Cedric Pisegna - Passion Sunday
Hi, I’m Father Cedric Pisegna. So glad that you tuned into the program. This is a very special week. This is called Palm Sunday, or Passion Sunday. We now enter into Holy Week, and we always have this reading every year from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. «Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness and found in human appearance. He humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name, which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father,» the Word of the Lord.
Passion week. You’ll see behind me it’s all red as we come to Holy Week. Red, the color of blood. The word «passion» means suffering, and Jesus suffered for you and for me. Even if you’re not a Christian, you understand that the message of Christianity is that Jesus died on a cross for the whole world. Everybody understands that. The Passion was a terrible event. It involved a lot of suffering. It was a humiliating torture. and perhaps our crucifixes are a little too antiseptic. They are almost decorative and they’re ornaments in churches. People wear 'em around their necks, and tattoo 'em on their arms, and put them on their ears as earrings.
People wear them as ornaments, but a crucifix was a cross, was an instrument of torture. I have seen many different crucifixes in my life, and perhaps some of those Spanish crucifixes that depict the blood and the scars and the wounds that Jesus truly bore are what we should be having in our churches instead of these real clean and antiseptic crosses that don’t really speak to us about what this was. This was a horrific torture involving intolerable suffering. You probably saw the movie «The Passion of the Christ» by Mel Gibson, a Catholic. And if you saw that movie, you realized how violent, and how long it took, and how bloody. It seemed to go on forever and ever and ever. And can you imagine Jesus as he went through this?
In the second reading that I read from Mass, the reading from Philippians, it talks about how Jesus was in the form of God, but he didn’t deem equality with God something to be grasped; rather, and the word in the Greek is «kenosis». I really think this is the word at the heart of Lent, at the heart of my Passionist charism, as a Passionist religious, and really, at the heart of Christianity. «Kenosis,» he emptied himself.
Remember what the journey of Lent is. It’s a journey from selfishness to selflessness. We are to deny ourself, take up our cross daily, and follow Jesus. The cross for Jesus was obedience. It was sacrificial. When we talk about God’s love, God’s love is many things. It’s affectionate. Talked about that in one of my episodes. It’s intimate, it’s powerful, but it’s sacrificial. Those of you who are parents, you realize that your love for children, your children, involves sacrifice. It involves time, it involves money, it involves your counsel, your being with them. Sacrifice, in this case, involved intolerable suffering. Jesus went through something that no human being, no animal should have to go through. He was nailed to a tree and it was awful.
And like I said, even the hardest of hearts realized it was for you and for me. I belong to a religious community called the Passionists. We are dedicated to the passion of Christ. And when I say dedicated, I mean we profess a vow. You see on my heart our sign and it means «The passion of Jesus Christ» in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. We profess a vow, our first vow, which no one else in the church takes, to meditate upon, to appreciate, and to proclaim the passion of Jesus to all the faithful. It is my joy, through television, to be proclaiming the passion to you as a Passionist priest. This is who I am and this is what I do. And it is my highest honor to proclaim the love of God in the passion of Jesus.
We Passionists were founded in 1720, over 300 years ago, in Italy by a man named Paul Danei. Paul Danei was a priest and he was subsequently canonized by the Catholic Church. He is now a saint: Saint Paul of the Cross. In his preaching, he loved to point to the passion. And he would say, «People are looking for miracles. This is the miracle of miracles». He said everything is to be found in the passion: forgiveness and mercy and salvation. And he said it’s the most overwhelming work of God’s love. The cross is captivating. It captures our attention. It convicts us and it draws us in. Jesus said, «Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert».
You remember what happened then. They just lifted up the serpent that bit them and they were healed just by looking at it. He said, «So must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes wouldn’t perish, but have eternal life». And that’s how salvation and redemption and forgiveness comes. Can’t earn it, we don’t merit it, we can never deserve it, but it’s by looking in faith. A lot of people look at the cross as an ornament. As I said, they decorate their homes with it, put it on their necks. That’s the way I used to do it when I was a young man, but I didn’t really know what it meant. I didn’t look at it in faith. But when you personalize the cross, what I mean by that is when you say, «That’s for me. He did that for me,» that’s when it starts to have efficacy and power and forgiveness and cleansing and washing and salvation.
The cross is the crux of Christianity. It’s not a decoration. It’s the heart of the whole thing. I lived a life of a teenager as a young man, born and brought up Catholic, but I fell away like most, living the life of a college student, and then I decided to make a move back toward God, and in order to do that, I needed to receive forgiveness, and I needed forgiveness, just like we all do. And perhaps that’s some of the problem with the world today. They don’t sense their need for forgiveness. I came to confession. Confession, the sacrament of reconciliation, is a celebration of the cross. Any sacrament in our Catholic church is the celebration of Jesus dying and rising. We are absolved in the sign of the cross. And I received forgiveness.
