ELOQUENT SILENCE OF CHRIST

Liturgical Reflection on Passion Sunday / Catholic Sunday Worship Guide
Palm Sunday opens the unfolding drama of the mystery of salvation that we Filipinos seem very much at home in. In today’s telenovela-crazed culture, we find sympathetic resonance in our hearts as we accompany the Lord in his journey of triumph on entering Jerusalem, only to move towards seeming defeat at Calvary. Ever attracted by the plight of the proverbial underdog, we see pathos, we feel pity, and we feel one with the suffering Christ even as we join the crowds in initially singing hosannas to the King of Kings!

Two seemingly conflicting images pierce our consciousness in today’s colorful but sedate liturgy: the triumphant entry of Jesus to Jerusalem, evoking Christ’s triumph as King, on the one hand, and the circumstances, conditions and the means Christ had to pass through to gain that eventual definitive victory – the Passion!

Palm Sunday is all about this seeming contradiction. Palm Sunday is all about apparent utter failure and defeat. It is all about a God condescending totally towards weak, sinful and frail humanity, becoming one with us in all things, but sin, even joining us for a while in savoring the triumph that awaits us all – the already and the not yet of our salvation-participation in the victory of God who will have the final word in the end. Palm Sunday is about us people who, one moment can sing hosannas, and at another, cry out lustily “crucify him!” Palm Sunday is about us sinful humanity, struggling between acceptance of a God who gives life, and the refusal of a God who indeed gives it while killing, while himself passing through the path of passion and death!

We do not easily understand it all! Come to think about it, if it were a mere telenovela, we would rally behind a pitiful figure of one subjected as Isaiah reports to us, to all sorts of ignominies, a suffering servant, alone and silent as we will see and hear in Mark’s account of the Passion, “who humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross” (Phil 2:8).

The response of Jesus to the shouts of triumphant hosannas was silence. It was the silence of a humble man who came, not astride a horse like mighty and powerful men would do, but on a lowly colt, whose owner was not even significant enough to be named for posterity. The response of Jesus to the untold suffering in his Passion was silence too. Mark reports that Jesus spoke only three times after his arrest. In the face of so many questions, Mark tells us: “But he was silent and answered nothing” (Mk 14:61). Before the High Priest, he declared himself the Messiah and the Son of Man. Before Pilate, he says he is King of the Jews. And on the cross, all he cried out was the lament of the suffering servant: Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani!

This is the impressive and eloquent silence of one who speaks, who represents, and who IS truth! This is the eloquence of one who would go through the most impressive silence and at the same time the most powerful statement from the God of the living and the dead – the silence of the tomb and the deafening roar of victory in the Resurrection! In this noise-filled world, one does well today to remember that genuine eloquence comes not from empty words, but from the power of liberating truth.

A LAW WRITTEN IN THE HEART

Lenten Reflection / Sunday Worship Guide

I would like to think that today’s liturgy may be understood as a call to reflect on three basic themes: renewal, authenticity, and interiority. The prophet Jeremiah speaks of the new covenant that will be forged between Yahweh and the house of Israel.That new covenant, we are told, is connected with Yahweh’s overriding mercy and forgiveness. The New Law, we are told further, is to be written not in stone, but is meant to be placed within us and written upon[our] hearts (Jer 31:33).

The letter to the Hebrews, along with the second part of John’s gospel passage, both allude unmistakably to the agony of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemani, and his subsequent suffering “in the flesh,” a very real and authentic journey of suffering and death that is at the root of the eternal salvation that awaits all believers.

The same Gospel passage from John gives us a glimpse of the interior struggle experienced by Jesus as he agonized in the garden, and the subsequent triumph of obedience to the Father’s will that ensued from that intense interior communing with the Father, when “he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death” (Heb 5:7).

We are all partakers now of this new covenant. We are sons and daughters of this renewal that has become a reality in the coming of Christ in our lives. But what was prophesied of old still has to unfold and become a reality in our individual and communal lives. We are all called to constant renewal, to constant purification, to continuing conversion. But for renewal to take place, there has to be a counterpart from our side of the covenant. We need to make the Law our own. We need to allow it to be written in our hearts. This is a call to authenticity and interiority. This is a call to act like Christ who “son though he was, learned obedience from what he suffered” (Heb 5:8). This is a call to be like Christ in his total acceptance of and resignation to his Father’s will: “But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name” (Jn 12:27).

How many times have we been told about our tendency as Filipinos to settle for mere externals, our penchant for form and image rather than substance? How many times have we been reminded about our propensity to be good debaters and glib talkers, but after all the sound and fury of our rhetoric, there is little in terms of action that we can show? The Philippines have produced among the best laws all over the world in terms of ecology and other relevant issues, but problems on those issues continue to plague us. Surely, there is something disturbing at the dawning realization we are having, that Asia’s only Christian nation, also happens to be among the most corrupt and graft-ridden. The last two national youth surveys confirm each other in this disturbing trend: the famed religiosity of the Filipino as we know it is fast disappearing. And in its place, we see a lot of media-mediated values like consumerism, hedonism and relativism, as shown for example by the tenuous appreciation for, if not downright refusal from an increasing number of Filipinos of the Church’s official moral teachings.Seventeen years after the Second Plenary Council of the Philippines, we can only beat our breast at the painful realization that evangelization has failed miserably in many senses! All this just shows that renewal, authenticity and interiority are things we cannot take lightly in our journey of faith as Christians and Catholics.