Passion

Palm Sunday, 2010

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

Passion: Someone can be passionate about a lover, or jazz, or ice cream, or baseball or justice.

Someone can play an instrument with passion, or sing, or run, or act, or write, or speak.

Someone can have com-passion for another person who is hurt or sad or treated unjustly.

The word actually comes from the Latin, passio, which means suffering.

The way we use the word today may reflect the emotion we have when we love something or someone so much it hurts.

So the stories in the Bible that tell about Jesus’ last week, his suffering, which Luke begins with the time Jesus wept over Jerusalem and ends with his death on the cross are called the Passion stories. Passion because of that Latin word reminding us of the deep suffering in the last days of Jesus’ human life, certainly. But also from the way we use the word now, for in Jesus God loved us so much that it hurt.

Jesus was passionate about feeding people, about healing people, about teaching, about forgiveness, about reconciling people with God and one another.

Jesus challenged and chastised the religious leaders of his day passionately for not listening to the prophets of the past and for putting burdens on people who needed to be freed. It was this passionate challenging of the powerful that got him in all this trouble to begin with.

Jesus lived his deep com-passion for those who suffered because they were sick, dying, outcast, condemned by society, strangers, poor, hungry, or misguided.

Jesus was not quiet in the face of injustice or ignorance; he passionately called people to repent and turn to God who stood ready, Jesus said, with great passion to forgive them.

Jesus’ passion for love and life raised up the dead Lazarus and a dying young girl.

Jesus’ passionate belief that good could indeed overcome evil, and that we needed to see that clearly, led him to face his own death without calling down the legions of angels the Tempter suggested he call.

Above all, God’s passionate love for us led God to resurrection and not the destruction human beings deserved for the death of Jesus. God loves us so much it hurt, and it hurt to the very depths of God’s being, but the hurt did not destroy the love.

That’s why we call this story the Passion. Listen, now, for the passions of Jesus did not end on that cross; God invites us to take them up, to understand how passionately we are loved, and to live boldly as that love today.