 | Passionate Christianity: A journey to the cross
Cally Hammond
978-0-281-05882-2, 9780281058822 SPCK, £6.99 2007CBOL: £6.50 including UK first class delivery In stock for next day delivery
Fear, resentment, humiliation, cruelty, love and faith: these are some of the raw emotions exposed in the Gospel stories of Christ's Passion."Passionate Christianity" explores key moments in the Passion as experienced by those caught up in the world-changing events of the last hours of Jesus' life, and relates them to our lives and faith today.Cally Hammond invites you to experience afresh the events of the Passion - the agony in the garden of Gethsemane, the scourging of Jesus, the crowning with thorns, the carrying of the cross and the crucifixion. In doing this, she leads you to discover new depths of meaning in these events, develop a deeper commitment to your faith, and to meet the challenges of life with passionate Christianity.
Extract: Reason can only take us so far The story of Gethsemane (Mark 14.32-42) is painful to read. In it, we see Jesus in a moment of mental anguish, encountering his fears.
Almost everyone who reads this passage, even for the first time, knows that beyond it lies the crucifixion. So there is a gap between the viewpoint of the characters in the story and those who read it — a gap that is called dramatic irony.
Inside the story, the characters do not know what the future holds, but we, the readers, know all too well. One of the funny things about such stories is that this does not make the end boring, but quite the reverse — the tension is all the greater.
Gethsemane, the first of the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary, is the beginning of the way of sorrows. Every year, the story is repeated, and every year, the torment of Gethsemane speaks to us again.
The most difficult question children always asked me when I was a parish priest was “Why did Jesus have to die?”
The way that this question is phrased shows that one of Christianity’s first lessons has been absorbed — that, in some sense, Jesus’s death was inevitable. The words “have to die” could suggest to us that Jesus was fated or destined to die. This is the wrong way to understand it. Jesus did not have to die in the sense that his death was predestined. God did not decide that this was how everything was going to work out, and programme Jesus like a robot to do what God wanted. Jesus was not made to die, nor forced to die. But it came to pass that his being killed was inevitable. It certainly seemed so to him.The children’s question goes directly to the very heart of the Passion. Yet no answer that I gave could ever meet their need to understand, because the Passion of Jesus is not really something we can finally make sense of verbally. The children learned the meaning through attending to the story, and so should we. Yet the question also carries with it another: “What does Jesus’s death mean for us?” Everyone who thinks about Christian faith must face these questions, and, if they do not find clear and simple answers, must at least find a way to live with their inability to put deep spiritual convictions into words.
After all, Jesus the Word became flesh, a human being, precisely because God knows that we understand as much through relationships and personal encounters as we do through intellectual argument.
So one reason for exploring the Passion is to make sense of it to ourselves; the other is so that we can make better sense of it to others. This journey can be a sobering one; it may be painful as well, but it is truly a way of entering into the Passion, and so uniting ourselves with Christ.I think reason, logic, science, and study can help us only so far. There comes a point at which reason and understanding have to merge into something else, as we enter in prayer, in imagination, and in meditation into the reality of the Passion. The journey to the cross begins with Jesus at the point where he makes a terrible, terrifying decision: in the garden of Gethsemane. Distress and anguish overwhelmed him, and he said to the disciples, “My heart is ready to break with grief. Stop here, and stay awake with me’” (Matthew 26.37-38, Revised English Bible). Death was in the air that night. Jesus saw it coming. So did those who loved and followed him. And he also saw that he had a choice. In his prayer in the garden, he was tormented by the possibility that things could have been otherwise. |
