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.

Introducing Good Friday: passion and pasch and pesah

Today is Good Friday and we’re talking about the passion of Jesus.

     The word ‘passion’ ultimately comes from an ancient Latin root patior, which means ‘to suffer’. That word itself may itself come from the Greek pathos. By the Middle Ages, this Latin word had become passionem which itself fed into medieval French. By the late twelfth century, there was a new French word passion, which meant the sufferings of Christ. That’s why in most European languages, Easter is called something like ‘pasch’.

     Later, the sense of the word ‘passion’ extended to include the sufferings of the martyrs and thence suffering in general. By the early thirteenth century, the word was being used to mean ‘a strong emotion or desire’—think of the phrase, ‘passionate embrace’.

     In our thinking about the Passion, we will be using the word within the sense of Jesus’ suffering and death.

     The season of Passiontide started nearly a fortnight ago on Passion Sunday. It marked a change of liturgical gear: we stopped looking at renunciation and introspection, and start looking at the public events of the first Holy Week: Jesus enters Jerusalem, cleanses the Temple, teaches and heals. We think of the private or more intimate events: the Last Supper with its New Commandment. And we think of the passion itself: Gethsemane, the show trial; the crucifixion and suffering on a Cross, and death.

     The passion of Christ started the day before the Passover; and his crucifixion and death occurred on the day of Passover itself. It’s appropriate that Jesus died on the day of the Passover because the whole point of the Passover was atoning for sin. To the Jews of Jesus’ day, Passover was first a remembrance of Moses leading the chosen people from slavery in Egypt, but it soon led to a sense of a spiritual new start and spiritual release. It was about escaping the slavery of sin. On the day of Passover, the High Priest prayed that the sins of the people would transfer to a lamb without defect or blemish — ‘the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the people’.

     Jesus engineered the date of his own judicial murder to coincide with the Passover. He wanted to emphasise (in case we’d missed the point) that he was the new Lamb of God. He was taking our sins. He was enabling our forgiveness.

     As we come before the Cross this Good Friday, we first think of our sins that Jesus took and then (in our mind’s eye) we transfer them onto Jesus. Note how they transfer from us to him. Note that with our sins in his soul, we are made sinless, forgiven, enabled to start afresh. The lamb of God has taken our sins.

Oscar Romero

Oscar Arnulfo Romero was born into a family of ten in 1917, in El Salvador. His father was in charge of the local telegraph office. Sometimes the young Oscar helped his father to deliver telegrams. He learned to be a carpenter, making tables, chairs and doors. He was a quick learner and talented, but it surprised no one when the young Oscar said he wanted to be a priest.

     Oscar entered a local seminary at the early age of 13. Later, when his mother was ill and they needed money for medicine, Oscar left the seminary for three months to work in the gold mine in Potosí, where he earned about 4p a day. He returned to the seminary, then completed his studies in Rome. He had to wait a year to be ordained because he was younger than the required age. His father and brother died while he was in Rome.

     Oscar was ordained in 1942, and returned to South America to become a parish priest in Anamorós. He moved to San Miguel, where he remained for 20 years. He embraced a simple lifestyle and was soon famous for his sermons but also did a lot of parish work visiting prisons, organising catechism classes and working with others in the Church to provide help and food for the poor.

Oscar was appointed secretary of the Bishops’ Conference for El Salvador in 1966, and became an auxiliary bishop in 1970. In 1974, he was appointed Bishop to the poor, rural region of Santiago de María. He became Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977.

     Oscar Romero’s ministry was distinguished by a particular attention to the most poor and marginalised. In a famous sermon he asked, ‘When I help the poor, they call me a saint. Why then, when I ask why they are poor, do they call me a communist?’

     All this time, violence was increasing in El Salvador as the United States funded right-wing extremists to counter the ‘communists’ they feared south of their border. Soon, the El Salvador government were killing those who stood up for their rights. Death squads committed murder in the
cities while soldiers killed as they wished in the countryside.

