Sermon for Passion Sunday, March 21st, 2021

 

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen

 

My dearly beloved in Our Lord,

 

We have now entered into Passiontide, the last two weeks of Lent. These days should be consecrated to contemplating ever more intensely Our Lord’s Sacred Passion and Death.

Holy Church teaches us to progress in this manner of looking more closely at Our Lord, and then imitating him:

Already before Lent, as of Septuagesima, she has abandoned the triumphant and joyful exclamation “Alleluja”.

Then she went on to present to our pious meditation different readings each day of Lent, as of Ash Wednesday. Some of them are very long, culminating in the reading of the Passion of Our Lord according to the four Gospels, from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. They contain abundant food for our soul, year after year.

As of today the Crucifixes and Holy Images are veiled in purple so as to make us stop and reflect better upon their signification. In the Masses and Offices of the Temporal (not the feasts of Saints), the “Gloria Patri…” is mostly omitted.

All the Saints have meditated Our Lord’s life intensely, and most particularly his Passion and Death. St Teresa of Avila mentions this explicitly as for her own case. One of the defining moments of her conversion was a spiritual vision of Our Lord suffering, crowned with thorns, “the man of sorrows” (Is 53:3) so often put before Christian eyes in pictures and statues, even along the ways and roads.

A contemporary of St Teresa was St Ignatius of Loyola. In his Spiritual Exercises he adds three further points of meditation to the usual three – reflecting upon the persons, their words and actions – when it comes to the contemplation of Our Lord’s Passion (nn. 195-197):

“Reflect on what Christ is suffering in His human nature, or is prepared to suffer… Make a great effort at the beginning to compel myself to feel grief and sadness and even to shed tears. In the same way I must try hard in all that follows.” The Saint’s aim is not to see us become sentimental – as some might think after reading his statements in a superficial manner: “feel grief… even shed tears”. He wants to induce us to obtain a quasi-experimental, inward and intimate knowledge of Our Lord. The final question, as we see in the third of these points, is: What ought I to do and to suffer for Our Lord, when I see the great sufferings he has borne on my behalf, on behalf of my sins?! Therefore this is not about being sentimental. It is just the contrary, it is most practical and down-to-earth.

St Ignatius’ wording is always very dogmatically accurate – here “what Christ is suffering in His human nature”. God cannot suffer, therefore Our Lord cannot suffer in his divine nature. But in his human nature he does suffer. He does make his human nature obedient to the/his divine will unto death, even to the death of the cross (cf Phil 2:8; Epistle of Palm Sunday).

Along the same line of thought he writes in the second point here: “Reflect how the Godhead remains concealed. It could wipe out its enemies, but does not, leaving the sacred Humanity to such cruel sufferings.” “Modern man” cannot bear the reality of suffering and death because he has lost faith in the reason for suffering and death, namely sin. Throngs of “modernist theologians” reject the idea that God willed His own Son to suffer and die as something cruel and unworthy of God. Did it never occur to their sick minds that not only the Father wills the Son to die, but the Son himself, being the Second Divine Person, wills it? “And I have a baptism wherewith I am to be baptized: and how am I straitened until it be accomplished?” (Lk 12:50) This “baptism” is nothing else but Our Lord’s redeeming suffering and death on the Cross, and all the Catholic interpreters know and say! “And he said to them: With desire I have desired to eat this pasch with you, before I suffer.” (Lk 22:15) But it would be just as silly as this exacerbated modernistic sentimentalism, for us to overreact and to exclude our sentiments and passions altogether from our human and spiritual life. We are not to throw out the child with the bath… We need to use all the faculties God has given us, in an orderly and proper way – and not to dissect our soul! Atrophied souls cannot become Saints…

The third point in St Ignatius’ method of contemplating the Passion is: “Reflect that all this suffering is on account of my sins. What ought I to do and to suffer for Him?” It is a very worthy and precious thought, to apply each of Our Lord’s pains to our own self. It is by no means an exaggeration! God has promised to send a Redeemer after one single sin committed. Therefore it is also true that God would have gone all the way if there were only my soul to be saved!

Let us therefore approach the Throne of Grace, Our Lord reigning from the wood of the Cross, with great reverence and desire for our salvation; and with true compassion, according to the example of Our Blessed Lady!

 

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.