For almost all of his public life Jesus was actively doing something.
However, from the moment he walks out of the Last Supper room and begins to pray in Gethsemane, all that activity stops. He is no longer the one who is doing things for others, but the one who is having things done to him. In the garden they arrest him, bind his hands, lead him to the high priest, then take him to Pilate. He is beaten, humiliated, stripped of his clothes and eventually nailed to a cross where he dies. This constitutes his “passion,” that time in his life where he ceases to be the doer and becomes the one who has things done to him.
What is so remarkable about this is that our faith teaches us that we are saved more through Jesus’s passion (his death and suffering) than through all of his activity and preaching and doing miracles.
There is a great lesson in this, not the least of which is how we view the terminally ill, the severely handicapped, and the sick. There’s a lesson too on how we might understand ourselves when we are ill, helpless, and in need of care from others.
The cross teaches us that we, like Jesus, give as much to others in our passivities as in our activities. When we are no longer in charge…humiliated, suffering, and unable even to make ourselves understood by our loved ones-then we are undergoing our own passion and, like Jesus in his passion, have in that opportunity to give our love and ourselves to others in a very deep way.
Rolheiser, Ron OMI, “The Passion and the Cross,” 2015, Franciscan Media, Cincinnati, p. 2 -3
Reading chosen by Deacon Steve
Image credit
Author: Nata Silina
http://www.supercoloring.com/coloring-pages/eleventh-station-jesus-is-nailed-to-the-cross