Palm Sunday – 10 April 2022
We have just listened to the Passion Story of the Lord. It is a week in which the Passion of the Lord will be at the forefront of our liturgical celebrations.
Passion is word with many different meanings. Pierre Wolff remarks about the word, ‘passion’:
In the context of the Christian liturgy, the word signifies sufferings, dereliction, and death. It implies everything that Jesus experienced during those days: betrayal and denial, rejection and abandonment, and other ordeals. The word “passion” in this context suggests little that is pleasant for a human being.
[However}, we often forget that we use it is an adjective when we speak of a passionate love. This time the word has a very positive connotation: it means that what we describe is pushed to its very limits, to its fulfillment. When we see a passionate love, we sometimes talk about the madness of love.
That is what the Passion of Jesus Christ is about. As Christians, don’t we see in these events a passion-tide of love in human flesh, the crashing waves of God called Love by John (1 John 4:8)? So when we read or pray the Passion narrative, we listen to a love story – not a romance, but the story of God’s love for us, the story of God as Love.[1]
To celebrate the passion of the Lord is to enter his passion – in this sense, to become passionate in life ‑ about life ‑ as he was. Each of us is called to become a passionate person. In this sense we can never have enough passion. William McNamara lamented once that there was not enough passion in our Church. He said,
There is no other way to be a really great lover. And if . . . men and women are not great lovers, what hope is there for Christianity?[2]
Our discipleship of the crucified and risen Lord, the passionate One, calls us into lives of greater love. Throughout the coming week, the story of passion into which we will be drawn will disclose to us the true meaning of love: a self-emptying become a self-giving. In this Jesus was passionate. So may we.
[1] Pierre Wolff, God’s Passion our Passion, (Ligouri, MO: Triumph Books, 1994), 5-6
[2]W. McNamara, Mystical Passion, (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1977), 3