A fool for Christ’s sake

The Greatest Week of the whole year is called “Holy” because during these days we’re called, indeed challenged to celebrate, to focus intensely on God’s condescension to the level of our lowly condition of abject poverty. This poverty consists particularly in an incapacity to imagine, leave alone comprehend, the extreme lengths to which divine mercy goes in reaching out to us to move our hearts, which have become dulled, listless and insensitive because inured by so much violence. Boredom has become a symptom of the raging disease of indifference affecting the heart of modern society, in which there is sadly all too often, as T.S. Eliot put it:

                                  Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration” (Four Quartets: Burnt Norton III).

If anything could shake us out of our accustomed religious nonchalance it must be the shock, as it were, that we should receive during these days of Holy Week as we perform and contemplatively enter into the realism of the scriptural texts presented in the liturgy. Here what is strikingly evident with a great poignancy is particularly the sublime condescension of divine mercy. This divine condescension is utterly different, wholly other than our manner of regarding the situation of suffering in the world, a manner that so often takes on a patronising outlook or leaves us frustrated about the impossibility of doing anything to change or alleviate the enormity of problems reported by the Media. This otherness of divine mercy is the tender love revealed by the sheer meekness of Jesus in complying faithfully to God’s design as his obedient Son. This is strikingly expressed in the second reading of the Mass of Palm Sunday taken from what was perhaps an early Christian hymn adapted by St Paul about the mystery of Christ’s kenosis, that is, descent in his self-effacing humility of love (cf. Phil 2:6-11).

The theme of this mystery is beautifully expressed in the hymn My song is love unknown, written by Samuel Crossman in 1664:

No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King!
Never was grief like Thine.
This is my Friend,
in Whose sweet praise
I all my days
could gladly spend.

Yet how is it possible, unless our hearts remain so cold and unmoved – “hard-hearted” as Jesus reproved people of his time – to remain unfeeling regarding the pathos evoked by Christ’s passionate dedication of self in the face of such hostility not merely to his message but especially toward his person, whose entire life was given in deeds of kindness and care towards lightening the burden and yoke of human misery?

The purpose of the liturgy especially of these days of Holy Week is to stir and disturb both our minds and emotions – our whole selves - to compunction and conversion. This is fostered through the dramatic realism of everything being celebrated in the proclamation of the word involving participation of the congregation’s response in sacred songs and likewise processions, such as that of Palm Sunday or as that of moving to kiss the Cross on Good Friday. A sense of active participation in the moving events of this sacred time was expressed in medieval times through certain para-liturgical performances of the ‘mystery plays’ of the Passion and the processions of penitents, the latter still carried out in Latin Catholic countries where various local cultural features are integrally incorporated. While these seem to a modern, Anglo-Saxon rationalistic mentality and to non-believers somewhat exaggerated in their too theatrical and artificial aspects, nevertheless, as Richard Viladesau, a theologian of art, states:

“Pathos remains an intrinsic element in the human situation. Catholic Baroque art was able to embrace pathos because of its confidence in the meaning of Christ’s cross as the prelude to an ultimate triumph of God’s love. In this sense, if we are to take it seriously, it speaks to us about the meaning of pathos and challenges us to ask what basis we have for a response.” (The Pathos of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology of the Arts, p.121.)

Whatever means are employed to induce in us a genuine pathos for the Saviour enables us to perceive how to realise the mystery of restoration and reconciliation that he brought about by his intense ardour of love for humankind. Contemplation of artworks of the Passion likewise can cultivate a sense of the identity between the world’s vast condition of misery and Christ, who entered fully into it. Thus, in contemplating the many paintings of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, such as Giotto’s fresco depicted above, we are drawn to share the sentiments of the crowded scene of people, to greet him with our Hosannas. Our perception of artistic representations of this event must be not merely motivated by curiosity, like those two figures presented as climbing into trees to behold the spectacle of his passing. But, rather, these representations invite and may encourage a truly deeper participation in the great work of divine redemption really being carried out in our midst sacramentally. Nevertheless, it is also crucial for us to recognise in honest humility that our devotional sentiments are not far from the fickleness of the motley crowd. As Crossman put it in the hymn mentioned above:

Sometimes they strew His way,
And His sweet praises sing;
Resounding all the day
Hosannas to their King:
Then “Crucify!”
is all their breath,
And for His death
they thirst and cry.

     A sense of humble honesty about our waywardness would take us further into the depths the mystery we are celebrating. G.K. Chesterton would seem to point to this as the secret realised by that dumb donkey, a simple creature which, perhaps symbolising anyone who in contrasting reversal of worldly values is not ashamed to become a fool for Christ’s sake (cf. 1 Cor 4:10), had the high privilege of bearing the full weight of the Saviour-Lord’s burden of love:

Fools! For I also had my hour;

One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

And palms before my feet.

Image above: Palm Sunday by Giotto, Scrovegni Chapel Padua