Peter Costello
The Passion and the Cross
by Ronald Rolheiser (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99 hb)
Lent approaches, and many will be looking round for a book which will provide them with reading during the weeks to Good Friday and Easter. For readers of this paper, and for the many other publications where his columns are syndicated around the world, Fr Ronald Rolheiser is like an old and valued friend. Many will find his new book ideal for Lenten reading.
An oblate priest, he is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonia in Texas. But in his popular and widely read writings he manages to find an audience, not only among Catholics, but all kinds of other readers, with a kind of universal inclusiveness.
All his virtues as a writer of popular theology are displayed in this excellent, insightful and moving book. It is written with a refreshing lack of the kind of language that often clutters many spiritual books. He draws his points from a range of writers, Kazantzakis, Roethke, Gandhi, Rilke, as well as Chesterton. This enables him to link his thoughts about the passion of Christ to the widest human context.
An example of this is a comment on Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. He notes that film was popular with many Christians for showing in physical detail the suffering Jesus underwent. But he adds: “Many Scripture scholars and spiritual writers were critical of the film.”
Why? Because it did exactly the opposite to what the Gospels do. “The four Gospels take pains to not focus on the physical sufferings of Jesus. Their descriptions of his physical sufferings are stunningly brief.”
Passion
His point is that the authors of the Gospels wish their audience to focus, not on the physical, but “on what Jesus endured emotionally and morally. The passion of Jesus is, in its real depth, a moral drama not a physical one, the sufferings of a lover, not an athlete.” This brief quotation gives one the idea of just how insightful, in a simple, direct, but vivid way Rolheiser is.
In a series of five chapters divided into 40 sections, he moves through the events of the passion stage by stage, providing short sections for daily reading and thoughtful consideration. After his discussion of the Cross as moral revolution, he moves onto a discussion of the other events.
But it is his concluding sections on the meaning of the Resurrection that are very fine. This is only right, for as Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians (15:14), “if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain”.
He remarks that when the person at the tomb spoke on the Sunday morning to the women, those deeply symbolic first witnesses of a new faith, he asked them: “Why are you looking for the living among the dead? Go back to Galilee and you will find him there.”
Rolheiser continues that they did go back to Galilee, which is not so much a real location, but a place of the mind and heart. They want back to Galilee “to that special place in their hearts, to the dream to their discipleship, to the time when their hearts had most burned with hope and enthusiasm”.
Perhaps on Ash Wednesday, it might be as well to bear in mind that ultimate outcome.
The disciples on the road to Emmaus never reach the town – according to Rolheiser, a sort of “Roman Las Vegas or Monte Carlo of human consolation”. But they never reached it, because of that encounter on the road.
It is suggested that post-Easter we should all go back to Galilee. But the last section in the book, the 40th, about the comfort of the Resurrection being akin to the comfort a mother provides a small child who wakes in the dark filled with fears, is a profound reminder of the paradoxically maternal nature of Christ’s love for us all.
If we “go back to Galilee”, we too will find him there