The concealment of Christ’s divinity naturally serves to accentuates His humanity. In the Passion, Jesus is man at his best—in obedience, and not in hubris, making the climb to Calvary. It is an ascent that is not a test of performance, not even of His own strength but a submission to love. Indeed, the hour has arrived not for the trial to begin but rather the revelation to unfold. The covenant between God and man will be fully revealed as love through suffering.
In the Gospel, Jesus lays before us His idea of perfect love. It ties in with the 1st Reading. In general, our present perspective, centred heavily on individual autonomy, tends to view the Law as codified rigidity even though its original inspiration was love. In practice, any alliance that is significant requires formal recognition and mutual obligations. Can you imagine the sort of friendship that is based on "See you when I see you"? It suggests that "seeing you" is not important at all. Thus, the compact between God and man is represented by a charter which in the bible is called a covenant—a bond that specifies the love between the two parties. The danger of customs and conventions is the emptying of its content—love. Just like our CNY hampers--beautifully wrapped but full of useless boxes and cans. Thus, the Prophet Jeremiah frames love as the script of the heart rather than formulates it through the language of the law. Instead of legal prescriptions reminding us of love through specified duties and obligations, Jeremiah hones in to the heart of the matter. From now on, love will be written into heart instead of expressed through “lifeless” laws.
Soon this perfect love exemplified by Christ will be stripped and put to the test. It is necessary to grasp the full extent of Jesus’ love in order to appreciate the suffering that He will undergo and what it means for us in this Lenten journey. To breathe life into “loveless” laws, Jesus speaks of the sacrifice of one’s life.
In a way, self-sacrifice is not alien to us. Salt and sugar provide an excellent analogy. When they do not blend in or dissolve into food, we will taste lumps of sugar or grains of salt. In human terms, a mother voluntarily gives up food for children. A father sacrifices himself by leaving the comfort of home and familiarity of country to slog for a better life and education for wife and children. In religious art and symbolism, this self-renunciation is expressed through an observation in the animal kingdom, known as the “Pelican in her Piety”[1]. This is found in numerous illuminations, stone relief, stained glass windows and etc. A pelican picks at her breast in order to feed her chicks—the symbol of sacrifice and love.
But what sort of love is that?
As Jesus reminds us, “God makes the rain fall on evil and good men. Even sinners do the same, do they not? Sinners love their own kind?”. For Jesus, ultimately the supreme act of self-sacrifice is when we lay down our lives for someone we know not of or someone we have no relation to. This mandate makes no sense simply because the human composition is innately controlled by the principle of self-preservation. It is inherently natural as it keeps one alive. Furthermore, driven by the principle of pleasure, our attachment to creaturely comfort renders the purpose of self-immolation rather meaningless.
Self-sacrifice is a concept which we resonate with but do not fully believe in or subscribe to. Look around us. One of the pressing issues that even billionaires-turned-philanthropes are trying to resolve is the so-called environmental crisis. Some religious may have fallen over themselves trying to burnish their “Laudato si” credentials because the destruction of the environment has been billed as one of the humanitarian crisis du jour. But let us not aim that high. We need only to scour our local scene to recognise a country quite messed up. In short, we want a better world and an improved country. It is logical to desire this because we instinctively aim for the good. However, the question is, are we willing to pay for improvement or should someone else be paying for what we want? This question brings us back to reality. We dream but we are not prepared to sacrifice for the reality to come through.
We realise that there is a connexion between the good we aim for and the sacrifice we must embrace. As someone used to say, “We make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give”. Love gives life. The finest token of life always involves self-extinction.
Because meaning is central to our behavioural response, the question that needs to be asked if it is possible to be joyful even when we lay down our lives? Or is it a stupid ideal? If “duty” is our standard, then the question is answered. No one is expected to sacrifice beyond the call of duty. But if our heart is filled with love, love of God and love for Jesus, then the answer is basically “No”. It is not stupid but worth giving up our breath for.
If that be the case, we need to turn to the saints. Consider the notion of sanctity, that is, of holiness. On the one hand, wholeness (sanity) is connected with holiness (sanctity). Holiness is supposed to be all encompassing (wholeness). Yet, the reverse is truer. Insanity (as opposed to sanity) or madness is also a mark of holiness. What we witness in many of our saints is a kind idiocy, a fecklessness and a recklessness which disregards the logic of comfort and self-preservation. Instead, in following Christ, they follow Him into the madness of self-giving.[2]
The grain of wheat that dies is essential to our discipleship, that is, if we want to follow Him closely. Thomas à Kempis in the Imitatio Christi said that the character of man is that he loves the feasting but dislikes the fasting. We effortlessly recall that Jesus broke bread but fail to remember that He drank the cup of passion. Today, the love of the Father invites us to follow the Son, not out of obligation or duty or even responsibility but out of love for Jesus. He came to show us how to go up to Calvary. Sacrifice, not suffering will be our companion along the way. There is a difference. We do not embrace suffering for itself for that would be masochistic. However, we know that in love, there is always sacrifice. Thus, the self-sacrifice of love always entails suffering, but it is never a self-destruction. As the Collect directs us, “Let us walk eagerly in that same charity with which, out of love for the world, Jesus handed Himself over to death” for in the glorious Kingdom of Christ the Lord, the nature of self-sacrifice is never a defeat but always an eternal victory. It is worth far more than any success we can ever dream of or achieve in this passing world.
[1] This was a belief that lasted until about 17th century. According to a description, “The pelican lives near the Nile river and marshes in Egypt. She loves her young so much that when snakes kill them, she strikes her side until blood comes out and with her blood brings them back to life”. Because of that belief, the pelican became a major symbol of self-sacrifice and charity. Early Christians had adopted it by the 2nd century and started using it in texts and images.
[2] We live under a regime that seeks to sanitise history through woke mentality and cancel culture. Unwittingly, this movement pretends that Original Sin does not exist. But it does. This drive to sanitise history runs the danger of a canonisation of comfort and self-preservation. How so? The Saints are not perfect in a sense that each one of them has a history of grace. What a sanitised history does is pervert history into a reflexion of who we are at the moment. Look at the way political figures in the past have been “cancelled” as if the present is the perfect perspective for history. The end result of this woke/cancel culture is that the Saint’s remit will no longer be to keep us on the straight and narrow. They should not be made because their only utility is to make us feel good about ourselves. Saints are merely a narcissistic reflexion of who we are. But these imperfect but graced saints show us that sanctity must always involve more than a modicum of self-sacrifice.
