The Twelfth Sunday of the Year, C

            Unlike a number of my friends and acquaintances, I have only seen the movie The Passion of the Christ once; for even though I defended the film against its detractors, I still found it hard to endure.  In the theatre, after it was over, as the lights went up, and people sat in a far more reverent silence than they do in churches nowadays, I too sat there, stunned.  These very words, from the first reading, words of Zechariah the prophet came to mind:  “…and they shall look on him whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him as one mourns for an only son, and they shall grieve over him as one grieves over a firstborn.” 

            I keep thinking back to the scene where one of the Roman guards – the one who, unlike the others, still seemed to have some decency about him, some sense of humanity, noted especially in the film in this rough Roman soldier’s awe-filled attention to Our Lady – the scene where this soldier takes up a lance and pierces the side of the now-dead Savior, and a flood of blood and water flowed out, showering him as he knelt down in wonder and felt on his very person the source of all the graces of the Sacramental life of the Church – the blood of Christ’s Eucharistic self-giving and the cleansing water of baptism.  And again, there is the prophet Zechariah foretelling these glorious events of our salvation:  “On that day there shall be open to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem a fountain to purify from sin and uncleanness.”

            Wouldn’t it be nice if one’s soul, the seat of one’s secret, interior life, the inner recesses of the personality we call the heart – wouldn’t it be nice if it could be cleansed so easily and leisurely as stepping into the hot shower after a day marked by moral failure?  No, that will not suffice, and it lacks all sense of reality anyway.  The cleansing fountain required is that described in the Gospels and so effectively recounted in the film, The Passion – the fountain that flowed out of the pierced side of Christ.   Our cleansing has required – by the sovereign design of God – what Our Lord speaks of in today’s Gospel:  “The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.”  

            So there it is, commemorated in the crucifix and truly re-presented at every Holy Sacrifice of the Mass (what is known as the Memorial of Christ’s death) – our cleansing and redemption involved the horror of all this, required this most well-known – and yet so often ignored – agony of agonies:  that, as our Lord Himself put it, “the Son of Man must suffer greatly….”  Or as the prophet Isaiah put it in those most memorable of prophetic descriptions, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted.  But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.” 

            Isn’t it interesting that St. Luke recounts how our Lord, once He had received the confession of faith as to who He really is, He immediately began to speak of His upcoming suffering?  “Who do the crowds say that I am?” Jesus asked His disciples.  Yes, the crowds… you know, the latest surveys, polls and opinions, the latest, faddish theory to explain away the wonderful, that which “everybody else is saying is the case.”  Then He turns to them, who would call themselves His followers, His disciples – or as they would very soon begin to be called – Christians, He asked them the pivotal question of our Faith, the pivotal question of all time:  “Who do you say that I am?” 

            Who do you say that I am?  Peter confessed this dogma that is at the very heart of our Faith, that this man standing before him, this one who was about to suffer as no man had ever suffered before (nor will again) – Peter, right there, proclaimed the thing that marks the Christian off as distinct from all others:  you are, said the Apostle, “the Christ of God.”  Everything about our faith hinges on this pronouncement.  Everything.  That Jesus Christ is in His Person God.  And what do the crowds say, they whose chatter all but drowns out the voice of the Church in this noisy world?  What do the crowds say?  “He was simply a good teacher,” say the non-committed, the ones who do not want to deal with the burden of taking Christ’s claims about Himself seriously.  “He’s just a man,” whines the musical Jesus Christ Superstar.  “He is one of the greatest of prophets,” chimes in the Muslim (who, nevertheless, sometimes give more honor to Christ than many Christians.  The story of Christ’s divinity – we are informed – was made up by the Emperor Constantine three hundred years after Christ’s time on earth, claims that pseudo-historical and pseudo-intellectual tabloid novel, The Da Vinci Code (a claim easily countered by simply opening up the Gospel of John and there seeing that His closest of followers, John, calls Jesus in no uncertain terms, God, and that a good two hundred years before Constantine).

“What would Jesus do?” people nowadays ask on their bumper-stickers and bracelets.  Who is He, I counter, that I should care what He would do? Well, people begin to squirm, “it doesn’t really matter what you believe about the identity of Christ as long as you follow His good example.”  Should I, I retort, should I then follow His good example all the way to the cross?  All the way to Golgotha?  All the way to where His side was pierced and blood and water flowed out so profusely, so abundantly, so graciously, so forgivingly? 

Ah, yes.  Now I see the difficulty.  For if He is who He says He is, then I must follow Him, I must deny myself whatever that would come between us, I must bear my obedience to Him, who is God, as a cross that like His, and because of His, liberates from sin, evil and the fear of death.  I must – following His words, “The Son of Man must suffer greatly,” – lose my life after the pattern of His obedience to God the Father as He offered Himself upon the cross for the redemption of the world.   I – we – must come to that fountain that purifies from sin and uncleanness, that fountain of life that flows into our world through the suffering humanity of Jesus and is effective for our salvation because it pours out from the very heart of God.