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Words have lives, they
evolve. Such is the word, passion. It comes from the Latin passio meaning
to bear and endure. It is the origin of the word patient. Later in
its life, passion came to mean suffering. Further on,
the passion would describe erotic love and soon after any
ardent emotion or enthusiasm. How fitting then that we use the word passion with
all of its nuances and resonance to describe the suffering and death of Jesus
our Lord. For all that Jesus endures
because of his tender love for us is most truly his passion. “For the joy that lay before him, Jesus
endured the cross despising its shame.” Patiently, passionately, most ardently
Jesus gives himself away to us, for us. And when he feels things, he’s moved to
his very guts. Jesus is thus the
perfect enfleshment of this passion of God’s self-forgetful love for us. He has come to establish an intimacy
with us that signals our access to everything he has received from his Father,
even the glory that is his as Beloved Son.* Jesus’ passion is to draw us into
God. Today we celebrate the wonder of this divine passion for us perfectly
enfleshed in his broken Heart.
In the First Reading
Ezekiel the prophet has given us God’s self-description as loving shepherd,
this, in turn, becomes a template for Jesus’ own understanding of his vocation
as Beloved Son of the Father. Jesus is the good shepherd who will relentlessly
search, run after and rescue all who are lost, even just one lost sheep. We
might say, “Why bother? Why put the other ninety-nine at risk?” But this is who
God is. And Paul assures us that this passionate desire of God in Christ for us
is expressed in a great gush of graced love lavished upon us through God’s own
Spirit – “poured into our hearts.” When we go to prayer, when we wake and walk
and work and eat and breathe our day, God is drawing us, ceaselessly, searching
and coming after us.
This desperation of a God
in love, whose burning desire for us is unquenchable and unending, is in
evidence constantly in the gospels. Jesus’ heart is constantly magnetized by
desperation. A sobbing widow following the bier of her dead son knows she’s now
without resource, destined now for a life of leftovers and condescension. I
want to see, cries Bartimaeus. My son is at home dying, my dearest young slave,
my daughter is possessed. Do something, I beg you. I’ve been to every doctor,
tried every cure. But now, if only I touch his tassel. They have no wine, it’s
only the first day of the celebration, and everything will be lost. Lord, wake
up we’re going to drown, don’t you care. Lord, the one you love has died. And
so best of all, last of all this dead-end that was always looming ahead will be
destroyed by his passion and death on the cross. Because Jesus could not bear
to have us live in fear of this final terror. He tramples down death by death
because he is all Life. If only we knew the gift of God. If only understood his
passion for us. He has given himself away totally, lavishly, foolishly,
unreasonably.*
He cannot make us love him,
still, he boldly exposes his broken Heart for us, longing as any man would for
a loving response. He is not embarrassed by the vulnerability and desperation
he reveals, he puts his Heart right out there. Perhaps all the tenderness and
divine vulnerability are too much, perhaps even tasteless or off-putting. It is
after all, way beyond a certain manly coolness and detachment. But Jesus loves
us to folly, and he is not about to be evasive or diplomatic about it. How
could he be? He’s on fire with it. And his love for us is not some
disembodied theological premise or a refined, pious sentiment but a deeply
felt, very raw, and real emotion. Jesus feels things deeply in his gut.
Today’s solemnity is all
about this Divine Exposure. All falsehood, pretense, and sin; all the pain
and suffering he endured and we endure, all the love we long for but dare not
express, there too in his wounded Heart we see all the sorrow and suffering in
Ukraine and everywhere else - it’s all right there in that Heart - exposed
for all to see, in its bleeding, gut-wrenching beauty, the vulnerability of
God. He shows us who he is, who God is, and who we are meant to be. The
invitation is to go and do likewise – to love until it hurts, though often we
might like to think there is an easier way. In the wounded Heart of Jesus, we
see our reality and our sublime destiny, as individuals, as Church, as monastic
community.
If like Jesus we dare
to open our wounded hands and hearts to one another, with nothing to hide - at
ease with the awkwardness and embarrassment of loving, at home with our
vulnerability the kingdom can happen. At best two desperations will meet.
Jesus’ desperate passion to share God’s love and our desperate need for the
healing, grace, and love that only Father, Son, and Spirit can bestow. We cry
out in a confident appeal that is always the echo of God’s first desperate
longing for us.
In the humility of his
passion for us, Jesus has come to give himself away. As we gather together
around this Table to consume Christ’s wounded body and drink the blood of God
poured out for us, we find ourselves once again overpowered by the mystery
of his love, by the unquestionable reality of the mystery of a God who is
love,* a God who even now desperately desires to offer us his precious
body and blood even his wounded heart.
References: 1. Sandra Schneiders. 2 Robert Barron. 3. Adapted from
Karl Rahner. A homily by one of the monks.