A reflection on our own passion (or lack of passion) for Passion Sunday. The readings (Jeremiah 31:31-34 and John 12:20-33) are below. It’s St Patrick’s Day, 2024, and we’re in two churches in the heart of England, in rural Warwickshire. The quotes from Cole Arthur Riley are from her book, Black Liturgies.
Today is known as Passion Sunday.
I have given this sermon a title – Inspired by love and anger. They are words of a hymn from two members of the Iona Community, John Bell and Graham Maule. (Hear it sung here)
The author of our first reading, Jeremiah was inspired by love and anger to hope in hopeless times when his people had lost everything – their home, their land, their institutions and their identity. At great cost to himself, he reiterates the promise of God to make himself known in a way that people could relate to. They would know God by heart, not by head and teaching or by law and obedience. He promises to write his law (or rule) in the heart of his people – the rule of God, self-imposed by God, the only rule of God, that he will only love, and that we will only know him in his love – in his passion. From that point the relationship between God and his people becomes an affair of the heart – where all our passions stir.
Jesus has this rule of God in his heart, living his life with this rule, and passionate for this rule of God’s love to be the rule of life on earth, just as it is in heaven. He taught his followers to make that our constant prayer. Thy kingdom come, on earth, as it is in heaven.
And as he resisted the temptations of an easier life so he insisted that we who are his followers should follow him in similar all-consuming passion, resisting the temptations of an easier life, to passionately engage with the rule of God for our lives – that rule being, only love.
Normally, on Passion Sunday, we would focus on Jesus’s passion without questioning our own. Jesus’ passion is well known.
But what of our own passion? Are we passionate? Are we inspired by love and anger? Are we passionate for the kingdom of God, in the way of Jesus? Are we passionate for, and compassionate with those who are always counted first in the kingdom of God who as a rule in the world are counted last or least, or not counted at all and get lost and disappear? The rule of God is that they come first.
Or are we too preoccupied and too easily distracted? Or, are our passions just about our selves? Or, has our passion become too domesticated so that our passion stays at home never reaching beyond our front doors?
Or have we been worn down and out by a hopelessness leading us to believe that there is no point in our passion because we can’t make any difference or we can’t change anything? Has our experience embittered our hearts?
Have we become numb? The opposite of passion is apathy. Apathy literally means without feeling, without passion.
Or have we never been helped to direct our passions? Have we ever had friends to help us safely explore the things of our heart – both the love and the anger?
Or have we become too nice for that sort of thing becoming the sort of people who never get angry? I looked up the meaning of nice. Apparently it is from the Latin nescire. Nescire means not knowing or ignorant. Nice became a word in Middle English to mean stupid?
How do we help one another to be more than the nice people we undoubtedly are?
Jesus wasn’t nice. He was fiery, fierce and furious – as we see in what happened when he went to the temple in the last days of his life, turning the tables on the moneychangers and condemning the religious authorities for their exploitation of the poor – the very people who come first in the rule of God.
We only have to listen to what the spirit says to the churches to realise that nice doesn’t even cut the mustard.
Hear the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, to the church of Laodicea (revelation 3:14-22): “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. For you say, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.” You do not realise that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked.”
We need to what what the spirit is saying to the churches.
Nothing good comes from being nice. Nothing changes if we remain apathetic. Nothing comes from being lukewarm, If we aren’t passionate and compassionate.
Passion is never served cold. It is heated by love and anger. Anger, rage and fury are part of our created order. They are very much part of ourselves. And they are very much part of our passionate selves.
Those counted last and least as a rule, those usually discounted and lost need the anger, rage and fury of those who have taken the rule of God to their heart. They need that encouragement from fresh hearts.
It is anger, rage and fury which wins wars, defends the abused and bullied, defeats fascism, establishes justice, rights wrongs – it is never done cold and it is never done by being nice. It’s how the rulers of this world are driven out.
We have a problem. We are schooled to be nice. In the playground we were told to be nice, particularly to those who weren’t nice. We have demonised anger. Who wants us to be nice? Powers that be do. Controlling people do. They prefer us not to know. They don’t want to hear us. They don’t want our disruptions and protests. They want to keep us in the dark – the very place Jesus doesn’t want to keep us. His whole mission was to shed light in our darkness.
Cole Arthur Riley puts it like this: “Happiness and sadness and even fear are met with tenderness, understanding; they are permitted to speak without constant scrutiny. But anger we require to use the back door – to come and go quietly without attracting too much attention to itself… The oppressors of this world have told you to play nice, be civil. They tell you to control yourself. But by this they only mean they want you easy to be controlled.”
She confesses “We have exalted being nice and calm as a pinnacle of character, repressing that which stirs our souls so deeply we must shout” and she prays to God to “release us from the kind of niceness that only serves and protects the oppressor”.
There is so much wrong, so many things are broken. There’s plenty to be furious about. How are things going to change without our fury, anger and passion?
We can’t take it all on, but we can let love lead us. (Hatreds can also make us angry – they’re the furies we don’t want. They’re the furies we will fight with a passion).
I suspect that few of us are any good at being angry or furious. It often comes out wrong, doesn’t it? We often finish up only hurting those we love. This isn’t surprising because we have repressed anger. We’ve kept it hidden and not given it voice. We haven’t kept up our practice.
Here we can practice that love, among friends, through our prayer, learning all the time how to be angry better, how to balance anger with love, how to live passionately in the rule of God which is only love, how to live compassionately with those Jesus always counts first.
Can we help one another redirect our passion to join the passion of Jesus for the rule of God, and so that our whole lives are inspired by love and anger?
Jeremiah 31:31-34
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt – a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
John 12:20-33
Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’. Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour.
‘Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say – “Father, save me from this hour”? No, it is for this very reason that I have come to this hour. Father glorify your name.’ Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ The crowd standing there heard it and said it was thunder. Others said, ‘An angel has spoken to him.’ Jesus answered, ‘This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.