Take the suffering—all the expressions of the passions in this life—of the world on yourself rather than passing it on. If we don’t take them on ourselves, we react to them and reduce them to reciprocity. We could bring an end to that. Don’t presume about it. Don’t react. Let it be. See as I see. Say what I say. Why have you abandoned me and into thy hands… then don’t make something of it. Bear your cross, don’t make something out of it. Just let it be what it is.
The big issue is what the spiritual landscape when you have a theology of the Cross or a Christus victor theology where you might affirm the doctrine of the Incarnation but in your whole way of understanding formally liturgically and in prayer, if the only thing you have is the Cross and the Incarnation is a set of events that lead to the Cross, descent and resurrection, you reduce the incarnation to the suffering of the world. That’s mischievous. And romanticizes suffering.
In the East, the Incarnation, lent and Pascha highlight that part of the story as part of a season, not the point or even as the culmination. They’re of a piece. Iconic images of human experience and the human journey. Fetishism of pain and sorrow. It makes the Incarnation only the birth and doesn’t link the Logos and the logoi. But it isn’t about God, it’s about the human being. You have these gifts of memory, imagination, the human problem is about being discarnate and not present, only projecting our nostalgia or our utopian dreams. The human problem and how to be incarnate, and human nature. Jesus Christ is two natures. The revelation of God is a midrash of Genesis 3. The image of the fulness of the human nature. Tree of Life.
Gibson’s film was a form of blasphemy that reduces the Logos to suffering and death, cultivating I us aa romantic attachment to that, and we can find who isn’t in Jesus’ camp and do it to them. It mythologizes, not the incarnation, logos or human nature, but of the human passions of the worst order.
Turn a biblical narrative into a spectacle and you will turn it into a blasphemy. That’s the devil. You make it a servant of evil instead of the good. Because it plants the seeds of literalism and historicism that ruins the bloody story. And lose the iconic revelation of our being and becoming. He came to redeem the world, not ‘history’ through our being and becoming. History will only be transfigured through being present to this life. The films can be reductionistic heresy.
Holy week should be the opposite of a performance. We are praying our way into the unfolding of our experience so we pray it, we don’t perform it. The great temptation of Satan is to perform the Good. Then he wins. Because when you perform something, you aren’t present to it. Prayer makes you present to what is real, the movements of the Logos and your logoi in all your experience. They talk to each other there and that’s why they weep. Shouting ‘he is risen’ can make us forget that this is what this is for us. “Holy week is somber joy.” The leper, the woman at the well, Lazarus raising holds together the wonder of our pain and unfolding healing.