Created to share infinite love with God

To hear the Passion read today, on Palm Sunday, and again on Good Friday, is to be carried into the heart of the unfathomable mystery of our Creator’s unbounded love for the whole of his creation, from the infinitesimal particles that constitute the whole of material reality to the vast infinity of time and space that stretches outwards, before and beyond us; and to each one of us, minute in scale, momentary in duration, but made in his image and likeness: “This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.” (Hopkins).

We have been created to share infinite love and friendship with God, who “so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life.” Crux stat, dum volvitur orbis: the Cross stands, while the world revolves. It is the “still point of the turning world” (Eliot), both the greatest good – Goodness Itself accepted to endure the cross as a consequence of becoming human so as to prove his love for us - and the greatest evil – we did him, our hope and our salvation, to death.

Jesus’s fate resulted from his being fully human in the violent, inhumane world that we have created. What happened to him was “the dramatic manifestation of the sort of world we have made.” (McCabe) But on the Cross, he bore all our faults and shouldered all our sins in himself: his death absorbed the worst evil that we have or will ever do. The Cross reassures us that God will, as only God can, bring unimaginable good out of all the pain and anguish of this world, caused by our folly. So, as Holy Week unfolds, we are not spectators but participants. We are among the cheering tumult in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday; we are present with the other disciples in the upper room, celebrating Passover with him on Maundy Thursday; we are sorrowing witnesses on Calvary, alongside his mother, on Good Friday; and we too silently experience the same grief and sense of loss that she and the others felt on Holy Saturday.

And on Easter morning, we are with Mary who, in the garden where his lifeless body had once lain, recognises her beloved friend, Jesus, when he speaks her and our name. The Resurrection is the full and final meaning of the crucifixion. “If we have died with him, we shall also rise with him.”