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Christ carrying the cross by Andrea Solario, 1513.
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Christ’ Passion
What is it about Christ’ Passion that moves me to tears? Not the torture and pain He undergoes but that the absolutely innocent and vulnerable (the He, the stranger, on the Cross) would be so misunderstood, mistaken, scorned, and mocked; that the whole of humanity--so ignorant and unjust--would eagerly join in the game of jeers and conspiracy whereby the son of God is made a fool’s spectacle. There is nothing more egregious than a justice system (or the religious establishment, in this case) that criminalizes the victim. The son of God is made to be "that imposter" who is feared to be claiming later by his followers as the one risen from the dead—after his body would be stolen away from the grave by them (Matt. 27:63). "The last deception would be worst than the first," said the chief priests and the Pharisees (Matt. 27:64). For them Jesus' claim of divinity and God's kingdom amounts to nothing more than a deception; and his claim of ultimate redemption by recreation (i.e., by his resurrection) is a deceit worse than the first. Jesus’ petition to the crying women at the sight of him carrying the cross is very appropriate: “Do not weep for me but weep for yourselves…” (Luke 23: 28). We should not weep for Christ’s suffering but for our sinfulness that brings about his suffering. It is us that must be pitied.
The chorus of taunts and scorns Jesus endures silently at Pilate's court is too painful to hear, not only because they are thrown at the Sacred Head but also because they reveal the deep seated hatred and revolt of humanity against the divine, his teaching, and his Kingdom. What would become of us, if we are incapable of following his teaching and incapable of entering his Kingdom? (“Blessed are the poor in spirit, [only] they shall inherit the Kingdom of God.”) The prospect of human society, government, and civilization where the divine is scorned and jeered, where the innocent is made the criminal, misunderstood, and ultimately put to death unjustly and cruelly is too grim. The picture that the Passion narratives collectively presents as a verbal icon is too vivid: the unjust and the powerful Sanhedrin, the chief priests, the elders, Pilate, and Herod juxtaposed side by side by the helpless, innocent Christ who stands before them all alone by himself, betrayed by his own followers, scorned by the crowd, wearing the crown of thorns, being mocked and flogged; the noise of the ignorant masses (“Crucify him, crucify him”), preferring the robbers to Christ, and their jeers and insults thrown at the silent Lamb of God. The gravity and the weight of the scandal is too much to bear. “What have we done?” cried one of the conscientious soldiers on one side of the Cross. "Truly this man was the Son of God," cried the centurion on the other side.
The verbal icon of the Gospels in the Passion narratives shows the two diametric realities at once: the innocent and the pure Divine, on one hand; and the depraved and deeply flowed humanity, on the other. The darker the human evil is, the purer and more divine Christ appears. The more the corruption, the more dire the need of God. “Lord, have mercy on us.”
We have killed God and mocked His Kingdom. The death of God is not only a rumor that started and echoed down from Zarathustra’s mountain cave in the late 19th century (if it has not already been anticipated by Hegel's philosophy earlier) but is a painful reality poignantly depicted in the ancient Scriptures already—in the verbal icon that is presented in the night vigil before the Good Friday. Is it possible that we can kill God? Setting aside the metaphysical question that has been debated for centuries, the death of God is a fact. We have killed Him. The Gospel teaches that we are capable of such a crime. That humanity can kill God is an empirical fact as astonishing as it is scandalous. But this fact also cries out for the dire need of God and for his intervention in human affairs. The darker the evil, the stronger the need for God and his intervention. Only we can kill God; and only God can save us. (The significance of the conjunction “and” here cannot be underestimated.)
The Passion narrative is not confined to the ancient time. As a verbal icon, it brings forth a true and powerful picture of humanity that is totally depraved without any hope of self-improvement. From the time of Caine and Able, through Sodom and Gomorrah, the time of the Judges in Canaan, King David, and the prophets, right through the birth and death of Jesus, down to the Middle Ages, and to the present, the dark history of human atrocity and injustice continues. We have continued to mock and reject God and his Kingdom. We continue to misunderstand his teaching and deny the divine reality in view of the empirical and immediately gratifying evidence. In short, we remain utterly secular, despite (and because of) all the advances in science and technology. “Let [him] … come down now from the cross, [so] that we may see and believe,” shouted one bystander. We like miracles and the magic; we worship power. We adore the golden calf and the establishment. (“We have no king but Caesar,” shouted the chief priests to Pilate.) We bow to the royal crown and scepter, and despise the crown of thorns and the purple robe Jesus wore. The weak, the poor, and the condemned have no place in our society. We misunderstand and scorn them. In fact, we eliminate them--rather than trying to understand them--by crucifying them (“Away with him, away with him, crucify him,” the crowd said in John’s Gospel.)
