A Human Passion

Jesus's Passion is a human story, one that is meant to show that our lives have meaning when we follow our God-given purpose.

By Mark McDermott

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Terms like “the Passion” and “the Pascal Mystery” elevate the events they describe to a point where they seem almost unapproachable. These deeds should indeed be revered, but the notion that they are somehow beyond us must be dispelled. Jesus was human, as we are, and the triumph brought by the Passion is what God intends for all of us.

Nonetheless, the brutality, betrayal, and abandonment of the Passion is discomforting – revolting, even. It may therefore be comforting to cast the Passion as something removed from human reality because we hope to never have to relate to that magnitude of suffering. But the execution of Jesus is imbued with humanity, and only in acknowledging that essence can a key message for our lives on Earth be revealed.

While much of Jesus’s life shows his divinity, the Passion shows not only the humanity of the Son but the compassion of the Father for our physical and emotional pain. God cares about human lives. He cares about our fears, about when the world causes us to stumble, and when it capriciously reviles and abuses us. If the physical body meant nothing to God, why would Jesus fear what was to come while he prayed at Gethsemane? Why would God send an angel to comfort Him? If life on Earth did not matter, why would the veil of the Temple split with Jesus’s last breath? It is because all human life matters and is sacred; we were created by God, and that creation is good.

Thus, when that goodness is abused, either by our own sin or the sin of others, the Passion of Jesus reveals the pain that God feels. The corollary of this is that, just as our human suffering pains God, so too then our true fulfillment brings him joy. This is the love of the Good Shepherd who leaves the rest of his flock for the stray, or the father who waits to see his son returning on the road from a distant land.

This may seem contradictory to other Scripture, which says that we must “die to the flesh” to be saved. Some interpretations, like the “Imitation of Christ,” take this as far as to say that death should be welcomed as a path to full communion with God. Jesus, fervent in prayer in Gethsemane, may have disagreed – at least in terms of “welcoming” the experience.

Rather, our experiences on Earth matter because of why and how we carry ourselves through them. The intent of Jesus throughout the Passion – and why it is so called – is, of course, God’s unremittent love. But the importance of the motivations guiding our lives is revealed also in the actions of those around Jesus. When he enters Jerusalem, the Jews hail him like their king. And, indeed, just days later, he is paraded through the city with a crown and the purple robes of royalty under the inscription, “King of the Jews.” In a different context, it might seem that they are fulfilling the decree that “every knee should bend, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”

The distinction, of course, is why and how each is done. The people welcome Jesus into the city, perhaps hoping if they can make him into a worldly king to elevate their own earthly power in liberation from Rome. Even the disciples did this during Jesus’s ministry: recall James and John asking that they “may sit one at your right and the other at your left” (Mark 10:37). For the crowd, this idolatry of worldly authority permits the immediate power wielded by the Pharisees to misdirect them to condemn Jesus when Pilate solicits a verdict. Jesus cries out, “Why have you abandoned me?”, to show how God is pained when we exercise the blessing of freewill for something other than what is eternal. God is not in everything, but only that which endures – hence Jesus’s lament of the absence of God in the violence to which he was subjected.

In the face of the greed and envy that mar the story of the Passion with human sin, Jesus’s conduct shows that our lives matter inasmuch as they are devoted to what is eternal. This is why “faith alone, without works” misses a fundamental truth: faith changes how we live all aspects of our lives. Rejecting the importance of the power of institutions on Earth, Jesus committed every aspect of his life – even death – to what is eternal with God. His entire being was in communion with God, even on Earth. In so doing – when we live the out the purpose for which God created us – human life is not meaningless, because we share our lives and our being with Him through His love.