I came to the cross, and that’s what I invite everybody to do that’s watching this program. Come to the cross. Go to confession, if you’re Catholic. Give your life to Christ crucified. Paul the apostle said, «I decided among you that I would preach nothing but Christ and him crucified, the power of God, and the wisdom of God». People are looking for power. They’re looking for wisdom. And this is what God gives us: the passion, the cross. It was for our transgressions that he was wounded. He was bruised so that we could be healed. And as you meditate on upon that, how can you hold on to that stuff? You lay your burdens down. You give it to Jesus. You experience the cleansing and the washing. That’s what we all need is inner healing.
The «kerygma» is another word in Greek. That’s the message. The proclamation of the early church right from the Scriptures was, is, and always will be forgiveness and salvation at the cross. We are forgiven our transgressions. They somehow identified a carpenter from Galilee being crucified on an instrument of torture as God’s means of forgiveness. Scholars tell us that the passion narratives were the first bits of information to be written down as the gospel and the other parts of the gospel grew from the passion narratives. They didn’t hide the fact that Jesus was crucified, they tried to highlight it because it’s at the passion that we are forgiven. It’s at the passion that we are redeemed. And it’s at the passion that we have eternal life.
That’s one of the reasons why I became a Passionist, because I experienced the efficacy of what the passion is. This is how Christianity grew. People received the forgiveness of their sins, received the power of the Holy Spirit, received eternal life. Pope Francis wrote an apostolic exhortation, and it was to young people but also to the entire church, to the entire world, and it was called, «Christ Lives,» about the Resurrection. And he said in his apostolic exhortation, «There are three great truths I want to proclaim to you. Number one, God loves you». And I’ve proclaimed that to you all of Lent. «Number two, Christ is alive». He’s not a dead Christ. He’s a living Christ. «And then number three, God saves you».
And on this Passion Sunday, that’s what I wanna concentrate on as we go into Holy Week and Easter. God saves you. Listen to what he said in paragraph 118. This is the Pope. This is the pontiff of the Catholic Church. «Christ, out of love, sacrificed himself completely in order to save you. Look to his cross, cling to him, let him save you». I love what Psalm 63:8 says, «My soul clings to you. Your right hand holds me fast». And that’s exactly what the Pope is saying. If you wanna cling to anything in life, don’t cling to the attractions and the addictions and the material goods and mammon and money and possessions. Cling to Christ.
Dr. Peter Kreeft was a teacher at Boston College. He would do something very interesting to the incoming freshmen. He would ask them a question and said, «If you were to die today and go face to face with God, and God were to ask you, 'Why should I let you into heaven? ' what would you tell him»? And he got some interesting answers from these freshmen, Catholic college, university students. Most of them said, «Well, God would let me into heaven because I’m a nice person,» or «God would let me into heaven because I’m good,» or «I haven’t hurt anybody. I haven’t killed anybody». That’s the answer that secular society gives. «I’m good. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m nice to people».
That’s the gospel of the world. Dr. Kreeft said he was shocked at these answers, that Catholic students could actually get to that level, to a university level, of Catholic Christian education, and not know the answer to the most important question that Catholicism offers us: How do we get to heaven? None of them talked about the cross, the passion. They’ve all been to Mass countless times. Mass is a celebration. Eucharist is a celebration of the death and the Resurrection of Jesus for you and me. We are saved by Christ crucified. That’s celebrated in every sacrament. And you might be thinking, «Well, wait a minute. We’re saved. What are you talking about? Isn’t that presumption»?
Presumption isn’t blessed assurance, knowing that you’re saved at the cross. Presumption is precisely what these children were doing: thinking that you can be saved by your own good works, by being nice, by being good enough. That’s presumption, right from the Catholic catechism. No, no, we’re saved only by the love of God revealed in the passion. Wow. I invite you to cling to the cross. Pope Francis said, «Let Jesus save you». I love that old hymn, comes from George Bernard; Youngstown, Ohio; from 1900; that old hymn, «The Old Rugged Cross». «On a hill far away, stood an old, rugged Cross, the emblem of suffering and shame, so I’ll cherish the old, rugged cross till my trophies at last I lay down. I will cling to the old, rugged cross and exchange it someday for a crown», wow, cling to the old, rugged cross, our only hope, our living hope.
