Isaiah 50:4–7
Philippians 2:6–11
Matthew 26:14–27:66
Western art in particular has not failed to offer us detailed images and pictures of the crucifixion. Nearly every crucifix is in some way an attempt to portray for the beholder something of the suffering of the crucified Lord: an expression of pain in the face, the taut muscles, the thorns on the head and in many cases the ubiquitous blood pouring and dripping. We are left in no doubt of the horrors of what Paul says today “He became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Why we should be interested in seeing crucifixion vividly portrayed and even acted out is another matter.
What is striking about the Passion story we just heard is that there is nothing of that at all. When the time comes in Matthew’s gospel to speak of the crucifixion, it is mentioned in a subordinate clause. It doesn’t even warrant a main sentence. There is no description of what Jesus’ crucifixion looked like. The evangelist’s interest must lie elsewhere for the whole story is filled with drama. Perhaps Matthew’s community knew too well what a crucifixion looked like and needed no picture or description of this excruciating death. The cross remains central but maybe its meaning is found in what leads up to it and follows it.
The Passion of Jesus doesn’t begin with his being nailed to the wood of the cross. His death has begun long before that. It is not just a horrible physical death that Jesus suffers. Where does the evangelist put his pen to work? We will find its strokes in the story of betrayal. Here money on the table will turn a companion in life into a personal object of gain. A monetary value is place on the person and personal relationships. And to make the point clear, it is not just anyone who betrays but someone who breaks bread with me, someone intimate—a Judas who eats at my table and with whom I have shared my joys and pain. Someone uses the sign of kiss as the final bridge to hand me over. Is that not a death, a killing of intimacy and friendship and for what–money? The betrayer gets a good chunk of the narrative. Why? Because betrayal makes the other a victim that is easily disposed of. Money over people. In this pandemic Pope Francis has already pleaded not to set economics over the sick and dying. Relations among humans is uppermost.
Then there is denial. Peter too gets a lot of the story. It is words that are at stake this time. There is bravado and boasting here. I will never deny you, I will be faithful, even dying for you. But when it comes time to stand by another, I fade into the farthest corner and simply watch another go to their fate. Peter doesn’t say I don’t know him once but three times. The sword of the word has struck deep and the evangelist has let us feel that. Here it is: promised fidelity to the end but the promise is cheap and so denied. A word broken. While the one to whom the promise is made remains faithful to his word to the end. Death of a word of promise, death of a word of fidelity. Jesus is surrounded by broken words, words of a leader he chose. Is this, too, not death in relationships. And where does that leave the Lord? After his chosen leader has said I do not know the man, I do not even know what you are talking about, Jesus is left alone. Now the disciples, the followers, the table companions with whom he has shared his body and blood hours before have left him alone. Jesus is isolated from his human companions. Others will take charge now.
Hanging on the cross, crucified now, he is still hit with words. This time words that mock him. Now his own words and actions are thrown back in his face. He saved others, he trusted in God, God should deliver him. Where is his is relationship with God now? Here is the king and look how powerless he is. What is said in mockery is true in one sense but the words are misunderstood. The words like this could hurt you and I when we are misunderstood, when our identity and message is thrown back in our face. But then slowly it comes to us that the truth of the words is found in that very crucified one. It is the cross and the crucifixion that fill these words with their true meaning.
In these pandemic days when being cut off, being alone feeling isolated is felt by so many, in these days we also hear this story of Jesus Passion. In it we hear how his dying encompassed precisely the death of relationships as well as the pain of physical suffering. If we are honest with what we read and hear, the evangelist devotes considerable energy to the death of relationships, the fracture of words, the misuse of words as part of the death story, as part of the Passion, as part of suffering.
Yet we also see how the death of human relationships only makes the one relationship Jesus has stand out more clearly. Filled with sorrow and distress, he calls out the one name he can and takes his position in that name: Father. In that name he pours out his heart and his sorrow. He pours out his fear of what lies ahead…take this cup from me. But each time, and we hear it three times, he will not give the final word on his life. That he leaves to his Father. He will keep the Father’s word even if it means drinking the cup.
In the midst of the passion and from the cross itself, there is one relationship that remains steadfast for him and he to it: namely Father. The cry from the cross, My God, My God…is not a cry of despair. It is the cry of every person who has come to their limits and only has faith in “My God” left. These are not words thrown to the air. They are words from a pained heart of humanity clinging to the only relationship left, the invisible but real Father. And this is relationship that the foreign, occupying soldiers see and hear in these events of death and so it leads them to declare: “This is God’s son.”
On this Sunday of the Passion heard in our own days when we seem to be at a loss and all is spinning around us, we have a witness in a dying man of where we must turn and to whom we can speak. For the trust we have in Our Father will lead, in his day and time, to something new, something right now beyond our imagining but quite possible. Possible because it will be rooted, as Jesus’ death teaches us, “in his will.” For God’s son, loving faithfulness on both sides led to resurrection. It will for us too when we enter into the Paschal Mystery these days of 2020.
~ Fr. Joel Macul, OSB