Relevance of Christ’s passion today

ESPECIALLY during these days of Holy Week, it would be

very good if we can pause and meditate more deeply on the passion and

death of Christ. To be sure, it will be an exercise that will be most

profitable to us. In fact, it is indispensable.

            Why? Simply because the passion and death of Christ

contains the ultimate reason and the way we can properly handle our

current human condition, hounded as it is by weaknesses and

temptations and wounded by sin, and convert that condition into our

means of salvation.

            The big problem we have to overcome with regard to this

matter is the ignorance, indifference, if not the total unbelief, many

of us have toward the importance, indispensability and relevance of

Christ’s passion in our life.

            It is in Christ’s passion that we are shown how our

attitude and reaction should be when we are made inevitably to suffer

in any form. Christ shows us how to suffer and eventually die, and

turn these negative things into the gateway to our salvation, to our

definitive eternal life with God, from whom we came and to whom we

belong.

            Let’s remember that we are meant to share the very life of

God, since he wants us to be his image and likeness, children of his.

We need to level up in our understanding of our human dignity and

extricate ourselves from the grip of merely worldly goals, no matter

how exciting and profitable they are. We are not meant for merely

earthly life. We are simply journeying here toward our definitive

home, heaven.

            It would be good if we can do certain exercises so that

the spirit behind Christ’s passion and death on the cross can inspire

us and become also our own. Perhaps, we can do the Via Crucis, spend

time before the image of crucified Christ or the ‘Santo Entierro,’

view films and dramatizations of Christ’s passion and death, etc.

            We need to understand that accepting all the sufferings in

this life the way Christ accepted all the indignities, mockeries and

insults and finally death on the cross, is the way to our salvation,

not only ours personally, but of all mankind collectively.

            It is when we have this spirit when we can truly say that

we are effectively identifying ourselves with Christ who is not only

the pattern of our humanity but also the savior of our damaged

humanity. We are supposed to be ‘alter Christus,’ another Christ.

            Our meditations of the passion and death of Christ should

result one way or another in our willingness to suffer. Can we say,

for example, that we are now more ready to accept all kinds of

humiliations and bodily suffering, instead of complaining and wanting

to make revenge?

            We should come out with some concrete steps and strategies

to develop the same attitude and reaction Christ had when he went

through his passion and death. Can we say that we are getting more

magnanimous, approaching the supreme magnanimity of Christ? Or are we

still wallowing in some form of victim complex when we suffer?

            To be sure, this willingness to suffer is never a form of

foolishness, though in the eyes of the world it may look that way. It

is rather a way of making ourselves more and more like Christ,

assuming his redemptive mentality and purpose in life.

            We need to reassure ourselves regarding this point. To

suffer with Christ is the way to our true joy, to our salvation and

total fulfilment as man and a child of God. We need to fight the many

forms of worldly but false ideals of what true human happiness and

perfection is. Sad to say, there are many of them and they have

charmed and seduced so many people.

            We need to do something about this. And one way is to

start by meditating on the passion and death of Christ these days.