Brothers and Sisters,
The liturgy of today is indeed extraordinary. It is one of many contrasts. Here is the Messiah, riding on a donkey, coming from the village of Bethany down to the valley of the Kidron. He makes a strategic descent, humbling himself to ride on a donkey, carrying all of us with him, so that as he rises to go up to Jerusalem, he lifts each one of us up to God.
Jesus enters Jerusalem, hailed as “the King who comes in the Name of the Lord”. It’s one of those glorious moments in his life. But then things change so quickly and take a dramatic turn, as they sometimes do in our lives; the hour of darkness sets in, and in the end, Jesus is crucified, he dies and he is sealed in a tomb, wrapped up in a shroud, and left on a stone shelf in a quarry that had been turned into a cemetery.
“I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled my beard”, says Isaiah. The son of God is “dumped before his shearers never opening his mouth”. He willingly goes into his passion as one who yields to the will of his Father. He doesn’t complain, but rather lets his adversaries have the better of him, yet by this innocence and his holy cross he redeems the world destined to damnation.
Reflecting on the gospel of today, which in the early centuries was used on the first Sunday of Advent (to begin the liturgical year), and moving from episode to episode, Jesus undergoes a process of stripping. He, step by step, is deprived of almost everything. He’s stripped of the allegiance and the company of the Twelve, his friends, he is betrayed by one of them, denied by another, and at the end deserted by all. In the garden of Gethsemane, he has to give up the desire for earthly life, “take away this cup from me” he cries, but it is not his own will.
In his arrest, he loses his physical liberty. In the trials before the Sanhedrin and then before Pilate, he’s deprived of basic justice, the right to defend himself; he loses the protection of the law. Yes, all this was a travesty of justice, it was a miscarriage of the rule of law, and the mistreatment of the Son of God. Today, many go through the same experience: being falsely accused of the crimes they haven’t committed, left languishing in the prisons without appeal. Who will plead for their course?
In the roughing, and the mocking Jesus loses the sympathy of the people he had fed even though Pilate finds no evil in him. He is disregarded by the cohort of religious men, derided by soldiers, by the passers-by, and even fellow criminals. He’s stripped of his dignity, respect and reputation. He is abandoned to the mercy of those he must save, and yet he is there “never opening his mouth”. How much more do we ignore those deprived of their rights and dignity? And what role do we play in ensuring that each one feels a member of the human family despite of their social status?
“My God, my God, why have you deserted me?”, He cries out. At this point, like every human being, he seems to lose even the felt sense of the Father’s closeness. In his cry he is carrying the unanswered questions of so many of us who feel deserted, left to the cruelty of a society that seems to be indifferent to the plea of the poor and the most vulnerable. It is the cry of the migrants whose hopes have been dashed into the unforgiving waters of the Atlantic. It is the cry of the people who have fled their homes in the DR Congo, the Sudan, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Mali, Palestine, Israel, Iran, Ukraine and other parts of the world, because of senseless wars. It is the cry of those nations ravaged by coups d’états, and it is indeed the cry of every human soul longing for Justice and peace.
Jesus undergoes a process of subtraction and diminishment. He has been subjected into the treatment of anything disposable. Yet, says St. Catherine of Siena, he goes into his passion like a deer yearning for water – thirsting for our wellbeing, and surely our happiness in God.
On the contrary, we put an accent on self-expansion, on value-addition, we want to add to ourselves; to be more, to do more, and to possess more; more achievements, more experiences, more knowledge, more money, a high reputation, and indeed all that inflates our ego. This is what society values, appreciates and pushes us to be. Yet the Holy One of God is reduced to nothing. He, says St. Paul, “assumes the condition of a slave”.
Finally, Jesus cries out in a loud voice “Father into your hands I commend my Spirit”. In this harrowing cry, the Christ, says the catechism, communicates to the Father all our troubles, the troubles of all time. He offers to him all the petitions and intercessions of salvation history. And the Father heard him, so that by his self-offering he redeems the world. By this cry he gathers the children of God together “as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings”. He does it, as Julian of Norwich puts it, with “the motherhood of God” in his heart. He does it as the high priest who makes atonement for our sins, as the incarnate Word carrying all of us in his body disfigured by beatings. He gathers all of us scattered by climate change, geo-political and economic confrontations, armed conflicts and ethnic divisions. He gathers all of us living in uncertainty.
So, in faith and simplicity, let us connect with the moment and allow the liturgy of this holy week to enter into us and to transform us, and it will because the liturgy works.
By: Nicholas Iwuala, M.Afr.