Today, on Palm Sunday, the Church gives us a curious liturgy. We go from jubilation to suffering. In a single day, we commemorate the Triumphant Procession of Jesus into Jerusalem and his ignominious death on the Cross.
The Crowd’s Contradiction
We hear the crowds shout joyfully,
Blessed is the king who comes
in the name of the Lord.
Peace in heaven
and glory in the highest (Lk. 19:38).
Later, in the Gospel of the Passion, we hear the crowds shout derisively,
Crucify him! Crucify him! (Lk. 23:21)
How can joyful praise turn so quickly to hateful condemnation? This is the experience of evil forced upon Jesus. Today’s liturgy introduces us to the mystery of evil, which as humans we experience most often in the form of suffering. Every suffering in our lives is a consequence of evil, be it physical or moral.
Witness of Wyszynski
As Christians, we promise to follow Christ. We receive the invitation to imitate him. This makes it likely that we too will experience evil in our own suffering. A Polish cardinal, Stefan Wyszynski, personified Poland’s struggle against Communism and Soviet domination. On September 25, 1983, Polish Internal Security Police roused him from bed.
Without trial, or even adequate explanation, he was stripped of his constitutional rights and shuttled out of the capital to a Capuchin friary in the countryside. During the three years of his imprisonment, he was moved about five times, always at night (New York Times, 25 September, 1983).
Surely, he suffered the temptation to be angry, and even to hate his persecutors. His experience of the evil of unjust imprisonment was intense. Just try to imagine being deprived of freedom to the extent Cardinal Wyszynski suffered. He suffered in his body what we often struggle with just in our mind.
Sometimes we can feel trapped and overwhelmed because of the circumstances of life. We feel incapable of improving our situation. In these times, there is the temptation to lose hope and fall into despair. At these moments, it can be encouraging to look to someone who has suffered more intensely than we have and still emerged on the other side. We have much to learn from Cardinal Wyzszynski, who took his imprisonment as a spiritual experience and stated:
It is better to cry than to be angry, because anger hurts others, and tears flow quietly through the soul and wash the heart, face, and hands (Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski).
Suffering Christ
We see this attitude incarnate in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Rather than become angry about the suffering he experienced at the hands of the Roman guards, Jesus weeps for sinners. Sometimes, we can use anger as a default emotion. It is even good when we feel angry about something to take inventory of ourselves and see if we are truly experiencing anger, or if there is some other emotion coming to the surface that scares us. Rather than masking it with anger, we should face the sadness, grief, or indignation we are feeling.
Part of the message of the suffering of Christ on the Cross is that he lends dignity even to the less enjoyable human emotions. When we are suffering, we have the consolation that we have a God who truly understands what we are going through.
Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on human suffering, Salvifici Doloris, teaches that
because evil is “a certain lack, limitation, or distortion of good,” human suffering is enmeshed with both good and evil and therefore touches the mystery of human freedom (George Weigel, “John Paul II: Knowing Suffering From Inside”).
Human suffering touches both good and evil. When we are suffering, it is easy to reject everything as evil. However, there is something profoundly human about suffering. Although we do not enjoy the experience, it allows us to be more human, and is inherently united to the mystery of human freedom. We can easily complain about human suffering that comes from natural disasters, but we must admit that so much of human suffering comes from the misuse of our freedom, or the misuse others make of their freedom.
Call for Holy Week
As we enter Holy Week, we celebrate the total self-giving of Jesus, God, and man. It is good to accompany him and recognize the human emotions that he lived during this time. One particularly relevant emotion he experienced was sorrow. From his experience of it, we learn that it is better to cry than to be angry. Although we face the temptation to shut off our emotions or mask them through distraction, God loves us even in the midst of our weaknesses.
It is good to enter the mystery of the Cross this week. We cannot escape the reality of our human existence. We should instead embrace it and go deeper in our love for him on the Cross. I recommend especially taking Psalm 22 into frequent prayer this week, to pray with Christ the words he said on the Cross. Let’s walk with Christ this week, not with hardened hearts, but with openly shared tears, trusting that in our sadness, we draw closer to his redeeming love.
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