Rector's Blog: Passion

Christians call the week before Easter Holy Week. During this time it is our custom to observe what we call Jesus’ Passion. I have always been thrown off by this wording – the use of the word Passion. In my mind, Passion is connected to intense longing, desire, and yearning. It is a word often connected to romantic relationships, or those things which captivate our hearts. But during Holy Week, the Passion we are referring to is the suffering and death of Jesus. And as much of a church apologist as I am, I’ve always had trouble getting my head around it.

Of course, the reason is simple: The word passion comes from the Latin word that means “suffering”. This is a thing Christians love to do, by the way – we love to remind people that a word commonly used to mean one thing means something else in Greek or Latin or Hebrew – and then we insist on using the arcane churchy meaning. I did it twice last week and felt very fancy and smart.

That being said, it is fascinating that this word that so readily calls to mind intense desire has its roots in suffering. We know Jesus suffers. We know he experiences abandonment and betrayal, is lied about and feels forsaken, is beaten, whipped, stripped, and killed. But when we use the word passion to describe this, it can remind us of something incredibly important about Jesus: His suffering is directly connected to the intensity of his divine desire to share life with us.

The story of Christianity is the story of a God and a people in love relationship. And it is overwhelmingly a story of God seeking to be faithful to that love, and to draw us ever deeper into the eternally liberating reality of our connectedness. The love between God and humanity, between Creator and creation, is the defining reality of our existence. God’s desire for you to more fully know the love for which you were created, coupled with God’s recognition that we feel separated, isolated, and alone is at the heart of Jesus’ suffering for and with humanity.

I want to be clear: I’m not just saying that Jesus likes us so much that he’s willing to suffer. I’m saying that Jesus’ suffering is the embodiment of God’s frustrated desire for communion with us. God builds us for love relationship. We are enslaved by sin in such a way that we shy away from the vulnerable power of that love. Jesus shows up to bind up our wounds – even the self-inflicted ones – and to repair the love relationship for which we were born.

Humanity resists for all the reasons you can imagine. We do so out of fear and insecurity, or out of complacency or ignorance of the power of love. We do so because we’re broken and scared, or because we don’t want to give up what we have, or threaten the warm, suffocating blanket of the status quo. Whatever our motivation – we have the tendency to run from love. In Jesus we see the suffering of both God and humanity when God’s desire for closeness is frustrated. In Holy Week we see that God’s Love can live in the tension of desire and suffering.

Remember: We are trained by the world to believe that love is conditional and binary. So if we are good to God, God will love us, and if we are bad to God, God will hate us. If we make Jesus suffer, then how can he still desire us? If we do not act lovable, how can we be loved? In this mindset, Jesus’ passion seems impossible to us. We stand before the cross stupefied by the idea that anyone could call this Friday “Good”.

But look at our world in the time of COVID-19: Our current suffering is a strong indicator of our desire for closeness. Now more than ever, in our isolation and solitude, we are realizing how much we want each other, how much we love one another, how radically interwoven our lives are, how very much we belong to each other. Like Jesus, our suffering is a sign and embodiment of our desire for closeness.

God’s passion in Jesus Christ is Good. Profoundly Good. Utterly Good. It’s good because it shatters our insistent belief in conditionality – and forces us to reorient our very understanding of Love around the life-giving sacrificial desire of God embodied in Jesus' complete and total solidarity with humanity at all costs.