Passion and Compassion

Reflection

This day of the Christian year is called 'Passion Sunday' - when we turn towards the story of  the sufferng and death of Jesus. Rather than revelling in the gory details of the last hours of Jesus, however, we consider the meaning behind Jesus death - the word 'passion' means 'suffering' and is a part of the word 'compassion' which means 'to suffer with'. Jesus death was one in which we are told that God entered into human suffering, and knows, not just theoretically but completely, what it is to suffer.

The earliest Jesus followers saw in their Jewish history poetry which resonated for them from the book ascribed to Isaiah - particularly the songs known as 'the suffering servant songs' - these writings refer to someone contemporary to the original writer, but they were used by these first 'proto-Christians' to explain some of the meaning within Jesus suffering - that, in love,  Jesus carried the world's sufferings as an undeserving victim of Rome's atrocities.  Jesus' compassion, Jesus' passion, inspires in us courage to share the world's pain.

Scripture

He was despised and rejected by others;
   a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
   he was despised, and we held him of no account.

Surely he has borne our infirmities
   and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
   struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
   crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
   and by his bruises we are healed.

Isaiah 53.3-5

Music

A Sundance Piercing Song

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