Passion and Action in Holy Week

-- By Tom Phillips

Homeless Jesus  -- Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Why do we call it the "Passion" of Jesus Christ?  The answer surprised me.

I always thought "passion" referred to the strong emotions Jesus felt during the last days of his life. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word originates in Christian theology, and its first meaning is simply “the suffering of pain.”  Its second definition is “the fact of being acted upon, the being passive.”   

In “The Road to Daybreak,” the late Catholic teacher Henri Nouwen wrote that the moment of Jesus’ arrest in Gethsemane is “a turning point from action to passion. After years of teaching, preaching, healing, and moving to wherever he wanted to go, Jesus is handed over to his enemies. Things are no longer done by him, but to him. He is flagellated, crowned with thorns, spat at, laughed at, stripped, and nailed naked to a cross… From the moment Jesus is handed over, his passion begins, and through this passion he fulfills his vocation.”    

In 1985, In the middle of a successful career as an author -- after teaching divinity students at Yale and Harvard -- in middle age Nouwen found a new home at the L'Arche community in Toronto, living with and learning from people with mental disabilities. At L'Arche, Nouwen realized that though most people think of their lives as what they do, what is done to them is really a much greater determinant.  In the case of poor, imprisoned, enslaved or disabled people, what is done to them is nearly all of life. Their only freedom is how they respond.    

Jesus was a poor Jew -- powerless politically and economically within the Roman Empire, which almost casually crucified him as a troublemaker.  The gospel stories agree that he offered no defense to the charges against him -- that he had called himself a King, thereby disrespecting Ceasar.  His response was not to dispute, but to declare the existence of a greater Kingdom -- one "not of this world."

In doing so he placed himself beyond the reach of Ceasar -- and his victory over earthly tyranny is part of what we celebrate in the Resurrection.  The African-American theologian Howard Thurman wrote that Jesus recognized "anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his destiny...  It is a man's reaction to things that determines their ability to exercise power over him."     

Thurman saw Jesus in the poor, disinherited masses of the world -- people who live with their "backs against the wall."  Jesus was a poor Jew, lacking status or even citizenship in the Roman Empire. Like Black people in America, the Jews of Palestine were a small minority in the midst of a dominant and controlling empire.  Their essential problem was survival -- not just in terms of life and limb, but as a culture, a civilization, and a religion.  

Jesus rejected both armed resistance and subservience to Rome, preaching instead a radical change in the inner attitude of people.  He told his disciples to be prepared for persecution, torture, and death -- and that none of this could defeat them.  

Fast forward to today, and Black Lives Matter, even lives that have ended in torture and death at the hands of the authorities.  After the resurrection, Jesus spoke to his disciple Peter about the kind of death he too would die:  “When you were young you put on your own belt and walked where you liked; but when you grow old you will stretch out your hands, and somebody else will put a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” (John 21:18)  

Thinking about our own lives in terms of passion rather than action puts them in a new light.  The test of character is not so much what we've been able to accomplish, but how we respond to what happens to us.  

-- Copyright 2013 by Tom Phillips