Saint Paul of the Cross said, «Look at a crucifix, look at a cross, and it’ll preach you a sermon». Saint Francis of Assisi heard that sermon. He looked at a Byzantine crucifix and it started speaking to him. I’ve been to Assisi. It’s in the Church of Saint Clare and it’s called the talking cross because Francis heard, from this Byzantine crucifix, he heard Jesus tell him, «Go repair my house. It’s falling into ruin». First, he tried to repair the dilapidated San Damiano Church. Then he went out to the piazzas. He realized that Jesus wasn’t talking about brick and mortar. He was talking about flesh and blood, and he preached the gospel in a very bold, simple way. Yes, the cross will preach a sermon. And when I look at the cross, the sermon that it preaches me, first of all, I see a love without limits.
As I told you, the cross was a torture device. And the fact that Jesus would humble himself and he didn’t have to, even to the point of death, death on a cross, tells me that in God’s love, there is a height and a depth and a length and a breadth that we’ve never known before. You can go to the Grand Canyon and see the depth, and you can look up at the stars and see the height, but God’s love supersedes all that at the cross. God so loved the world that he gave. Psychologists tell us that love is many things: a decision, it’s affection. Most of all, it’s sacrificial. Love is sacrificial.
Every sacrament in the Catholic church, whether it be Eucharist, baptism, confession, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, anointing of the sick, it’s the sacrament of God’s sacrificial love. It’s a sacrament proclaiming the cross, the death, and the Resurrection, the Paschal mystery of Jesus Christ. And we celebrate the sacraments because we’re saved by these sacraments. We’re saved by the cross and the Resurrection of Jesus revealed in the sacraments. Thirty-five years ago, I studied in Israel and went over to the Holy Land and lived there for three months. I’ve led a couple pilgrimages back. I love taking people over there, because I feel right at home. They call it the fifth Gospel.
Of course Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but the land itself is the fifth Gospel, where Jesus himself walked. Had the privilege of going to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Traditionally, it was built by Constantine in the year 325, traditionally right over the site of Mount Calvary, which was a limestone quarry. That’s why it was a little mount they… not too tall, probably 30-feet high. Every Friday for three hours, they actually close that church and they lock it. Nobody can come in; nobody can go out. I knew one of the Franciscans there who has custody of the Holy Land, you know, of that particular church, while I was studying there. He allowed me to be locked into that church. Usually it’s bustling and hustling with people, and I was able to be locked into that church for three hours by myself.
There was a couple Franciscans in there, doing their jobs, but for the most part, you can barely get up those steps of Calvary, there’s about 20 steps or so up. And I went up there all by myself. And there on Mount Calvary, as I prayed and I had a Bible with me, right underneath the altar, there’s a place where you can reach down and actually touch the limestone quarry, the place, the very place, we believe that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. And I sat there for hours with my Bible, reading the passion accounts and meditating. I was a seminarian at the time and I remember, in the quiet at that place, there were no people, I remember feeling the vibrations transcending the 2,000 years that, on that spot, the Son of God suffered intolerably for me and for the world. It was like I was at the center of the universe and in a time machine.
I remember promising God. I said, «Should I ever be ordained, I promise that I will proclaim, to the best of my ability, what happened here». Well, I was ordained, and little did I know that God was gonna give me the platform of television and radio, the platform of missionary preaching to proclaim the good news about Jesus Christ and his passion. And now, through writing, through preaching, through media, through every way possible, I proclaim to the world that Jesus came for you and for me, that he suffered on the cross and died so that we could be forgiven and have eternal life.
I went to the catacombs, and there in the catacombs, they found the earliest statue of Jesus. It was a statue of a shepherd with a little lamb around its neck. And you know what happens? The little lamb will stray and the shepherd will go looking for it. And inevitably, the lamb will get stuck in a hazardous place, maybe a thorn bush or in a little crevice somewhere, and the shepherd will find it and extricate it from the place where it’s stuck, put it around his neck, and bring it home. That’s exactly what Jesus is doing for us. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, he said, «The Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep».
That’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s extricating us from our misery, from our sin, and from death itself. And where is he taking us? He’s taken us to heaven. That’s what salvation is. That’s what Jesus, the Good Shepherd, is doing at the cross. Jesus said, «No greater love has someone than to give his life for that person. There’s no greater love than to give up your life for another person. I am the Good Shepherd and I lay down my life for my sheep». During Lent, we’ve been in the desert. We’ve been to the mountaintop. We’ve fasted. We’ve prayed. We’ve given alms. We’ve done penance. We’ve laid our burdens down. We’ve taken up our cross and followed Jesus. Now we end up at the foot of the cross. On Good Friday, we will venerate the cross. And it’s there that we look at the cross and listen to the sermon that it preaches. And what does God say in this sermon? At the cross, God says, «I love you and I will always love you».