Pasyon

The Passion story of the Christ is the most celebrated story from Europe, out of the faiths that were nurtured from the Levant transmitted through the web of the Graeco-Roman civilization for Christianity, and Arabia for Islam.

The impulse in the desert to succumb to the illusion of mirage is constant and deadly. This led to a fundamental question of what reality is and what might be a reliable guide to living.

Judaism vowed that the Way Life Is, symbolized by the enigmatic YHWH, is the way life is without imaginal embellishment. The Jews’ stern deity came a long way after returning from exile in Egypt, though what was once common space in Palestine became sacred space and holiness was bestowed on geography rather than as a quality of the Way Life Is!

What was true of the Jew became personalized and authenticated in the lifestyle of Iesu of Nazareth, that of sheer expenditure. The Way Life Is cannot be saved and contained in the Holy of Holies. It is true of life that it is more blessed to give than to receive, not because someone said so, but because life itself bears witness to it. Expenditure is the nature of existence, and nature’s decay is the foundation of new life. As all die, new life, nevertheless, emerges!

Constantine unified the empire with only one religion that canonized the Four Gospels with the whole gamut between Genesis to Apocalypse in sacred writ, the New as fulfillment of Jewish prophesy. Augustine, Aquinas, and the Augsburg crowd nailed their theses on the Christian soul before the idolatry of Jesus reared its ugly head and the canon of Scripture took in a Koranic quality of inerrancy. To this tradition would half of America pledge its allegiance!

Mohammed in Mecca respected the Jews and the Christians but wary of the tendency to create icons within religion, the “no-thing” (Allah) became supreme reality, which is to say even images of personages like Mohammed and realities like Allah were banished to ensure that the rampant multi-idolatry in Mecca was to cease.

Unfortunately, the followers of Mahmoud and Ali turned around and created idolatrous icons out of the Koran, a confrontational lifestyle like the jihad, and the cultural practices attendant to the observances of Islam among the Arabic community in the Middle East. The politics of oil understandably enough gives Islam reasons to be resentful of the West, and Islam took a heinous coloration of violence among ordinary citizens of the Western world.

The three faiths out of the Levant nevertheless addressed themselves to the same question of reality and authenticity. The Jews learned to sing the songs of Zion by the rivers of Babylon, deeply grounded in Hitler’s Holocaust where the spirit can survive any dispensation; Israel was born! Christians took the motif of the suffering Servant and made Jesus’ total expenditure of self an unquestioning obedience to the Way Life Is. From the 7th to the 15th centuries, Islam shared a communal lifestyle with the rest of the world that tolerated diversity in a sea of differences and sought common humanity, until Columbus made his way to the New World, and the Ottomans appropriated jihad as a tenet of faith.

Meanwhile, the traditions of the East had the Hindus keep unity in diversity at the personal level, Om. Buddha became a state of serenity made possible by the disciplines of meditation and contemplation. The ways of the Tao retained the obvious difference of opposites fully contained within the same circle, with the tranquility of the individual lodged firmly at the pivot point pressured by the struggle for balance and harmony. The yin-yang became an enduring symbol.

The Passion of the Christ, from the incarnation to the resurrection, is an umbrella story of the liberation from exile of the Jew, the transcendent non-material ethos of Islam, the all-embracing capacity of the Hindu, a comprehensive contentment of the Buddha, and the communal endurance of the Tao, all in a fluid account of a person’s travail from the entry to Jerusalem to the triumph of an empty tomb. The story is true of every Joe Blow and plain Jane transcending ecclesiastical hierarchies that sprouted in many traditions. The story is true of everyone who walks this earth!

Christian theologians are clear that the Passion story (Mel Gibson’s box office success notwithstanding) is exactly that, a story, defying historical accuracy in merging four Gospel narratives into a seamless whole. It is a lasting story not because it is authoritative but because it resonates with authenticity.

This week began the last call on cholesterol on Tuesday seen in the raucous Mardi Gras of New Orleans and the samba-swinging Carnival in Rio that ushered the solemnity of Wednesday morning when we were reminded again with ashes on the forehead that “to dust we came and to dust, we shall return.” A 40-day fast leads to Lent where Stations of the Cross and Golgotha’s reality endure as a backdrop of Saipan’s Sabalu, and every human’s journey.