What do we think of when we think of passion and in particular when it has "the" in front of it? In some respects our understanding of passion and the Passion can become confused. In everyday usage when we consider passion we look at examples that are predicated on joy and a surfeit of or abundance of emotion. We are engaged in passionate sex or we engage our passions. Of course some of those joys and things we pursue are not desirable for the majority but more often the case we are looking at something that consumes are very being. However, when we capitalise it and put the in front of it, especially as Christians, we begin to think of Christ and the Sunday before Easter. A Sunday that traditionally calls for the reading of the Passion, which is the full story of Christ's sacrifice on the cross. At this point we ponder the connection between what we know as passion and what the connection is with Christ's agonising decisions and consequences? There does not seem for us to be a connection between the two.
Theologically speaking in terms of the Passion we are driven to think in terms of its original usage which comes to us from the Latin passionem or the nominative form passio which means to suffer, or endure an experience. It is not about the nature of the experience it is about our resilience and our ability to endure all things and in the case of Christ it is his ability to endure the decisions that lead to the cross. Our understanding of the word passion in everyday usage does not come from this source but from the Middle English rendition to desire with strong emotion, arising from the Greek pathos and being popularised in the 1600s through into the 1700s. In some respects we all have to endure our passions or our lack of ability to indulge in them, so there is perhaps a bit of a connection there. However, it is in the original that we must focus especially at this time of year when we approach the celebration of new life at Easter.
We have, if we have been true to our Lenten journey, endured our time of fast to prepare ourselves for this coming week and its culmination in the risen Christ we celebrate at Easter. In some respects Lent should be for us a mirror of the last week and be our own passion. However, we seldom take these things of Lent seriously for this to occur. Perhaps though if we were serious and passionate in rendering our Lenten season into our daily lives, so that we too can be resurrected to new life, we should consider the words I state at the start of the journey. These words I convey in various ways on Ash Wednesday "What we do in Lent should be a preparation for the rest of our lives. Thus, if we give up chocolate, then the trial of Lent makes the resisting chocolate for the rest of our lives easier to achieve". In this way we select what we give or take up over the Lenten period and allow it to become a passion, a trial, and our passion for new life. Christ in his passion gives up ongoing life for himself in preference of new life through the agony of the cross for us; can we not offer a little agony in ourselves for the betterment of our lives or are we too self absorbed to see that this may change the way we think?
I have been re-reading Frank Herbert's Dune series and something from there strikes me as appropriate in this moment as we seek for Christ's passion in our lives but are fearful of the change that that will bring. Herbert writes "We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. 'I already know the important things!' we say. Then Change comes and throws our old ideas away". In some ways this is what Christ does to and for us as Christ is the great Changer in our lives. Lent for us should be about change in our lives as we move towards the greatest change that Christ gave to us; New Life. Yet, we stumble at the first hurdle, we are unable to join Christ in his passion even if we have had the whole of Lent to prepare because we fear that change and what its consequences will be for our lives. This is our passion the one that Christ understood in Gethsemane, our fear of change that must and should be embraced. If we do not then we become belligerent in our fears like Putin and Trump. We become stagnated without true hope for the future like many modern politicians who live solely in the past. Today, we face Christ Passion in the reading of the Gospel but can we face our own Passion and follow Christ into newness of life?
