PASSION SUNDAY 2023, Year (A)
(Isaiah
50:4-7; Philippians 2:6-11; Matthew 26:14 – 27:66)
In
Jesus said to him, "Put
your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the
sword. Or do you think that I cannot
now pray to My Father, and He will provide Me with more than twelve legions of
angels? How then could the
Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must happen thus?"
Those words show us that Jesus was indeed, living His
life, as St. Paul puts it, ‘according to the Scriptures’:
I delivered to you first of
all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day
according to the Scriptures.
And Jesus Himself confirmed this explicitly when, after His
Resurrection, He appeared to His disciples on the way to Emmaus, and said to
them:
“O foolish ones, and slow of
heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not the Christ to have suffered these
things and to enter into His glory?"
And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all
the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. (Luke 24:25-27)
Therefore, Jesus understood and lived His life in
accordance with the Scriptures, because, as He publicly declared:
I have come down from heaven,
not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me (John 4:34),
My food is to do the will of
Him who sent Me, and to finish His work (John 6:38).
Now, the God and Father Who sent Him had been preparing
Israel for some 2000 years -- through her
inspired prophets and Scriptures -- to become first of all a fitting ‘seed-bed’
where the Son-of-God-made-man could take root, so to speak; and also a Chosen People
able to recognize, appreciate, and respond to Him when, ultimately, He would be
manifested publicly. Surely, then, for
us today as for the Apostles of old, Jesus can only be meaningfully recognized,
rightly appreciated, and spiritually encountered when we understand Him ‘in accordance
with the Scriptures’, both Old and New.
Immediately before the coming of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah
and the world’s Saviour and Redeemer, the Roman World -- well-nigh at the
pinnacle of its power -- was looking for peace after ambitious and
costly campaigns of aggrandizement, self-satisfying revenge-taking, or just the
regular wear-and-tear of put-down’s here and there to ensure ‘peace, established
order, and plenty’. But more recently,
after civil wars rending Rome itself and culminating in the aftermath of Julius
Caesar’s assassination, the Roman Senate and traditional Roman society -- the mighty
and most-important patricians, and other serious and most necessary political,
social, and military people -- whom the Senate represented and for whom they ‘ruled’,
actually LONGED for peace to such
an extent that the very young and inexperienced pseudo-son of the most famous
Julius Caesar was allowed and enabled to become himself Caesar under the name
of Augustus; a position he would soon amplify to being recognized and acclaimed
as divine Augustus (‘Divi Filius’ … god's son) was one of his titles, and giver of peace!
Dear People of God, that Augustan worldly peace, that peace in the
Roman world of Augustus and his immediate imperial successors, lasted only long
enough for Our Lord Jesus’ Christian peace to be born and take firm foothold in
the Roman world itself, first of all.
From there, however, the Christian faith quickly discovered God-given flocks
to pasture in the uncivilized world of the surrounding pagan nations, guiding,
leading, and teaching them in their aspirations for God’s gift-and-promise of spiritual,
eternal, peace for all men and women of good will.
Our modern age, our traditional Western world, has reneged
on that Christian inheritance of over 1500 years and now finds itself – like
the Roman world of Caesar’s times – longing for what it has not, and must
search for: that is, justification
and hope. And in that process our world, our society is now grasping at self-justification, and fleshly hope.
Self-justification, by the ‘woke’ who will not see
their own sins, but whose keen eyes will to seek out and find personal and social
failings past and present, and remedy them without truly knowing either past or
present human situations; and fleshly-hope, by those who want immediate and
enjoyable results for whatever commitment they may give to anyone other than
themselves.
Dominated and dazzled by science and its achievements, our
world approaches Jesus in an objective manner, seeking to scientifically examine
and test whatever words or actions of His it might feel inclined to investigate,
and then to formulate and pronounce thereupon a merely rational, impersonal,
judgment; a judgment invalidated not so much by its rationality – because
reason, after all, is God’s great gift to human kind – but by its illogicality:
for Jesus is, above all, One Whose Personality remains divinely mysterious
until it is freely revealed in a mutual relationship with those who seek to believe
in Him; and yet those investigators in no way seek personal communion with or
commitment to Jesus. Again our society seeks an object for scientific study,
not One Who only reveals Himself in order to be appreciated by those wanting
to embrace Him by humble faith and obedience in the waters of baptism, by those
who, thereby sanctified, will receive His Most Holy Spirit as the Guide and Light
of their subsequent lives.
The whole purpose of the Jewish Scriptures was, as I have
said, to prepare and lead the people of Israel to embrace their promised
Messiah, the Son of God, and Saviour of mankind. And those Scriptures are still valid for that
purpose today. For us Christians, the
Old Testament is still living and necessary, not so much in its provisional
prescriptions but in its divine foreshadowing and orientation. The Spirit of
God was given provisionally to Israel in and through her prophets and in her Scriptures;
now, the same Spirit – the Holy Spirit -- is given in supreme fullness to Mother
Church, and, through her to all the faithful, by her proclamation of the Good
News of Jesus’ Gospel, and her celebration and ministration of the sacraments
of the glorified flesh of Jesus, and the copious gifts of His Most Holy Spirit.
A meeting with Jesus – sent by His Father for our salvation
-- arranged by modern scholars thinking themselves able and qualified to objectify and
rationalize all that comes before their mind, could in no way be a saving
encounter. The real, true, and saving
Jesus is not to be thus coldly encountered, but ardently desired in prayer, and
patiently sought, in the Scriptures and the Eucharistic Sacraments, before
being lovingly embraced through faith and understanding by those who, under the
guidance of the Spirit, are seeking forgiveness and redemption, New Life,
through the total gift of self in loving obedience to Jesus.
Dear People of God, consider closely in your heart what
sort of meeting you are seeking to set up with Jesus this Easter. If you wish it to be, indeed, a personal
encounter involving both heart and mind, then pray that with Mary’s help you
may learn to recognize something of Jesus in the swaddling clothes of the Old
Testament Scriptures, and in His full beauty and glory in the Gospel; so that they
may help you open up your hearts to Him in the Eucharist that His Spirit may become
the deepest joy and hope, the abiding peace and strength, of your lives.
