The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ

In very early times, the Church did not have Holy Week as we have it today. Rather, the entire Passion and Resurrection of Jesus was celebrated in a single night – the Easter Vigil. However, before long the Church wisely chose to extend the celebration over an entire week, in keeping with the Gospel story: the entrance to Jerusalem on the Sunday before Easter; the Last Supper and betrayal on Thursday night; the Passion and death of Jesus on Good Friday; the Resurrection on the Sunday.

Part of the wisdom of Holy Week is that we are not unduly rushed from the contemplation of Christ’s death to the celebration of His rising. We are given time to face up to the reality of the death of Jesus and its profound importance for the whole human race.

Pope John Paul II has spent much of his life combating what he has called “The Culture of Death” prevailing in our modern world. It will be remembered as one of the greatest themes of his preaching and teaching throughout his pontificate. In his Lenten message for 2005, the Holy Father drew our attention to the Fifth Commandment: ‘You shall not kill.’ “Human life,” he said, “is a precious gift to be loved and defended in each of its stages.” The Commandment “always requires respecting and promoting human life, from its beginning to its natural end.”

Every human being is made in the image of God. Therefore, wherever and whenever a human life is destroyed through an intentional act by another human being, the image of God Himself is under attack.

In Holy Week we proclaim the death of Jesus, but Jesus was not just ‘any man.’ In the Passion according to Saint John, Pilate calls Him “The Man.” As fully God and fully human, Jesus was the image of the invisible God (as Saint Paul calls Him). When Jesus died at the hand of human beings, God Himself became the victim of man’s perennial transgression against the Commandment, ‘You shall not kill.’

In the reading of the Passion on Palm Sunday and Good Friday, we kneel for a short while in silence after the words, “and He gave up His spirit.” Our silence is the silence of awe at the stupendous length to which human rebellion against God has gone. So far had mankind failed to love God and his neighbour, that in destroying this One Human Life he killed his Creator. The First Commandment was completely transgressed in the breaking of the Fifth Commandment.

The Catechism reminds us that “in her Magisterial teaching of the faith and in the witness of her saints, the Church has never forgotten that sinners were the authors and the ministers of all the sufferings that the Divine Redeemer endured.”
Would that it had ended there, but it has not. “The Culture of Death” is a twentieth and twenty-first century culture, not a first century culture. The last hundred years has seen the abuse of human life – in everything from warfare to abortion, from failure to feed the hungry to euthanasia – reach a scale previously unimaginable. That it continues in our very day and in our very community is a continuation of the Passion of the One Man who willingly gave Himself into our violent hands.

The reading of the Passion does not have a “happy ending;” the story we hear this week simply ends with the silence of death and a tomb. Of course, we know that the happy ending will come, but the timing of Holy Week forces us to confront the death of Jesus and, in His death, the death of every human person. We are reminded to continue our struggle against the Culture of Death and in our constant witness to the Lord and Giver of Life we become aware that the awful necessity that that struggle begins within us.

However, the fact that Easter Day is on the horizon means that we do not give up hope. We know that “Death with Life contended” on the Cross – but so too we know how this “combat strangely ended: Life’s own Champion, slain, yet lives to reign.” (Easter Sequence)

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.