Given the gravity of human evil, death of the innocent is inevitable: Even the Son of God must be condemned and die. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” --this cry of Jesus on the cross can be heard everywhere where a bomb is dropped indiscriminately, where an innocent child dies or loses her parents as result. The fate of Jesus, the suffering servant, foreshadows the fate of humanity. We will suffer and cannot escape suffering. Christ, the icon, presents who we are: the victim of our own insanity. He, the suffering servant, exhibits our suffering: “Behold the man,” [said the Pilot], wounded, beaten, spitted at, and mocked. “Behold the Lamb of God,” shouted John the Baptist earlier. "He has born our grief and carried our sorrow," said prophet Isaiah even earlier. His grief is ours; his sorrow ours. Christ, the Immanuel, is one with us in our suffering. The necessity that "the son of man must die" (Matt 26:24; Mark 14: 21) is brought upon by our own evil. There is no source of evil other than ourselves. Corrupt and depraved, we cannot save ourselves. Only God can by becoming one of us in suffering and death. By becoming a victim, Christ becomes the redeemer. The logic of “conquering death by death” is made possible not based on the logic of exchange (where one’s guilt is paid for by another’s sacrifice offered in appeasement) but by the an-archic (il)logic of “substitution,” where one stands for another in expiation and expiration, in inexhaustible expenditure of total and complete gift and sacrifice offered beyond oneself—to the point of death: kenosis (Phil. 2:7). That one must bear for others and others’ guilt is the necessity arising from the darkness of evil, overcoming and transcending the evil. The ethics of the Cross is the ultimate response to human evil.
Just as God suffers and is killed by us, He also suffers and dies for us. He is given over as "a ransom for many" (Matt. 20:28; Mark 10:45). He dies for the ones who has killed him. He substitutes for them and for their crimes. The site of our crime thus becomes the site of his redemptive work. Our evil deed is the very instrument through which his goodness shall shine forth and be triumphant. It is not that the evil somehow transforms itself into the good in a synthesis but that the evil is decisively conquered by the good. Evil does not say the last word, thank God. His suffering and death thus becomes the very site of God's intervention, where the good ultimately triumphs. Out of his death arises a new beginning, a new life, a new creation. "Christ is risen. He is risen, indeed." That his death would be redemptive, that he would substitutes himself for others even to the point of death--kenosis—is the wonder of resurrection.
In the meantime, however, until the time of Christ triumphant return, there is Mary, the Mother of Sorrow (Stabat Mater), who witnesses the death of her own son—not any son but the divine one. Who can bear her sorrow, her disappointment, her agony of seeing God die on her own lap? (“Behold your son,” says Jesus hanging from the cross, as if to drive the point home. How can a mother bear such a sight of her own son?) If humanity is so evil that we are capable of killing God (which might be equivalent to ripping an infant from mother’s bosom and killing him—as depicted by Voltaire in his novelette Candid), on one hand; Mary is so magnanimous that she can bear it all with the incomparable grace and dignity, on the other. There is a reason why Mary’s face in Michelangelo’s Pieta—in fact in all of her icons—is young and tranquil. She is capable of bearing the agony and despair of the biblical proportions in the literal sense of the terms without losing her peace and grace. She does not age in the agony undergone. After all, what could be more devastating than to hold the dead body of God on one’s own lap? Can we believe any longer after the death of God? Can we hope any more at the sight of God's death? If the death of God is the death of humanity itself, how can we go on thereafter?
Like Mary, we go on by enduring and by forbearing. Mary maintains her peaceful continence at the sight of the death of her Son. “Behold your mother,” says Jesus to the disciple. Mary is indeed our mother—if we are Christ's disciples—who, as a mother, welcomes us all despite our faults, sheltering us with her tender care, healing, and restoring us. As she had welcomed the divine in her youth, she as the icon now welcomes the dying, the broken, and the wounded—all of us who have lost hope in the hopeless world. Love divine triumphs all in the meantime, in the in-between time when Christ, the risen Lord, is yet to come as Christ, the triumphant Prince of Peace. “Blessed are the merciful…., blessed are the meek…” Forbearance is all while we wait for His coming in the vigil and in the liturgy.
Chungsoo J. Lee Easter 2016
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