Passion Sunday, Year C
First Reading: Is 50:4-7
Second Reading: Phil 2:6-11
Gospel Reading: Lk 22:14-23:56

This Sunday, “the Church’s liturgy solemnly opens Holy Week,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

It begins with “the long Gospel,” which recounts Jesus’ Last Supper and his agony, betrayal, arrest, trial, torture, and death by crucifixion.

It was “a death he freely accepted,” the Church says. “I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting,” Isaiah prophesied. Jesus “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,” St. Paul said; he “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

All this was for us. “He was pierced for our offences, crushed for our sins,” Isaiah says.

Jesus assumed our sins at his incarnation, when he told his father, “I have come to do your will.” He accepted “his mission as God’s suffering servant” when he was baptized, letting himself “be numbered among sinners,” becoming “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”

However, it was at the Last Supper, when he gave himself to us as food and drink, that God “made him who did not know sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the very holiness of God.” In that union, he became infected with our sin.

Only days before, he had stood at Lazarus’ tomb and addressed his father with “filial boldness,” the Catechism says: “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I know that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd.”

Now, however, he kneels in the garden, in anguish so great that his sweat falls to the ground like drops of blood, and begs, “Father, if it is your will, take this cup from me.” Now he seems to be no longer sure of his father’s will; he seems to be submitting to it, rather than doing it.

He has become sin, and he begins to suffer the consequences. The most agonizing is separation from his father, culminating in his cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

All this was for us. As we listen, we are horror-struck at the suffering our sins caused him; we are filled with pity as he is mocked by the soldiers, falls under the cross, meets his mother, and groans, “I thirst.”

We long to respond to his heartbreaking reproach: “Could you not keep watch with me for one hour?” We want to accompany him to the cross instead of running away, to wipe his face as tradition says St. Veronica did.

What can we do?

First, we can stop sinning. We were “the authors and the ministers” of all his sufferings, says the Catechism; we bear “the gravest responsibility” for his torments; we crucify him still when we delight in our vices and sins.

Second, we can accompany him by participating in the Mass, the sacramental re-presentation of Calvary. On the cross, Christ, as priest, offered himself, as victim, to God the Father, in the one perfect sacrifice offered for all people and all time. On the altar, his priests, acting in his person, offer him, under the appearances of bread and wine, to God the Father, in the very same one perfect sacrifice.

At Mass, we become contemporaries of Christ’s passion: his passion is present for us and we are present at his passion. When we hear Were You There When They Crucified My Lord? we can answer “Yes!”

This re-presentation is possible through the two sacraments Jesus instituted on Holy Thursday: the Holy Eucharist – when he said, “This is my body ... this is my blood” – and Holy Orders, when he said, “Do this in remembrance of me.”

If we neglect Mass, we neglect Christ and what he did for us.

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and Sessions 1-27 in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 28, “Holy Week,” will be available in YouTube form starting April 10.