Today's readings: Isaiah 50, 4-7; Philippians 2, 6-11; Luke 22,14 - 23, 56.
The focal point of all that believers go through these days is always the extent to which the Christ experience is capable of enlight-ening our human experience. Vatican Council II affirmed that it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. Christ is indeed the key to all our human queries and mysteries.
Throughout Chapter nine of his gospel Luke speaks intensely and metaphorically of the cross to describe the calling of the disciples of Christ. But in today's passion story the metaphor becomes event. In the second reading, the emptying of Christ who "did not cling to his equality with God" which is normally used as a way of talking about the incarnation, is immediately linked to Christ's humbling himself in obedience to this most extreme form of death. In some sense this fits squarely with the temptations in the desert at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus.
There are two instances to be highlighted in Luke's version of the passion. One is characteristic of Luke's Jesus who, as Rowan Williams writes, places himself with those whose language cannot be heard. When asked by the Council to tell them if he was the Messiah, he replied: "If I tell you, you will not believe me, and if I question you, you will not answer". For Luke, Jesus stands with those who do not have a voice, with those without power to affect their world, with those believed to have lost any right they might have had in the world.
The second instance to be highlighted is how Herod "treated Jesus with contempt and made fun of him", almost to confirm the foolishness of the cross which is a most important theme in the reading from St Paul. Indeed, as Kenneth Leech writes in his book We Preach Christ Crucified, we could say that the entire life of Jesus was an act of folly. By worldly standards there is no sense in all that happened to Jesus. Christ is a fool, a symbol of contradiction, of the foolishness of God. Sadly it is only in the eastern Orthodox tradition that the status of the holy fool is recognised liturgically and that the folly for Christ's sake is seen as an integral part of spirituality.
This is the challenge of Luke's gospel. We are faced with someone who cannot speak our language. It is the language of folly and scandal. The mystery revealed to us through the passion story is hidden in that "sixth hour, with the sun eclipsed, the darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour". That moment of darkness extends over time and reaches out even to our enlightened minds in the 21st century.
In that darkness Jesus was alone. Those who should have known better were shortsighted, and Christ for them was just a threatening personality. Those who had followed him and even believed in him, were just scandalised by what they saw and ran away for their life.
It is the task of the preacher to hold up Christ as a symbol of folly and scandal, a sign of contradiction, and so to bring about that crisis, that turbulence and upheaval in the soul which opens our eyes to the truth and make us recognise truly where we stand: we can be fairly happy with being secret followers of this Christ, yet afraid of being in some way involved in his folly; or else we can just take it on us conventionally that we are his disciples, without even bothering to grasp what it really means.
The cross is the point at which and in which everything stands or falls, says Jurgen Moltmann. From a tendency to consider Christ cruci-fied pitifully, Luther's reformation marked a turning point when it considered the cross as the true and unsubstitutable sign of God's love and presence.
Redemption takes place both within time and from the captivity of time. But it's a movement wherein we need to become personally involved. Redemption is never automatic.