Fr. Michael Williams

St Mark’s account of the Passion of Christ reveals to us the depths of suffering that Jesus endured. It reveals to us that God Himself in a mysterious way experienced an intense suffering of body and soul. God is not separate from human suffering, He has experienced it fully in the passion and death of Jesus.

Although “His state was divine”, Jesus “accepted death, death on a cross”. The Divine Son assumed human nature, only to be stripped of it in a most barbarous way. The Son of God’s human body became one great wound as he suffered unimaginable pain. He suffered that pain out of love for sinful humanity. The film ‘The Passion of the Christ’ reveals the full horror of what Jesus endured. Yet through all His suffering He continued to love. In Luke’s gospel Jesus forgives those who crush Him, and commends Himself to the Father: ‘Into you hands I commend my spirit’.

Mark’s gospel account of the Passion reveals the great mystery of our faith that God should share our humanity in all its pain. Jesus feels so isolated in His pain that He even cries out to the Father whilst on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you deserted me”. For Jesus the Father appears silent in the face of all His suffering. ‘It seems that what was most his, his intimate union with the Father, has been obscured’. By taking the sins of the world upon Himself Jesus loses sight of the Father, because sin makes us blind to God. Jesus took on Himself the horrible weight of human sin.

It was out of love for humanity that God became blinded by human sin: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). Christ takes onto Himself all of humanity’s rebellion and sin, so that we would be made whole.

A prayer of Chiara Lubich sums this up when she prays:

‘So that we would have light you made yourself blind.

So that we would be united, you experienced separation from the Father.

So that we would possess wisdom, you became ignorance.

So that we would be clothed again in innocence, you became sin.

So that we would have hope, you almost despaired.

So that God would be with us, you experienced his distance.

So that heaven would be ours, you experienced hell’.

So as we begin Holy Week let us give thanks to the Lord who died that we might live eternally.