The Passion of Christ announces the triumph of God’s Mercy

Christ’s Passion reveals the foundation of the human wound, and shows forth the strength of God’s love. We need to look to the Easter season to deepen our relationship with the Lord Jesus, meditating on the glory of his Cross so as to receive the grace that the Risen One offers us through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Three spirits show themselves during the Lord’s Passion.

The spirit of the world is evidenced at every turn. The disciples could not keep watch with him while he was in the garden of his agony. This is called spiritual laziness. Peter denies to have known the man taken prisoner. This is called spiritual cowardice, and being dominated by fear. Pontius Pilate does not have the fortitude to insist that Jesus has not committed any crime. Pontius Pilate’s personal blunder, because it was an official blunder of the government, unleashed immense consequences. Also, what Pontius Pilate did was an act of cowardice, the type that results from deciding that it is not worthwhile to defend an unfortunate and innocent human being.

 

Caravaggio, Peter's Denial of Christ

All these examples indicate that human weakness truly constitutes a spirit of frailty, unable to remain firm in the face of injustice or cruelty. Placed in those circumstances, none of us could presume to have acted differently. The Son of God knows very well of what we are made, and in full freedom he exposed himself to this awful parade of selfishness in order to open our eyes to the gravity of the problem that afflicts us.

But there is more. An evil spirit operates within this theater where the spirit of the world prevails. What the Malignant One does is agitate and manipulate human weakness to fulfill his own purposes. If the spirit of the world seeks its own likes and preferences without taking into account the greater demands of justice and mercy, the evil spirit tries to guide these conjoined weaknesses to fulfill its ultimate desire. And there is no room for doubt, its principal desire is to destroy human life; Evil is a spirit of destruction.  And this we see it clearly in the cruelty of the soldiers that whipped Jesus, and in how Herod and Pilate, with their own agendas, conspired to get rid of the “little problem” of the Nazarene. Each had their objectives, but the Spirit of Evil animated them to obtain the final result: Jesus’s death. The Evil One took as an extra prize the traitor’s despair. In fact, I am convinced that the Malignant One does not care so much about our sins and weaknesses in themselves, but only insofar as they take us down a path to abandon hope in the mercy and forgiveness of God.

 

Antonio Ciseri, Ecce Homo

We cannot take comfort in thinking these cruelties ended in ancient times.  We cannot think that because of cultural progress, human weakness in the face of injustice no longer causes much harm, or that the Evil One has little space in this world within which to drag himself around causing destruction. There are “friends” of the forsaken today, who easily forget about them whenever polite conversation among the powerful requires it. And there is no shortage of Pilates today, quite capable of allowing the innocent to suffer, like the unborn and immigrant children, to fulfill the wishes of those who sell human beings to consolidate profit or power. The enemy’s game is to spread about a spirit of weakness and resignation in the face of the evil that effectively denigrates and destroys human life.

For all the more reason, then, we should meditate on the Passion to understand how God wants to insinuate the victory of his love and his mercy in the life of everyone and in the whole world. The Spirit of God acts in the Passion of the Lord, foremost through the solidarity between God and the human race, and then, with expressions of solidarity amongst people themselves. The spirit of the world and of the Evil One have been defeated because Jesus Christ is the Son of God who united his own person with a human nature. He became man. God is always “with the human being” because the Incarnation is irrevocable. And in his Passion, he expresses totally this solidarity with us; He dies. And furthermore, he died unjustly and with great cruelty-- the experience of many, and not just the worst among us.

 

El Greco, Pieta

The effective extension of the grace of the Incarnation begins to show itself in Peter’s repentance, and in Cyrene’s move to help Jesus carry the Cross. It is also shows itself in the penitent thief crying out to Jesus that he remember him; and in the confession of the Roman soldier, who admitted that Jesus was an innocent man; and in Nicodemus, who made available to the disciples the new tomb that would receive the body of the Crucified. These signs of solidarity with Jesus Christ our Lord, signs of compassion and human strength, indicate -- in the obscurity of the Passion – whence shall come the light of the Resurrection. In this sense, the triumph of the mercy that will manifest itself in the Resurrection of the Lord and in the gift of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, is already present during the Passion of the Lord.

 

The Risen One will give us the fullness of his Spirit in courage and wisdom, his Holy Spirit, precisely to renew us from within with this love in solidarity between God and us, and between ourselves with one another. We need this Spirit to resist the spirit of laziness and resignation in the face of evil, and to be able to announce clearly that God’s victory, poured into our hearts, is the only thing that can save the human race.

 

Let us, then, dedicate the Easter season to the acts of mercy, because they are signs of the victory of Christ. We have not received a spirit of weakness or a spiritual frailty, much less a spirit of resignation in the face of human suffering. We have received a spirit of strength and wisdom, to attend without fear to the Christ that suffers today in our midst. He is risen; let us be raised up with Him.

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