Jesus constantly desires closeness – Luke 22:14-23:56

Palm Sunday (Year C); Notre Dame (Lewis Hall)

How might we have responded to Jesus’ Passion at the time?  How are we responding now?  How are we responding to Christ’s suffering lived out in the suffering of our sisters and brothers and of ourselves?  How are we responding to Christ’s sacrifice, re-presented on every altar at every Mass, that we might be fed?

These are the questions this passion reading throws up for me, that this Holy Week throws up.  As we consider our response, we see that Luke’s passion reading shows so many different human responses to this arrest, trial and execution.  It shows how Jesus serves as the “sign of division” that Simeon had told Mary he would be.  There’s no one response, but humanity is divided, just as I think our hearts are often divided.  Our Holy Cross Constitutions talk about our longing “to be whole-hearted, yet we are hesitant.”  We are inconstant.

Maybe we can’t think of ourselves as ever calling out for Christ’s crucifixion, but maybe we can see more of ourselves in the disciples at the end of the reading, who stand by, but at a distance, fearful, hesitant.  They love Jesus, to a point, but they don’t actually want to be close to him, not if that’s painful.  Maybe we can even see Peter in ourselves, the disciple who denies.  Maybe it’s the daughters of Jerusalem, who follow on the way and mourn and lament suffering but feel powerless to do anything.  Or maybe we see in our prayer the penitent thief, who cries to Jesus, but sees himself as crying from so far away.

We are inconstant.  But Christ isn’t.  Jesus constantly desires closeness.  He knew Peter’s denial was coming, he’d predicted it, and he’d promised to pray for him.  As Peter denies, Jesus looks at him, and we know that wasn’t a look of judgment, but maybe of sorrow, and certainly of prayer: the same loving look with which Jesus regards each of us when we try our damnedest to turn from him; the same look he tries to inculcate in us, whenever we’re tempted to judge our neighbor.

To the daughters of Jerusalem, Jesus finds breath to speak on his exhausting trek.  He is weeping for the whole city; for those whose suffering is not as obvious as his, and he invites them to do the same; he seeks to draw them close to his compassion and invites them to extend it; the very invitation he still makes to us.

To the thief on the cross, he has the grandest promise: he will draw him so close that they will be together in paradise.  The nails that seem to keep them far apart are no defeat for Jesus, but the very means by which he will enter into the kingdom and prepare a place for us.

And to the disciples who stand at a distance… at Easter, we will see him come to them; we will see a love so great that not even death could keep him from being with them, just as it can’t keep him from being with us.  But, God is not absent from the end of this passage.  Jesus expends his final breath, to cry out to God, “Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit.”  His final words express his will to draw close to the Father he loves.

Christ is constant in his prayer for us and in his desire for closeness; to be close to us, and to be held in his Father’s embrace.  We might feel or be or make ourselves distant, but Christ will draw us close.