Palm Sunday 2010
March 2010
One great insight of Christianity - an insight incomprehensible to and rejected by the wisdom of human beings - is that suffering, death and resurrection go together. Even the closest followers and friends of Jesus did not grasp the truth that suffering and death are the necessary passage to a better life - to resurrection. This understanding came only after the Resurrection.
This does not mean that God wants us to suffer no more than He wanted Jesus Christ to suffer. Where there is death, of necessity, there is also suffering. You cannot have one without the other. No matter how I live my life there will be suffering - sickness, loss of family and friends, accidents, failures, deliberate insults and slights etc.
Also if I am someone who constantly fights against injustice at all levels and strives to uphold the rights of the poor and the indigent, as Jesus Christ did, then the powers that be, both secular and religious, will see to it that I am sidelined in some way, or as happened with Jesus of Nazareth, executed for some reason.
God , Our Father, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, clearly demonstrated his desire to defeat and get rid of suffering and death. But He also demonstrated that the only way this can come about is for each one of us to walk the path of suffering and enter by the gate of death. This does not mean that Christianity is a religion of suffering and pain. It means that I take life as it comes, the joy and the sorrow, and live it in the company of God my Father who walks, hand in hand, with me as I thread the path of life and enter the gateway of death to Eternal Life with Him.
Today is the first day of Holy Week when our God walks the pathway of life, through joy and sorrow, through suffering and death, to Resurrection and Eternal Life.
Let me try to join Him on His journey.