Why do we suffer?
Perhaps we will never know for sure but we can be quite sure that suffering is pretty much guaranteed for all of us at some point in our lives. Perhaps this suffering will make us call God into question. Perhaps it will weaken our faith. Perhaps, in searching for the answers, we will lose sight of all that is good and holy.
Knowing that this is an unfathomable part of the human condition, why do we refer to Our Lord's suffering as His Passion. Isn't passion something felt between lovers who aren't backward at coming forward to express their love?
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The words, "patience," "passive," and "passion" are all related and come from the same Latin word which means to suffer or to endure. If you are a patient in a hospital, then you are experiencing a passion. A passion is something that happens to you. As we enter Passiontide, veiling the images and the statues and crucifixes, we are demonstrating that in being a saint, we have to be willing to suffer because Love suffers. Perhaps that's why suffering has to exist so that we can learn to love truly and thus truly know God.
That's thoroughly unpalatable in this day and age when we have all kinds of medicines and distractions that can dull our pain but without actually addressing the cause. We see too many people addicted to painkillers of many forms. Some embrace the pain, seek to have it define their lives and thus become perpetual victims. There are those who simply cannot stop grieving for one whom they loved so much and, in so doing, settle down into a comfortable half-life of grief. If passion is something that happens to us, then what else can we do but let it happen? Isn't Jesus, in His suffering in the dreadful events of the coming week, a perpetual victim?
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Indeed Our Lord is the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world. It is by His eternal victimhood - His Eternal Passion - that we are reconciled eternally with God. What makes the Passion of Our Lord so unique is that He isn't just the victim: He is the priest as well. He makes the sacrifice happen. This doesn't mean that Our Lord is suicidal: it means that, by being in control of His passion, He can put it to the best use possible.
"CHRIST being come an High Priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands; that is to say, not of this building; neither by the blood of goats and calves; but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us."It is the priesthood of Christ that turns around the notion of the victim on its head. Instead of being passive in His suffering, Our Lord takes what He has been given and endures it actively. While His life undergoes pain and torture, He takes the fight into the spiritual realm and smashes the whole of the Devil's work to make life a misery and death an Eternal inevitability.
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And this is part of the nature of our Catholic priesthood. The Church, through the activity of all its members, offers up the suffering of the world through the exercise of Love. The Church, herself, is nourished through the obligations of priests who must participate in the active sacrifice of Christ in order to give each Christian the spiritual nourishment they need in order to keep the fight going.
Our challenge is not only to take up the Cross at Our Lord's command, but also to venerate it even as we would venerate the cross of Christ. We are to venerate the very cross to which we are nailed.
By accepting the suffering that we receive and carrying it with us, bearing one another's burdens as the Church, we can follow Christ into taking up the fight against Evil and, by enduring, win through God's grace.
We need not be passive in our passion. Christ isn't.
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