they were unaware of the danger, but because they had given their lives to God and to the Algerian people.
Many times, the fear of humiliation makes us flee. For fear of humiliation we very often enter into alliances that contradict the gospel message.
The fear of humiliation drives us to conform because it is easier to cling to models of power and to forget the strength that lies in humility. But conformity is the opposite of prophecy. The passion narrative still serves as key to understand the situation of Christianity in today’s world.