The Passion of Jesus Christ.
As we approach the holiest week in the Christian calendar, the week of the Lord’s passion, I am thinking a lot about time. I am thinking about what I do and do not want to do with the time that I have, what is both used and wasted, but also how much of my time seems imaginary, fanciful, fictitious. As time passes, I still remember much that is gone. But my memory can never possess the expansiveness, texture, and color of the moment that is right in front of me.
As Christians we are told that for God all of time is present in a single eternal now. God looks upon each second and sees it with a vividness and truth than no human has even been fortunate enough to know, even in the so-called “peak” experiences of their lives. Which leads me to think about God’s time, the time that he lived here on earth, and how each moment of that life is endlessly alive in him.
The apostle Paul told the Christians of Ancient Rome that “Christ having died once, died to sin for all, and that the life he now lives, he lives to God” (Rom 6:10). Joining all of these thoughts together in my mind, my heart is bent by their abyss. As if with him, through the retinas of Jesus’ deep brown eyes, I am one with the divine mind looking perfectly onto moments that bear him aloft from the height of that Roman cross always, forever.
But there is only so far that I can go. The signal in my brain stops. Horror and grace hold contemplation back. The price that God paid for my redemption is too great for the fragility of my soul.
Imprisoned within the divine being, the evil of that time lives surrounded and trapped by a vast ocean of love, both infinite and complete. Ablaze, this ocean is a fire of uncreated light too perfect to behold. “The light laid siege of the darkness and the darkness did not conquer it” (John 1:5).
Passion week is the Church’s remembrance of the agony of its Lord, retelling the story of a life that once in a moment of human time overcame the world. We Christians strain our minds to relive those moments this week together with Jesus in all of the dust, heat, and turmoil we can richly imagine. It is never however enough, nor can it or should it ever be.
The warm Mediterranean air which swept that day across the hill called ‘skull’ even now gently bathes his face. An audience of clouds like porters having swept the sun’s shadows from the ground stand in the darkness aloof. His hour in perpetuity comes as he watches them gaze on him whom they have pierced. Surely it is only for us that he said, “It is finished” (John 19:30).
“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth will drag every person to myself” (John 12.32).
