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Salt Spring Island United Church
Rev. J. Clark Saunders
Palm Sunday, March 29, 2015
Mark 11:1-11
Passion Play
I wonder whether any of you have ever seen a Passion Play. Probably the most famous
one in the world is held (normally) every ten years at Oberammergau in Bavaria. In 1990 I took
a group on a tour of central Europe. Our trip included attending a performance of the famous
play. You’ll find spin-offs of this centuries-old tradition in other parts of the world. Perhaps the
best known example in North America would the Black Hills Passion Play in South Dakota.
A passion play re-enacts the events of the last hours of Jesus’ life – a dramatic period
known traditionally as his passion. When Johan Sebastian Bach set a couple of gospel accounts
of these events to music he called them “The St. Matthew Passion” and “The St. John Passion”.
It’s interesting that this series of events should be called Christ’s passion, because the word
“passion” has other uses and meanings. A dictionary may tell you that it can mean “strong
barely controllable emotion” or “strong enthusiasm” or “intense sexual love and desire”. When
I was a student minister in northwestern Ontario there was a spot not far from town that was
known locally as “the passion pit”. Not much doubt about what went on there. On a PBS
membership drive recently, after showing a love duet from “West Side Story”, the host said,
“Well, that was a passionate song, and here at PBS we’re passionate about public
broadcasting”. Common to all these both of these uses of “passion” is a sense of emotional
intensity.
When the word passion is applied to Jesus’ last hours it is often taken to refer to his
suffering, to the painful events that we’ll hear recounted in our Good Friday service this week.
Certainly that was a pretty intense time. Betrayed, abandoned, denied, mocked, scourged and
finally crucified, Jesus suffered both physically and mentally. In those hours some have
suggested that, outwardly at least, something changed in Jesus. From being in charge, from
being the teacher with the commanding presence, from being a powerful healer, from being
the spiritual leader who drew crowds of eager listeners, he became a victim. From being in
control he became helpless. From being active he became passive.
Ah, passive. I never noticed this before, but the word “passive” is related to the word
“passion”. It doesn’t make sense, though, does it? Passion is all about drama and intensity and
action. Being passive is about just sitting there and letting things happen to you. It reminds
me of how the word “suffer” once meant to let or allow or permit. That’s what it meant in a
line in a children’s hymn that old crocks like me may recall: “Suffer little children to come unto
me”.
But what about being passively passionate? Is that possible? Perhaps there is an ironic
truth about Jesus contained in that apparent contradiction. I remember many years ago
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reviewing a book for a newspaper – a book that provided an imaginative description of the last
brief period of Jesus’ life. What came through strongly for me was the impression that,
although in one sense the power drained out of Jesus the moment he was arrested in the
garden of Gethsemane, although from that point on others would decide what would happen
to him, there remained an inner strength and sense of purpose that kept him at the centre of
the drama. His apparent passivity disguised the fact that he was still passionate about life and
about his purpose in life. No, I don’t think Jesus was passive-aggressive. But he was passionate
in his apparent passivity.
If passion is a word that suggests intense feeling, Jesus had expressed passion in more
conventional ways in the days leading up to his death. There was intense feeling in his weeping
over Jerusalem and the destruction that would eventually befall it. There was passion in his
driving the money-changers out of the temple. But there was passion, too, in the suffering he
would endure when his appearance reminded his friends of a lamb being led to the slaughter.
But I’m not done with wordplay. The word that refers to Jesus’ suffering – passion – is
from the Latin. But the Greek word that comes to mind for me is pathos. In English pathos is a
word that, narrowly, once referred to suffering. More generally pathos refers to a quality that
we sometimes find in a play or a novel, a quality that arouses pity or sorrow. That’s what it
really means to be pathetic. Again, the common denominator is intense feeling or emotion.
From pathos we get words like “sympathy” (feeling with), “empathy” (feeling with someone to
the point of identifying with them), and of course “apathy” – the opposite of pathos: lack of
feeling, simply not caring.
When it comes to Jesus we are clearly seeing someone who was capable of deep feeling,
who identified with those who suffered, who cared passionately about justice and mercy,
whose com-passionate heart went out to people who seemed to him like sheep without a
shepherd. And we, as we watch the last scenes of his life, are certainly affected by the pathos
of it all because the undeserved suffering of someone with these qualities arouses a sense of
sorrow and pity in us. But I suppose what makes this really matter in an ultimate sense is not
just seeing Jesus as a remote historical figure or as a fictional character in an ancient drama, but
sensing that he reveals to us something of the nature of God.
There were among the ancient Greeks people who believed in an apathetic god, a God
who was too great, too distant, too far above and beyond the human scene to care about
people or to be touched by human suffering. But that is not the sort of God we see in the face
of Jesus. In him we see a God who is not removed from the life we know. In him we see a God
who is passionately involved in human life and in the life of the cosmos. In him we see a God
who feels, who cares, who suffers. In him we may even see a God of pathos who arouses a
sense of sorrow and pity in us. Yes. Have you ever felt sorry for God?
Jesus presents us with a concept of God that speaks powerfully to some of us. But the
idea of a God who feels is at odds with other concepts of the divine that are not easily
dismissed. The object of some spiritual paths is to overcome passion, to eliminate intense
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feeling from our lives. If I understand them rightly, I would say that there are some expressions
of Buddhism and even of Celtic Christianity that aim at that. When we have overcome ego – if
we ever get there -- when we can say with relief that all passion is spent, according to this view,
we may be able to feel that our spiritual goal has been achieved.
I find much in that approach that is appealing. But the problem is that if you get rid of
one thing it’s hard not to get rid of another. Anger, jealousy, competitiveness, aggressiveness,
overweaning ambition – these may called passions, and they may be ego-centred passions that
we could well do without and should try to let go of. But what about love and the pursuit of
justice and enthusiasm for your work and delight simply in being alive: are things like these not
passions, too? And would we really want a life that experiences none of these things?
I recall a novel by the English writer Olivia Manning in which a couple befriend an
impoverished, exiled Russian nobleman – Prince Yakimov, known to his friends as Yaki. Yaki is
an innocent. He is mild and laid-back, gives no thought for the morrow, has not an aggressive
bone in his body, sponges off his friends, trusts that he will be looked after. The wife of the
couple says to her husband, “If everyone were like Yaki, there would be no wars.” Her husband
replies, “If everyone were like Yaki there would be no anything.”
That’s our dilemma, isn’t it? Is it possible to dispense with the destructive passions in
life without finding that we have lost the creative ones as well? Is there a way that we can let
go of the ego-based passions and still lift up the passions that live for a larger purpose than our
own pleasure and personal fulfillment? Is there a spiritual fire that can burn in us with a passion
for greater things than these? And can the way of Jesus lead us on a spiritual path that will take
us to where the Holy One means us to be? Jesus, who whose apparent passivity at the end
concealed a passion that never died, whose apparent defeat concealed an undefeated
commitment to his calling, who valued something in life more highly than his own physical
survival – this Jesus may yet be our guide on that path.