Good Friday 2: Compassion and sharing the passion: our sense of at-one-ment

We come before Jesus on the Cross. We look at his body while the political elite torture him to death … and we’re being invited to share his passion. To be sure, we’re neither being asked to die on a cross nor take on our souls the sins of others. But we are asked to identify with this man on a cross. As far as we’re able, we try to understand what he is going through for us, and to share something — however little.

     Our English word compassion has two parts: ‘com’ and ‘passion’. We know about the passion bit. The ‘com’ part means together: think of other words starting with ‘com’: complete, complementary. So to have compassion means quite literally being asked to share the passion of Jesus; to be at one with him.

     As we learn compassion, we realise that we’re being invited to ponder the passion as a means of achieving Christlikeness.

     As Jesus dies on the Cross, his soul is polluted with our filth and with the sins of all the in-penitent. His soul was once clean and pure (and therefore in perfect communion with God) but it’s now polluted and can no longer even sense God. That’s why Jesus cried aloud, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ In our com-passion, we analyse why our own souls struggle to sense the presence of God.

     The reason why we —all of us —struggle to sense God is because our sins form a smothering, suffocating blanket between us and him. We’re insulated. But if our sins were to be removed, forgiven and dealt with, then we could come into a better sense of who God is. We would become at-one with Him.

     One of the first people to translate the Bible into English was William Tyndale in the 1500s. He struggled to find the right word of expression to describe that process of removing the barrier and entering God’s presence more fully. He gave up looking for an existing word and, instead, made up a new word of his own. He spoke of ‘at-one-ment’ — Jesus on the Cross won for us the at-one-ment. And if you take those three syllables and force them together, we get atonement. The atonement on the Cross is a means of us getting closer to God.

     And in proportion that we repent, we are atoned for. And in proportion that we are atoned for, we can sense God. And in proportion that we can sense God we can identify with Him. And in proportion that we can identify with Him, we can truly talk of com-passion. The two are connected.

    Today as we watch Jesus being tortured to death, we are invited to have compassion — to share his passion.