Who are you looking for?

I remember reading a review of Mel Gibson's "The Passion" which was shown in cinemas over ten years ago. It was a very powerful account of the journey of Jesus on his road to Calvary. It recounted these important events that happened to Jesus but in many ways left you with the same impression of him that you had when you first went to see the movie. If he was just to be judged as a good man, this was an awful and unjust punishment to any human being, if you saw him as God and man then you wondered on how this redemptive action encounters our own suffering.  It focused on the events surrounding Jesus rather than actually encountering the person.
Yet Holy Week encounters us as not just a retelling of the suffering, death and resurrection of Christ as though it was a documentary but rather it calls us to encounter the person of Jesus when we seem powerless and unable to change the course of the events. There is poverty which wishes we could fix it up or choose another way and yet we experience this is as people deeply moved by what unfolds. There is a desire to encounter the person who is at the heart of this event more than the events that surround him. We long to meet the person who invites us to journey with him to the Cross.

This is not just a call to feel particularly pious but rather to live his story in our own flesh and in our own world. We know how easy it is to view the suffering of others vicariously and to wonder how this comes to be in our own age. Why has the war in Syria dragged on for so long, how did the events of child abuse unfold in the Church and other institutions and people stay silent for so long, how do we allow peoples lives to suffer the indignity of life in refugee camps and offshore detention centres? These are only a few of the stories which can bring us to silence and yet in the midst of these stories we can either respond in rage or in love. The choice that Jesus made was that his life was transformed completely by the loving relationship he had with the Father. He surrendered his whole life to this relationship which formed and sustained him. I think this is the underlying story of this week. We need to keep our eyes on Jesus. For us, forgiveness is a person!