IN ISAIAH, Christ has spoken in the person of the Suffering Servant, in a foreshadowing of the Passion. Neither retaliating nor resisting, he received from God strength to know that his vindicator was near. That happened centuries before the earthly life of Jesus. Even in Jesus’s own time it was read as “scripture”.
Like other parts of the Bible, it is always speaking of both the past and God’s eternal “now”. Isaiah for ever “fore-tells” our Lord, whose prophesied coming is in our past; whose earthly existence is likewise past for us, and yet whose living being still speaks, suffers, and is vindicated, in every generation. Through scripture, we learn that he will endure in all the years yet to come (Hebrews 13.8).
When we enter on the liturgy of Palm Sunday, we know what we are letting ourselves in for. We are going to encounter shame, violence, and injustice; and rejection. It could be claimed that rejection is the cruellest blow of all. Whether it is family (“You’re no child of mine!”), institutions (“The number of applications was very high”), or relationships (“I like you as a friend”), it can eat away at our self-worth; a worm in the bud.
How this could happen, how there can be meaning in the suffering, is a question that we choose to ask ourselves each Palm Sunday. No one is forcing us to walk with Jesus the path to Calvary. No one forced him, either, but he knew the path that he had to tread, as do we.
To say that God gives us suffering to teach us something is no answer at all to rank injustice or unbearable pain. But if there were absolutely nothing to learn from the Passion (from the Latin word for “suffer”), Palm Sunday would be mere spiritual masochism. The NT reading and the Gospel of Mark both offer answers to this problem, but to understand them clearly it helps to have a bit of context.
Understanding the Passion is a lifetime’s work, not a column’s. But even one small point can help. Christianity has accustomed us to seeing vulnerability as something that deserves compassion (meaning “suffering with someone”). It has not always been so. The Romans put no value on weakness; theirs was a warrior élite culture driven by ambition, competition, and prestige. The reaction of the soldiers to Jesus reflects that. He attracts their ridicule and contempt. Pilate’s reaction is more that of a bureaucrat (or J. K. Rowling’s Giants): let’s kill him, “jus’ to simplify things”.
In the Passion, Jesus confronts opposition on two levels. Only one is evident on the surface: the level of ordinary human interaction. The other, cosmic, level is articulated by Paul, in Ephesians 6.12 and elsewhere, but here it is only a shadowy presence. Thus the responsibilities for wrongdoing, on every level, are located where they truly belong — with the human beings who commit them. Some are famous, like Judas, Pilate, and (temporarily) Peter; others are nameless, like the chief priests, council, false witnesses, soldiers, crucified prisoners, and the crowd.
One way of absorbing the Palm Sunday Gospel is to imagine it through a character in the story. To experience this most fully, we have to include imagining inflicting suffering as well as enduring it. What drives human acts of vanity, cowardice, or judgementalism, is a difficult question. Some people find it hard to admit their sins — their acts of vanity, cowardice, or judgementalism — even as others cannot accept their own good qualities and intentions; we find both kinds of denial among the people in the Passion.
Mark’s is the simplest of the four Passion Gospels. Like the other three, it comes at the end of years of teaching and healing for Jesus. Thus it represents the summit of a lifetime’s formation for him, and the pivot point of human history for us. If we want to merge the human passion with the cosmic Passion, we don’t have to reinvent the theological wheel. All that’s required is to turn to Philippians 2. There, the Word is both Jesus and Christ; in the form of God and in human form, humanly humbled and cosmically graced with the name that is above every name. Here are words that show us how to move from passion to compassion — through fear cast out by love, and pain soon to dissolve in rejoicing.