Today we turn our hearts and minds once again to the suffering and death of Jesus Christ as we enter Passion Tide.  That suffering won for all mankind the definitive victory over sin and hopelessness.  But the question that keeps coming back to me year after year is this: God is all-powerful.  He could have chosen to save us from sin in many other ways.  Why did he choose to do it by suffering? What is the meaning of the Passion?  The answer does not change, but the heart is not satisfied, and every year it longs to know and to be told once again the great story of God’s love for man.

The Passion tells us with perfect clarity the message we most need to hear.  The Passion of Our Lord says to us: God is faithful; you can trust him.  Trusting God is the most important thing for us, but it's also the hardest, because our trust has been violated. 

We have all been wounded because people we trusted let us down, in little things and big things.  As a result, we have all built up walls around our hearts, to protect ourselves from being let down again.  But those walls also keep out God.  God knows that unless we let him into our hearts, we can never experience the happiness we long for.   So he came up with a way to win back our trust: the Passion of Christ.  The Passion is God saying to us: "No matter what you do, I will keep on loving you. I will never let you down."   If we reject Him, scourge Him, crown Him with thorns, betray Him, even if we crucify Him, he continues to love us: "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do."  God's love and faithfulness doesn't depend on us being perfect, and it doesn't depend on His whims.  He will never take it back. We can trust Him - completely.  That's the message of the Passion.  And it's the message that each of us, wounded and sinful as we are, most needs to hear.

We have to learn to trust God more and more in order to be transformed by him into the kind of person we know we should be.  The Catechism teaches that “man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God's command. This is what man's first sin consisted of. All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness."  

This was experienced in a powerful way by the actress who played the role of Veronica in Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ.  She was an Italian actress in her early thirties.  Although she had grown up Catholic, she had long ago stopped practicing her faith. At the time when they began filming, she was at a spiritual low point in her life.  She was dead inside.  She explained later that she had really wanted to believe in Jesus, but she simply couldn't.  And then something incredible happened, for God might have had mercy on her.   She was a given a minor part in a soon-to-be world-famous movie, The Passion.  And her part was small, but indeed memorable.  Jesus is carrying His cross to Calvary, and He falls for the third or fourth time.  The crowds surge around Him, abusing Him as He lies on the ground.  The soldiers try to control the crowds.  Gliding through the middle of this confusion is Veronica.   She looks at him with love and devotion. Or at last she tries.  She kneels down beside Him and says, "Lord, permit me."  She takes a white cloth and wipes His blood and sweat-stained face.  Then she offers Him a drink.  It is a beautiful moment of intimacy in the middle of violent suffering.  But it was hard to film that scene.  The churning crowd kept bumping into Veronica and disrupting the moment of encounter.  So they had to film it over and over again.  That was providential. 

After fifteen or twenty times of kneeling before the suffering Christ, looking into his eyes, and calling him Lord, the actress felt something start to melt inside her.  Later, she explained that while she looked into his eyes, she found that she was able to believe. "For a moment," she said, "I believed!"  That experience lit the flame of hope in her darkened heart.

This is what Christ wants to do in his Passion, to convince us that we can believe in him, that no matter how confusing and difficult and painful life may be, and no matter how many times we may fail or even sin, He is still loving us, he is trustworthy.  Today and throughout these two weeks we have a chance to renew our trust in this God who went to such great lengths to prove that he is trustworthy.  Today and throughout these two weeks we have a chance to let this truth heal the wounds of our hearts and renew our lives.  But we shouldn't think only of ourselves.  Many people have been wounded and have erected walls around their hearts, and they have never heard the message of the Passion.  There are many Veronicas in each one of our lives, people who want to believe in Christ, who want to experience the hope He has to give, but simply can't.  They need someone to show them the love, mercy, and faithfulness that the actress found in the face of Christ.  There are two ways that each one of us can make this Holy Week truly holy, not only for ourselves, but for those around us.   There are two ways that each one of us can be a living image of Christ's Passion to those around us: by words and by deeds.

So that our faith might not be useless to our life, but truly shows us the reality of God’s love, we must meditate on the Passion.  Put yourselves there in the crowds accompanying Christ on the way to Calvary.  Look at the faces of the Blessed Mother and Mary Magdalene, and realize the incredible pain and sorrow they experience.  Put yourselves next to the cross and look at the Lord in His last agony, and realize that God is dying for us.   And by our deeds: we can participate in Christ's Passion by doing what he did, by sharing our neighbor's burdens, by taking upon ourselves the crosses of others.  It may be as simple as stopping by the roadside and rolling down your car window and speak a blessing to the homeless man begging for alms, not ignoring him.  It could be getting involve and being truly present when your co-worker tells you the burdens she has been carrying all these years.  It could be paying for a meal for the homeless street artist outside your restaurant, having listened to him his life story.  In other words, be ourselves the reason for people to hope and trust in God once again!

Fr. Luan Tran