We\u2019ve just heard the story of Jesus\u2019 torturous and violent death as told by St John. We\u2019ve been listening to it year after year on each Good Friday. The same story told in the same way and heard many times can make us less perceptive or sensitive to it. Listening to this long story while standing up can be painful enough. Moreover, there\u2019s no shortage of harrowing stories of injustice, torture and killing that people suffer in our times. Shouldn\u2019t we be more interested in easing those pains rather than brooding over the story from the very distant past?<\/p>\n
Twelve years ago the film \u2018The Passion\u2019<\/i> made by Mel Gibson depicted Jesus\u2019 ordeal in such an extremely gory way that made watching it extremely hard. I\u2019m not going to argue whether the tortures suffered by Jesus were as shown in the film \u2013 quite likely they were. However, the film creators missed the point of Jesus\u2019 passion. It wasn\u2019t elaborate tortures nor gallons of blood that mattered. It was Jesus\u2019 attitude that mattered, and still matters.<\/p>\n
Jesus\u2019 ordeal mirrors the cruelty, injustice, betrayal, pettiness, disdain and mindlessness, and many other unpleasant attitudes that we are capable of. In a spiritual sense, Jesus intentionally accepted and took upon himself all those shortcomings of ours. In his acceptance Jesus broke the vicious circle of hatred and revenge, as he didn\u2019t respond with violence against violence. So, when we read and listen to the story of Jesus\u2019 ordeal we do this not seeking gore, but looking for answers to our own everyday problems. There we can learn how to deal with betrayal, undeserved punishment, unjustified accusations or malicious slander\u2026 The list is very long indeed. The passion of Jesus can change and shape our attitudes towards adversities, to make sense of them and to make the best out of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We\u2019ve just heard the story of Jesus\u2019 torturous and violent death as told by St John. We\u2019ve been listening to it year after year on each Good Friday. The same story told in the same way and heard many times can make us less perceptive or sensitive to it. Listening to this long story while standing up can be painful enough. Moreover, there\u2019s no shortage of harrowing stories of injustice, torture and killing that people suffer in our times. Shouldn\u2019t we be more interested in easing those pains rather than brooding over the story from the very distant past? Twelve years ago the film \u2018The Passion\u2019 made by Mel Gibson depicted Jesus\u2019 ordeal in such an extremely gory way that made watching it extremely hard. I\u2019m not going to argue whether the tortures suffered by Jesus were as shown in the film \u2013 quite likely they were. However, the film creators missed the point of Jesus\u2019 passion. It wasn\u2019t elaborate tortures nor gallons of blood that mattered. It was Jesus\u2019 attitude that mattered, and still matters. Jesus\u2019 ordeal mirrors the cruelty, injustice, betrayal, pettiness, disdain and mindlessness, and many other unpleasant attitudes that we are capable of. In a spiritual sense, Jesus intentionally accepted and took upon himself all those shortcomings of ours. In his acceptance Jesus broke the vicious circle of hatred and revenge, as he didn\u2019t respond with violence against violence. So, when we read and listen to the story of Jesus\u2019 ordeal we do this not seeking gore, but looking for answers to our own everyday problems. There we can learn how to deal with betrayal, undeserved punishment, unjustified accusations or malicious slander\u2026 The list is very long indeed. The passion of Jesus can change and shape our attitudes towards adversities, to make sense of them and to make the best out of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7072,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sermon"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}