5th Sunday of Lent
28 March 2004
Praised be Jesus Christ! Now and forever!
Dear Friends in Christ,
Passion. To our ears this word suggests deep emotion, usually romantic or erotic emotion. But the original English meaning of passion is suffering, from the Latin word passio. This is why we refer to the suffering of Christ as His Passion. All of the events from the Last Supper through the crucifixion, death, and burial of Christ are together described as His Passion, and after the Fifth Sunday of Lent the appointed Scripture readings and Mass prayers turn our attention to Christ’s Passion. For this reason, an ancient name for the final two weeks of Lent is Passiontide.
The sacred liturgy of Passiontide prepares us to confront our contribution to the sufferings of Christ. Next week on Passion Sunday (or Palm Sunday) and again on Good Friday, all who are present will join in reading together the account of Christ’s final hours from the Gospels. But on those days even the name of the reading is changed from Gospel (Good News) to Passion. Together we will shout: Crucify him! Crucify him! And only minutes before we will have shouted: Hosanna to the Son of David, the King of Israel! Such is the mystery of iniquity in human hearts. We do the evil we should not, and we do not do the good we should (cf. Romans 7:19). This is because all men have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and the remedy for this catastrophe is the Passion of the Lord Jesus Christ. As an outward sign of this solemn turn in the sacred liturgy, the statues in the church are veiled during Passiontide.
Important as Passiontide is for us, however, it is not the heart of the Christian life. That place is taken by the Paschal Mystery of the Lord Jesus, which culminates in the great Solemnity of the Resurrection. And this is made clear in the second of the two Prefaces of the Passion, the prayer sung by the priest before the celebration of the Eucharist with these words: "The days of His life-giving death and glorious Resurrection are approaching. This is the hour when He triumphed over Satan’s pride, the time when we celebrate the great event of our redemption. Through Christ the angels of heaven offer their prayer of adoration as they rejoice in Your presence forever. May our voices be one with theirs in their triumphant hymn of praise!"
Father Newman