Passion Sunday A (Saturday evening, 15 March 2008)

Philippians 2:5-11; Mt.27:11-54

Pr. George L. Murphy

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Akron OH

GOD’S PASSION

The Sunday of the Passion begins Passion Week. We will be focusing on the passion of our Lord, and we just read from St. Matthew’s Passion. We’ll be using the word “passion” a lot in the next few days. What do we mean by it?

Well, look up “passion” in the dictionary. It is “the enduring of afflicted pain, tortures, or the like.” A special Christian use is indicated, “the suffering of Christ on the cross, or his sufferings between the night of the Last Supper and his death.” That’s what we just read about in the Gospel, but it’s only a description of what happened. Is there a deeper meaning? So go on. Passion, the dictionary says, can be “intense emotion,” “ardent affection for one of the opposite sex; love” – and we talk about “crimes of passion” and so on. That doesn’t help us much now. Ah, here’s another meaning of the word – a use “now chiefly philosophical: State or capacity of being affected by outside agents.” Hmm.

Our “passion story” tells of the arrest, condemnation, beating, crucifixion and death of a Jewish teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. It’s similar to the stories of other good people persecuted, tortured, and murdered – Socrates, Christian martyrs, those who died in Auschwitz, Martin Luther King. But somehow the passion of Jesus is more than the suffering and death of other people. The elderly bishop Ignatius, being taken to Rome to be martyred in the early second century, wrote of his desire to be “an imitator of the passion of my God.”

If what we just read was the passion of God, and if passion means “being affected by outside agents,” then God is affected by the world. God really is engaged with the world and participates in our life. God is “affected by” the scourges of Roman soldiers, the mocking of priests and the nails, and is able to feel pain and loss.

The Christian tradition has had trouble acknowledging that. It has been so concerned with God’s supremacy and sovereignty, God’s superior to everything else, that we’ve thought that God had to be immune to any injury. (Suspiciously, that’s the kind of God we would be if we could be God.) So God supposedly can’t be affected or changed by anything. God must be far above all suffering, pain and loss. In fact, the first of the Articles of Religion in the Prayer Book says that God is “without body, parts, or passions”.

We ought to respect the intent of that statement. God is not just tossed about by the whims of creatures. But that isn’t the whole story. God does have a body, one born of Mary that hung on the cross. And God can be passionate. Back in the third century a bishop who’s been given the intriguing name “Gregory the Wonderworker” wrote an essay titled “The Passibility of the Impassible.” It is a great Christian paradox. God is not forced to be affected by, and suffer from, the world, but can choose to be affected, to enjoy creation and to suffer from it. God chose to create a world different from God - and to love the world, and rejoice in it, and be hurt by it.

God is indeed supreme – so supreme, so high that God can become low. So full that he can empty himself. So lordly that he can take the form of a slave. So full of life that he can be obedient unto death, even death on a cross.

Why would God do that? Apparently because God is able to love passionately. God loves wayward, undeserving humanity with a love that won’t abandon us. God loves even when repaid with disobedience, with being ignored, scorned and hated.

That is not entirely new with Jesus. It’s the way God spoke before through the prophets: “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? ... My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” That’s the God we see and hear in the passion of Jesus, who hangs on the cross mocked and reviled even by the criminals condemned with him. And the supreme paradox is that he feels abandoned even by God.

This is not some kind of divine masochism. The passion of God is directed at sin, our alienation from God, and reconciles us to God. It brings sinners back home and restores creation. The passion of God takes place so that no one who suffers, no one who knows the guilt of sin, no one who hurts, will be alone. God is the fellow-sufferer, who shares in the passion of the world.

And the passion and death of Christ is effective. It means more than solidarity with those who suffer and is something beyond a noble stand for truth like the martyrs. It is those things, but it is more. As the story is told, we hear how at his death the veil of the Temple is torn, so that the barrier between God and humanity is removed. Jesus is confessed as Son of God at his dying and the tombs are opened, so that already with the cross there is victory over death.

We enter now into Passion Week. We come into a time of hearing and experiencing how great God is, how passionate God chooses to be – how able to love, and able to save.