The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage

Prayerful observance of Holy Week is a challenge in a climate of pandemic restrictions and political outrage. Spend time with us this week Beyond These Stone Walls.

Something timely and fascinating was unearthed in the days just before Holy Week this year. It actually began in 1960 near the Dead Sea in Qumran, an ancient Hebrew settlement in Jordan. Archeologists discovered fragments showing that caves there were used as a hide-out by Bar Kochba’s rebel army which staged a three-year revolt against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem from AD 132-135.

The 1960 discovery included Roman coins, arrows, and a fragment of parchment bearing sixteen verses in Hebrew from the Book of Exodus. In a deep cave in Wadi Haver, archeologists also discovered several of Bar Kochba’s letters on papyri and wood.

Sixty-one years later, on March 16, 2021 the Israeli government announced the discovery of dozens of Dead Sea Scroll fragments of Hebrew texts from the Prophets Zechariah and Nahum from an adjacent cave. The “Cave of Horrors,” as it is called, contained other evidence that it was used by followers of Bar Kochba to evade the Roman armies. The cave is located in the Judean desert about 262 feet (80 meters) below a cliff top.

The Bar Kochba rebellion took place about 60 years after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, an event predicted by Jesus during his triumphant entry into Jerusalem (Luke 19:28ff). In AD 70, Romans destroyed the Temple. The revolt of Bar Kochba was triggered 60 years later when Roman emperor Hadrian decided to erect a shrine to the mythological Roman god, Jupiter, upon the site of the Temple.

Emperor Hadrian came personally to Judea to put down the Bar Kochba revolt which ultimately cost the lives of over a half million Jews. The revolt was called the “Liberation of Jerusalem” by its adherents. It was led by Simon Ben Kosibah, known to the documents of the early Christian Church as Bar Kochba.

Hadrian and his General, Sextus Julius Severus, crushed the revolt by a long, slow starvation of the Jewish revolutionaries and their families who had been driven into the desert to take refuge in the desert caves. When it was all over, Hadrian destroyed what was left of Jerusalem. He then decreed that the whole Jewish nation should be barred, from that day forward, from entering the City of Jerusalem and its surrounding area so that “they may not even view from afar their ancestral home.”

Little is known today about the state of Christianity at the time of the Bar Kochba revolt. It was a time in which a break between synagogue and church was taking place for Jewish Christians. A succession of thirteen Jewish-Christian bishops ruled Jerusalem until the time of Hadrian. At the time of the first destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, Simeon, son of Clopas, was Bishop of Jerusalem and was martyred there. The Second Century historian Eusebius, reported that between the martyrdom of Simeon and the Bar Kochba revolt, “many thousands of Jews had come to believe in Christ.”

A Revolution in the Soul

These remnants of a revolution seem an almost fitting discovery just before Holy Week in this of all years. I believe that the bones of Bar Kochba’s faithful Jewish and Jewish-Christian revolutionaries are calling to us from those caves. I have never written a Holy Week post like this before because we have never had a Holy Week like this before in our lifetimes. For the second year in a row, many Catholics face a drastic reduction in their ability to participate in the liturgy and Sacraments of their Faith.

The first time Holy Week was limited by fears of a pandemic — in Holy Week 2020 — Christianity was caught off guard on a global scale. We never imagined that the restrictions set in place by both civil and religious authorities would further impede our faith as we approach another Holy Week a year later. We never imagined that many of our spiritual leaders would continue their passive acceptance of the severe limits placed on our practice of faith. I wrote of this at the turn of the year in “A Year in the Grip of Earthly Powers.”

On what we today call “Passion Sunday,” Jesus entered Jerusalem as the triumphant Son of David, a title given to him by Sacred Scripture. As he entered the Holy City, he wept. It is notable that he did not weep over his knowledge that he enters Jerusalem to commence the Passion of the Christ. Saint Luke’s Passion Narrative makes clear that Jesus wept over Jerusalem and what he knew to be the coming destruction of the Temple and Holy City by Earthly Powers. He knew that many would lose their lives in revolt against it.

Many people in our era are just now awakening to a revolution in the soul as clarity dawns that demonic forces behind so-called “cancel culture” are using a pandemic to suppress our churches, our liturgy, our voices, and our communal values and expressions of faith. Many are also awakening to the reality that some — but certainly not all — of our religious leaders have acquiesced to this suppression, most by their silence, but some by outright endorsement of government-imposed shutdowns.

I have written of at least two instances in which the courts have overruled political impositions on Mass attendance and Catholic practice only to have the local Catholic bishop re-impose the same restrictions the courts had declared unconstitutional. I feel indebted to the many priests — and, in fairness, some bishops too — who have found courage in their fidelity to reject the modern version of one of my most memorable Holy Week posts: “The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’.”

That Whisper in the Ear of Judas

There is another force, also seemingly demonic in its origin, that has impinged upon our expressions of fidelity in the public square. I could sense it all around us throughout the last year and it has not abated. It has just festered and grown deeper within many of us as persons and as communities. I had a hard time putting a name on it until I saw it spelled out by one of my favorite columnists in The Wall Street Journal.

On March 9, 2021, political columnist Gerald F. Seib published a masterful analysis entitled “The Perpetual Outrage Machine Churns On.” You may not be able to read it without a subscription but I will give a brief summary of its evidence.

Two months after the January 6 events at the U.S. Capitol, prison-like fencing still surrounded the area. In Minneapolis, the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin over the death of George Floyd — seemingly every horrid moment of it caught on national television — has commenced amid another round of protests. Innocent Asian Americans have suddenly become targets of physical and verbal assault across the nation. Four women at a Bed and Body Works store in Arizona erupted into a wild brawl. Eight persons were killed by a single gunman in a spa in Atlanta. Ten more were murdered while shopping in a Colorado supermarket.

This list of present day atrocities spawned by rage could go on for pages. There is an influence behind it. A master opportunist has been doing what he does best. In Holy Week 2020, I wrote “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness & Light.” Its point was that the whisper into the ear of Judas at the Last Supper was preceded by other events. Before it happened, Satan entered into Judas (Luke 22:3) as Judas entered into a deal with the chief priests to betray Christ. His sin of greed left him vulnerable to the exploitation of Satan and his minions. That is always the case. The mere whisper in the dark is never enough. Through a long, slow, barely noticeable descent toward ever greater darkness, Satan finds an opportunity just as he found one in Judas Iscariot.

Our rage against the affairs of this world can also be a point of vulnerability. The great Christian writer, C. S. Lewis, described that path to spiritual destruction in his allegorical story, The Screwtape Letters (1940). He captures Satan instructing his nephew in the ways of spiritual warfare: “It is the cumulative effect of sin that draws the Man away from the Light and out into the Nothing ... The safest road to Hell is the gradual one, the gentle curves, soft underfoot, without turns, without signposts, without a roadmap. (The Screwtape Letters, p. 61)

Satan exploits fear, rage, even political contention and a pandemic to drive a wedge not only between persons, but within them. If your life of faith has been assailed by the world, the flesh, and the devil in this past year, we invite you to walk the Way of the Cross Beyond These Stone Walls this week.

We are posting on Monday of Holy Week instead of our usual Wednesday post day to present this special Holy Week post and a short list of six others for you to read and share in each day of Holy Week. The list begins in an hour of darkness and ends in the glory of Salvation.

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Satan at The Last Supper: Hours of Darkness & Light

Waking Up in the Garden of Gethsemane

The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’

Behold the Man, as Pilate Washes His Hands

Dismas, Crucified to the Right: Paradise Lost and Found

Mary Magdalene: Faith, Courage, and an Empty Tomb