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Sacred Scriptures/Liturgy- Commentary on Sunday's Readings |
A Historical Look at the
Passion of Christ
Palm Sunday
Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, OFMCap, Pontifical Household Preacher
www.zenit.org
Isaiah 50:4-7; Philippians 2:6-11;
Luke 22:14-23, 56
On Palm Sunday we will hear in its entirety St. Luke's account of
the Passion. Let us pose the crucial question, that question which
the Gospels were written to answer: How is it that a man like this
ended up on the cross? What were the motives of those responsible
for Jesus' death?
According to a theory that began to circulate last century, after
the tragedy of the Shoah, the responsibility for Christ's death
falls principally -- indeed perhaps even exclusively -- on Pilate
and the Roman authorities, whose motivation was of a more political
than religious nature. The Gospels supposedly vindicated Pilate and
accused the Jewish leaders of Christ's death in order to reassure
the Roman authorities about the Christians and to court their
friendship.
This thesis was born from a concern which today we all share: to
eradicate every pretext for the anti-Semitism that has caused much
suffering for the Jewish people at the hands of Christians. But the
gravest mistake that can be made for a just cause is to defend it
with erroneous arguments. The fight against anti-Semitism should be
put on a more solid foundation than a debatable (and debated)
interpretation of the Gospel accounts of the Passion.
That the Jewish people as such are innocent of Christ's death rests
on a biblical certainty that Christians have in common with Jews but
that for centuries was strangely forgotten. "The son shall not be
charged with the guilt of his father, nor shall the father be
charged with the guilt of his son" (Ezekiel 18:20). Church teaching
knows only one sin that is transmitted from father to son, original
sin, no other.
Having made it clear that I reject anti-Semitism, I would like to
explain why it is not possible to accept the complete innocence of
the Jewish authorities in Christ's death and along with it the claim
about the purely political nature of Christ's condemnation.
Paul, in the earliest of his letters, written around the year 50,
basically gives the same version of Christ's condemnation as that
given in the Gospels. He says that "the Jews put Jesus to death" (1
Thessalonians 2:15). Of the events that took place in Jerusalem
shortly before his arrival, Paul must have been better informed than
we moderns, having at one time tenaciously approved and defended the
condemnation of the Nazarene.
The accounts of the Passion cannot be read ignoring everything that
preceded them. The four Gospels attest -- on nearly every page, we
can say -- a growing religious difference between Jesus and an
influential group of Jews (Pharisees, doctors of the law, scribes)
over the observance of the Sabbath, the attitude toward sinners and
tax collectors, and the clean and unclean.
Once the existence of this contrast is demonstrated, how can one
think that it had no role to play in the end and that the Jewish
leaders decided to denounce Jesus to Pilate -- almost against their
will -- solely out of fear of a Roman military intervention?
Pilate was not a person who was so concerned with justice as to be
worried about the fate of an unknown Jew; he was a hard, cruel type,
ready to shed blood at the smallest hint of rebellion. All of that
is quite true. He did not, however, try to save Jesus out of
compassion for the victim, but only to score a point against Jesus'
accusers, with whom he had been in conflict since his arrival in
Judea. Naturally, this does not diminish Pilate's responsibility in
Christ's condemnation, a responsibility which he shares with the
Jewish leaders.
It is not at all a case of wanting to be "more Jewish than the
Jews." From the reports about Jesus' death present in the Talmud and
in other Jewish sources (however late and historically
contradictory), one thing emerges: The Jewish tradition never denied
the participation of the religious leaders of the time in Christ's
condemnation. They did not defend themselves by denying the deed,
but, if anything, they denied that the deed, from the Jewish
perspective, constituted a crime and that Christ's condemnation was
an unjust condemnation.
So, to the question, "Why was Jesus condemned to death?" after all
the studies and proposed alternatives, we must give the same answer
that the Gospels do. He was condemned for religious reasons, which,
however, were ably put into political terms to better convince the
Roman procurator.
The title of "Messiah," which the accusation of the Sanhedrin
focused on, becomes in the trial before Pilate, "King of the Jews,"
and this will be the title of condemnation that will be affixed to
the cross: "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." Jesus had
struggled all his life to avoid this confusion, but in the end it is
this confusion that will decide his fate.
This leaves open the discussion about the use that is made of the
accounts of the Passion. In the past they have often been used (in
the theatric representations of the Passion, for example) in an
inappropriate manner, with a forced anti-Semitism.
This is something that everyone today firmly rejects, even if
something still remains to be done about eliminating from the
Christian celebration of the Passion everything that could still
offend the sensibility of our Jewish brothers. Jesus was and
remains, despite everything, the greatest gift of Judaism to the
world, a gift for which the Jews have paid a high price ...
The conclusion that we can draw from these historical
considerations, then, is that religious authorities and political
authorities, the heads of the Sanhedrin and the Roman procurator,
both participated, for different reasons, in Christ's condemnation.
We must immediately add to this that history does not say everything
and not even what is essential on this point. By faith we know that
we are all responsible for Jesus' death with our sins.
Let us leave aside historical questions now and dedicate a moment to
contemplating him. How did Jesus act during the Passion? Superhuman
dignity, infinite patience. Not a single gesture or word that
negated what he preached in his Gospel, especially the beatitudes.
He dies asking for the forgiveness of those who crucified him.
And yet nothing in him resembles the stoic's prideful disdain of
suffering. His reaction to suffering and cruelty is entirely human:
he trembles and sweats blood in Gethsemane, he wants this chalice to
pass from him, he seeks the support of his disciples, he cries out
his desolation on the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?"
There is one among the traits of this superhuman greatness of Christ
that fascinates me: his silence. "Jesus was silent" (Matthew 26:63).
He is silent before Caiaphas, he is silent before Pilate, he is
silent before Herod, who hoped to see Jesus perform a miracle (cf.
Luke 23:8). "When he was reviled he did not revile in return," the
First Letter of Peter says of him (2:23).
The silence is broken only for a single moment before death -- the
"loud cry" from the cross after which Jesus yields up his spirit.
This draws from the Roman centurion the confession: "Truly this man
was the Son of God."
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