Palm Sunday (C)
ISAIAH 50:4-7
The Lord GOD has given me a disciple’s tongue, to know how to speak a word in season to the weary. Morning by morning he wakens, wakens my ear to hear as the disciples do; the Lord GOD has opened my ear.
And I was not rebellious, I turned not backward. I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I hid not my face from shame and spitting. For the Lord GOD helps me; therefore I have not been confounded; therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame.
This is the “third song of the Servant.” It is the perfect introduction to the passion narrative, and the most vigorous correction to any sense of the externally triumphant Kingdom of Christ. And it is impressive how directly it can be applied to Jesus in the Passion. It serves us as a perfect prophetic reading of the Passion, and even of the drama of the anguish of Gethsemane and the abandonment of the cross.
The ending is rather unfortunate, contradictory, it seems as if not even Isaiah is able to accept the humiliation of the Messiah. The triumph of Jesus is the resurrection, not the external recognition of the Jewish nation, nor of the peoples of the world. The triumph of Jesus is that the Spirit in him is so strong that it makes him capable of facing the cross.
PHILIPPIANS 2:5-11
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.
Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Paul gives us a perfect example of the two christologies, ascending and descending, in a single text. Starting from the pre-existence of the Word, Paul develops a theology of the self-emptying of Christ:
divine condition > kenosis > to the cross
And at the end of the text, starting from his human condition, he rises to the proclamation of his faith:
human condition > exaltation by God > God makes him Lord
Influenced by the almost exclusive predominance of the first in liturgical texts, we run the risk of disagreement with the sensitivity of the Christian people who today recover with force the christology of “the man full of the Spirit.”
It would be wise to ensure that Christians recover their faith in the divinity of Jesus starting from his humanity. If we do not travel this path, it is more than likely that we are transmitting or admitting a divine conception of Jesus that can be qualified as mythical. And it is precisely in the Passion that we are offered the perfect test of our faith in Jesus.
In summary and to avoid repeating once again what we proclaim so many times: any christology that stumbles over the agonizing prayer of Gethsemane or the abandonment of the cross is suspicious. Suspicious of the oldest temptation of the first communities: docetism and its consequences (for example, the much used and very dangerous expression: “insofar as God” “insofar as man”).
José Enrique Galarreta, S.J.