The Passion

The Passion

“How much more shall the blood of Christ... purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” Heb 9.14

I’ve never been good with blood. It probably stems from an unpleasant boyhood incident which started with an empty tobacco tin at bath time and ended in hospital.

I was reminded again the other day of the wonderful line in that cult film Withnail & I. As the louche, Uncle Monty, persuades someone else to prepare the meat for dinner, he declares his horror of blood saying: “As a youth I used to weep in butchers’ shops!”

So I have been forced into a culturally deprived life, never having seen any of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre films and constantly suffering the disdain of waiters in French restaurants as I have whispered ‘medium to well’.

And all this is by way of explaining why I have never seen that film which came out just a year ago, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

On Passion Sunday, when the readings are about new life in Christ, we are nonetheless bracing ourselves for the horrors of Holy Week as we begin to enter into the passion of our Lord.

Why did Mel Gibson produce such a visceral film of those 18 most bloody hours of our Lord’s life, from Gethsemane to Calvary?

The cynics will say that it was to make £200 million. And I’m sure he hoped to make a buck or two. But I am more inclined to believe what Gibson himself says:

“My aim is to profoundly change people. The audience has to experience the harsh reality to understand it. I want to reach people with a message of faith, hope, love and forgiveness. Christ forgave them even as He was tortured and killed. That’s the ultimate example of love.”

But do we really need all this blood and gore to achieve such an aim? The unequivocal answer of Christianity is ‘yes’.

I’m reminded of William Cowper’s hymn which always made me blanch as a boy:

There is a fountain filled with blood
drawn from Emmanuel's veins;
and sinners plunged beneath that flood
lose all their guilty stains.

Old Testament religion, was certainly authenticated by blood – the life principle of all animals. As the writer to the Hebrews says a few verses after my text for today: “without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin.” (Heb 9.22)

Jewish temple worship was messy and bloody. The congregation brought birds and animals for slaughter. They were sprinkled with the blood. The priests were ritually smeared with blood and smelled of blood. Blood was poured out on the altar.

In other words, the people of Israel were left in no doubt that the sins they committed were not dismissed lightly by God. The principle was firmly established that it was costly to maintain the moral purity of the universe.

Now the ‘principle’ here is the important thing.

The blood and sacrifices themselves were culturally determined. They were the lingua franca of ancient near eastern religion. Angry gods were to be appeased by blood sacrifice. Although the children of Israel were always forbidden to make the ultimate blood sacrifice: the ritual slaughter of a human being.

The willingness of Abraham to contemplate this, even with his own son, makes it clear how blood sacrifice was deeply ingrained in the religious mentality. It was a sign of devotion.

But the revelation of God through Judaism was always trying to go deeper. The prophets constantly reminded people that sacrifices alone were not enough.

Yahweh was a God of compassion, mercy and love, and he longed for heartfelt sorrow and wilful love from his children. And yet there was still to be sacrifice.

You will remember at the end of the penitential Psalm 51, which we read so often during lent, the condition of a contrite heart did not vitiate the need for sacrifice, rather it was the precondition of the sacrifice being acceptable:

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offering: then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar.” (Ps 51.17,19)

So in the Old Testament the compassion of God and his willingness to forgive those who repented did not obviate the need of sacrifice. But all this was pointing to what was to come.

It was sign and symbol, type and foreshadowing of the greatest sacrifice in the history of the cosmos, the one final and full sacrifice: Deicide. God made flesh would offer himself up to the bloodlust of sinful humanity.

The principle had been firmly established over those centuries of tabernacle and temple sacrifices: the principle that it was costly to maintain the moral purity of the universe; this principle was all but incomprehensibly exploded by a dying God.

For the cost was to be born, not by those who paid for the animals, not by their anguished repentance, nor by the animals unwittingly offering up their life blood. The cost all along had been the precious blood of Christ. As Peter puts it in his epistle:

“Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, ... But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot." (1 Peter 1.18f)

It was the blood of Christ that justified Abraham. It was the blood of Christ hysopped on the door lintels that saved the children of Israel in Egypt. It was the blood of Christ that atoned for King David’s sins. It was and still is the blood of Christ which validates any act of contrition and repentance.

And the blood was real blood. As Archbishop Temple reminds us, ‘Christianity is the most materialistic of all religions.’

So Christ, the Man of Sorrows, drained the cup of very real, physical suffering.

This reality has been depicted in Christian art and literature, film and music in so many different and sometimes graphic ways down through the centuries.

The flagellation of Christ displayed in the current Caravaggio exhibition portrays the cold brutality behind the passion of our Lord.

But having said all this, it was not the blood of God which undid and began to undo Adam’s sin and rebellion. It was the love of God, expressed in terms that we as humans can grasp.

For we all shy away from physical suffering. We all hope for a kind death for ourselves and for our loved ones. We all instinctively fear inflicted pain and torture.

And yet this is all part of the flaw in the universe and in the human heart. And, in a way we cannot understand this side of that cold river death, pain and suffering are part of the Godhead. There is a bloodied man at the heart of the Holy Trinity.

And so not only with our minds, but with our bodies we understand redemptive love. The passion of Christ which soon we will rehearse again in the annual cycle of our salvation, speaks to us of love beyond telling. There is a visceral response to the suffering of Jesus.

Here is Mel Gibson again:

“But when you finally see it and understand what He went through, it makes you feel not only compassion but also a debt. You want to repay Him for the enormity of His sacrifice. You want to love Him in return.”

So every time you come to the mass, you are reminded of the physical horror and cost of your redemption. Broken Body. Shed blood.

Occasionally, in our sanitized society, and especially on this Passion Sunday and during the next fourteen days of passiontide, we should remember, amidst the beauty, the terrible fleshly suffering of God.

Never was love, dear King!
Never was grief like Thine. (Samuel Crossman)

And as we ponder his Passion, so our love for him should draw us into the glad service of God.

“How much more shall the blood of Christ... purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” Heb 9.14