[Propertalk] Palm/Passion Sunday

[Ann Fontaine]

from a link at http://textweek.com

by Kate Huey

Here on the edge of Holy Week, we will undoubtedly hear many words  
about the meaning of Jesus' death, much of it troubling. Mark doesn't  
avoid the reality of the agonizing death of Jesus and the abandonment  
he experiences at the end, and we realize that Jesus is with us in our  
every moment of abandonment, our every moment of suffering and loss.  
Mark Vitalis Hoffman writes beautifully about the meaning of this  
text: "the message is not how Jesus defeated death but how he refused  
to avoid it. Jesus' cry of forsakenness from the cross should not be  
tempered with the prospects of the resurrection victory to come. It is  
a true cry of desperation that echoes the truth of the pains we  
experience in our lives. Jesus reflects real life." And in our own  
real lives, when we face pain and loss, we have the example of Jesus  
to follow, as Hoffman describes it: "Jesus refused to fight inflicted  
pain by inflicting pain. He refused to overcome injustice with an  
easy, optimistic plan for progress. He refused to fight back against  
the shame poured out on him by a flashy display of power."

This is not a story about something that happened long ago and never  
again. Jesus is with those who suffer and understands our human  
experience because he has shared it. The deliberate response of true  
faithfulness, we learn in the Gospels, is not violent retribution and  
revenge: "God has clearly proclaimed to humankind that the killing  
must stop," Megan McKenna writes, "and any rituals that involve death,  
violence, humiliation, or the diminishment of human beings must be  
discarded forever." Going even deeper into the meaning of the cross,  
Margaret Farley writes that we must do everything we can to end the  
suffering caused by injustice, "the kind of suffering that does not  
have to be; that cries out for an end not in death but in change.  
Christianity is therefore not a religion obsessed with necromancy and  
pain. It is a religion of resistance and hope. The point of the cross  
is not finally suffering and death; it is, rather, that a relationship  
holds. There is a love stronger than death....The God of Christians is  
not an arbitrary ruler who demands the price of suffering and death,  
but a God who makes possible all of our loves, as well as our  
resistance to evil." How indeed will we respond?





Ann Fontaine
Wyoming GC2009 c3

http://seashellseller.blogspot.com

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