However, rightly or wrongly, in the amalgamation, what happens is that we seem to dash through the liturgy with barely time or space to savour the silence of helplessness because the mood very quickly takes a dramatic and sensational turn. Beginning with waving palms, jubilantly we enter into Jerusalem but by the time we re-enact the Gospel drama, we are already thick in the Passion of the Lord. Whatever the loss of space or time to stay and watch, our focus is no longer penance but the bitter passion of Christ’s suffering. Passiontide directs our attention to the sorrowful Saviour as He struggles up to Golgotha.
What we have today is the longest Gospel in the liturgical year and it previews what is to come on Good Friday. A sharper focus of what Jesus goes through has already been foretold by Isaiah’s Song of the Suffering Servant. If we were to remove all the details, the entire Passion drama can be abridged into the 2nd Reading. There St Paul’s theology is central to appreciating what God’s Son went through, all for the sake of humanity.
His state was divine but He clung not to His divinity. This is the great paradox that Jesus taught and lived: life is lived fully not by surrendering to our survival instincts and definitely not by self-preservation. It is counter-intuitive that the fullness of life comes when one gives it up so that others can live. Think of a candle that burns. The only way to emit light is through being burnt off. The idea of self-sacrifice is not unfamiliar to us. Many of you work south of the border so that your children can have a better life. The lofty challenge is to lay down one’s life for strangers and not for blood relations.
Self-preservation is the mantra of a post-Christian, post-truth world. The greatest love is supposedly self-love. The true Servant of Love is Jesus who exemplified that true love equals laying down one’s life and the hymn in the Letter to the Philippians reveals the full sacrifice of that love. If we take our inspiration from the 3rd Luminous Mystery where Jesus proclaims the Kingdom of Heaven, what He does in "kenosis", in self-emptying, is to make sure that the Kingdom He came to inaugurate is not an empty slogan but can be recognised in this world.
And yet, we are far from that Kingdom, are we not?
Even as we claim discipleship, conversion has been painfully slow. St Paul’s “incurvatus in se”, translated as “curved inward on oneself” describes the contradiction between good intentions and our inclination to evil deeds. Man is deeply afflicted by concupiscence for even though the Sacrament of Baptism washes away Original Sin, it does not remove our tendency to sin. This impulse is akin to the experience that we cannot “unknow” or “unlearn” what we have come to know and learn. A person who knows how to walk cannot “unknow” walking.
Why is it so difficult to be converted?
The hurried descent from triumph to failure may have robbed us of the opportunity to stay with the Lord. Like Peter, James and John in the Garden falling asleep while Jesus agonised alone, the sudden slide from victory to defeat also lets us off the hook of staying with the Lord in His suffering. We are ill at ease with inaction, that is, doing nothing, because our basic attitude is activism. After all, are we not upwardly mobile? Instead of waiting for the winds to push our sails, we fly into the storm to get to where we want to be. To be productive is to do something because a minute stalled is a minute wasted. Furthermore, we are uncomfortable with sorrow and we shy away from pain because we associate God with a sense of well-being. In our rush through the liturgy, there is no time for silence and sorrow. No space for us to stay with Him and to feel the weight of our sins loaded onto His shoulders.[3]
If the spiritual objective of Lent is renewal, then, as the etymology of the word suggests, it is a springtime for the soul. In fact, the season of spring leaps forth after the passive fallow of winter. Conversion is the fruit of our penitential practices. But it is not guaranteed automatically. Some Catholics who mortify themselves rigorously will discover that the lasting change they long for always remains as elusive as the horizon. Here we may not realise that conversion is most radical in a grateful heart. A thankful heart is more disposed to change. Without gratitude, Christ’s salvation can feel like we are entitled to it and when it comes to accepting that He died for us, without a matching sense of gratitude, we will take salvation for granted and remain where we are, unmoved, unchanged, unreformed.
Gratitude grows from staying with the Lord. The prolonged Passiontide and the entire Holy Week give us ample time and space to accompany the Lord and to deepen the awareness and to savour the gravity that He died for “me”. He sacrificed Himself to take away “my” sins and not the generic He took away “our” sins or that He died for “us”. It is not “we” who hanged Him on the Cross. It is “I” and not “we” who crucified my Lord. It is easier to hide behind the generic “we” but it requires more personal responsibility to acknowledge the “I”.
Sadly, entitled and insulated that we are, “I” want God to stay with “me”. Whereas a conversion of lasting effect is the fruit of keeping close to Jesus. Furthermore, “I” stay with Him not because He needs “me” but because “I” need Him. Especially when “I” want to rid “myself” of sins or grow in the deeper appreciation of how “my” sins crucified my sweet Jesus. The longer I stay and the more intimate I am with Him, the keener will I feel my sinfulness through and through. Like the Publican at the back of the Temple, not daring to look up, beating his breast, I can lament, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am a sinner”.
In the 2nd Reading, St Paul rightly sings of the abasement of Christ. If the fall of Adam is my damnation, then the abnegation of Christ is my salvation. If I have no sins, then, I really have no need of Him which can only mean that salvation is unnecessary and if He did die for me, I will not be able to appreciate it. Just like the Pharisee in the Temple who was not saved because he had no sin.
Finally, we may not have veiled our images as we have been instructed to do it on Holy Thursday. Notwithstanding, just be mindful that these days of inactivity, our sight should be drawn toward the essential work of Christ’s redemption and the price paid for our salvation. In these coming days of silence, let the hymn “Abide with me” play in our minds. More effectively, change the wordings to “Abide with You” to signal that “I intend to stay with You, my Lord, in Your agony in the Garden all the way to Your death on the Cross so that I may rise with You and be freed from the sins that cling to me”.
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[1] Except Stained Glasses, Stations of the Cross and Procession Cross.
[2] Our Lady of Sorrow is now permanently commemorated on 15th Sept, a day after the Exaltation of the Cross. Its trace is found in the alternative Collect for the 5th Week of Lent. “O God, who in this season give your Church the grace to imitate devoutly the Blessed Virgin Mary in contemplating the Passion of Christ, grant, we pray, through her intercession, that we may cling more firmly each day to your Only Begotten Son and come at last to the fullness of his grace”.
[3] What we are comfortable to do is bubble-wrap the notion of God’s presence in safety and security that we often fail to recognise that He is there in our physical, psychological, social, ecological and spiritual pain.