     Oscar continued to speak out against social injustice, poverty, assassinations and torture. He demanded justice and recompense for all the atrocities committed by the army and police, and he set up projects and pastoral programmes to support the victims. He became a catalyst for radical moral prophecy both inside the Church and out. The press attacked him vehemently and called him a communist. He knew his life was in danger but he continued.

     The death threats multiplied and the atmosphere was charged. In a sermon on 23 March 1980, Oscar ordered the army to stop their killing. He said, ‘In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I beg you, I implore you, I order you, in the name of God, stop the repression!’ He was murdered the very next day while celebrating
Holy Communion in the chapel of the Hospital of Divine Providence. Many believe his murder was funded by the US Government.

     His funeral was celebrated on Palm Sunday. He was later declared a martyr of the Church, beatified in 2015 and canonised in 2018. 

For more information, please visit the following websites:

http://www.romerotrust.org.uk/who-was-romero
https://cafod.org.uk/News/International-news/Oscar-Romero-life-timeline

https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/commemorations/st-oscar-romero

The Book of Haggai

Introduction Haggai is the tenth of the twelve prophets in the Old Testament. These twelve prophets are sometimes called ‘the minor prophets’ because their writings are brief rather than a consequence of their importance. Haggai is the second shortest book in the Old Testament (only Obadiah is shorter), and is quoted in the New Testament once (Heb 12:26).

      The book consists of four prophecies delivered over a four-month period during the second year of the Persian King Darius I the Great (521 bc).

Author Haggai was a prophet (1:1). His name means ‘festal’, maybe suggesting he was born during one of the three great pilgrimage feasts. His ministry was short, lasting only four months. There is some evidence that Haggai witnessed the destruction of Solomon’s temple (2:3) but, if so, he must have been in his 70s when writing. Alternatively, a different Prophet took his master’s name for this book.

The date The book of Haggai was written 70 years after the Babylonian exile. The book was compiled soon after the events in the book occurred.

Background King Nebuchadnezzar deported the Jewish people to Babylon in 597 BC following his first invasion. A second major deportation occurred in 586 BC soon after the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed.

     Much later, in 538 BC, King Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon (2 Chron 36:21–24, Ezra 1:1–4). He adopted a policy of local identity and self-rule, and allowed the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem. Cyrus told them to rebuild their temple (Ezra 1:2–4; 6:3–5), so this period is known as the Second Temple period. The Second Temple was begun in 520 BC under King Darius of Persia and completed in 516 BC. The Books of Nehemiah and Ezra also describe the Restoration of Israel.

     The governor of Judah, Zerubbabel, and Joshua the Priest led about 50,000 Jews back to Jerusalem. They immediately started rebuilding the Temple, and completed the foundation within two years (Ezra 3:8–11). Their success upset their Samaritan neighbours, who feared the political and religious implications of a thriving Jewish state with a rebuilt Temple. The Samaritans opposed the project, and managed to halt work until about 520 BC, when Darius the Great became King of Persia (Ezra 4:1–5,24).

The Book of Haggai Haggai’s prophecy is a two-fold challenge to Israel after the Exile in Babylon: they must remain faithful to God and must rebuild the Temple (Ezra 5:1–2; 6:14).

     Haggai was sure that Babylon was able to conquer Israel because its people had broken their covenant with God. He therefore challenged the exiles to choose obedience and repent. He condemned injustice and idolatry, and reiterated the laws of ritual purity, telling the people to humble themselves and reject injustice and spiritual apathy. He reminded the would-be rebuilders of Jerusalem to give God their allegiance and build the Temple before they started constructing homes for themselves.

     Haggai assured the returning exiles that if they repented, God would fulfil His promise to establish a New Jerusalem and would defeat evil from among the nations. 

For more information, please read:

https://thebibleproject.com/explore/haggai/

https://www.biblica.com/resources/scholar-notes/niv-study-bible/intro-to-haggai

http://biblescripture.net/Haggai.html

https://www.bible-studys.org/Bible Books/Haggai/Book of
Haggai.html

https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Book-of-Haggai