Redemption and Suffering

Juventutum Vespers and Talk Düsseldorf

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
17 Aug 2005

On Ash Wednesday 2004 Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" premiered (for the first time, because of the dateline) in Sydney.

It was attacked beforehand as anti-Semitic (often by those who had seen no preview); then as showing too much violence, and violent it was, at excruciating length especially during the crucifixion.  The cinema network tried to prevent distribution.

Some of professed fear that it would be used by anti-Semitics was genuine, but secularists feared that it would be effective Christian teaching (with all its imperfections, I believe it was) while Catholic radicals feared it would give a boost to traditional understandings of redemption, which they wish to destroy.

For them too the redeeming cross is an anachronism, an embarrassing reminder of what they have jettisoned.  "Ave Crux, spes unica" is no longer a truth for them!

So a redemptive understanding of suffering is not only a radical point of difference between us and neo-paganism, but it is a sore point of difference, very deep and important in all the Christian communities and even our own Catholic church.  For pagans old and new, suffering is a brute fact, with no redemptive meaning.  They cannot offer it up.

The English Catholic magazine "The Tablet" (27/3/04) did us all a service by listing such a range of views.

There was a writer from "The National Catholic Reporter" in the USA.  "The Passion over-individualises the Christian message by portraying violence against Jesus himself as a central concern of Christian faith, separating this violence from violence in our own lives today."  In this way, "we are kept from seeing the banality of his death as something suffered by thousands of other political prisoners in his day.  For these reasons, The Passion cannot be called a Christian film".

More deeply and in fact in a thought provoking question a Protestant theologian from Sydney asked: "How can a flogging literally equate to hundreds of thousands being vaporised in an atomic blast over a city?  The relationship between these events is not of an outward "like for like" kind".

A priest theologian from Boston College claimed that the resurrection not the Cross is the foundation of our faith and that the film gives the wrong answer to why God became man.  The film gives the wrong answer to the question: why God became man.  It illustrates Anselm's atonement theory, which has held devotional meaning for a very long time but needs to be replaced.

Perhaps the worst of all was an Australian Catholic theologian at Oxford University.  Passion and death of Jesus; There is no deep meaning to it; nothing to be gained from picturing it in our minds, or on the cinema screen.  It is just the awful banality of evil, the utter predictability of the unfeeling cruelty human beings mete out to one another, and then justify by reason of statecraft or religion.  And it still goes on today, and is still defended today, even by religious leaders, and by the leaders of the so-called "free world".

In some ways we have even moved beyond Richard Niebuhr's verdict on "The Kingdom of God in America",

We want a God without wrath
who took a man without sin
into a kingdom without justice
through the ministrations of
a Christ without a cross.

Because the USA remains one of the most religious in history; much more religious than Australia and most parts of Europe.

A recent work of Pope Benedict "Truth and Tolerance" explains something of this new concept where the renunciation of the claim to truth is seen as a fundamental condition for peace.

The then Cardinal Ratzinger quoted an Egyptologist Jan Assmann, who claimed that Moses introduced notion of truth into religion, rejecting false Gods.  Hitherto religions had been pure or impure, sacred or profane; people could have a no of religious enthusiasms!  But Moses destruction of the Golden calf set an unfortunate precedent for monotheistic intolerance.

The "secular" task today is to return to ancient Egypt, to again remove the distinction between God and the world, a return to pantheism, a vague nature worship.

With this reversion there would be no more need for the notions of Sin and redemption.  Sin only came into the world with Moses according to this theory.  If there is no true and false religion, it is (?almost) impossible to distinguished good from evil.  "If there is no truth about man then he has no freedom, only the truth makes us free".

If there is no personal God, there is no possibility of judgement after death and therefore no need for Godly forgiveness, no possibility of reward or punishment.

We know Karl Marx's claim that religion was the opium of the people, numbering them and taking then away from the class struggle for justice.  In fact the contemporary poet Milosz is closer to the mark; the opium of the people today is mistaken belief they will not be judged after death by our good God.

Evil is real, evil committed by persons.  My group of pilgrims visited Auschwitz in route to Cologne; we saw again that evil is real and the scales of justice often do not balance in this life.  We need a just God to balance the scales in the next life, with the life, suffering and death of His own Divine Son eliminating or balancing the sins of the saved.

There are many dimensions to Christ's redeeming activity; indeed a diversity of orthodox emphasis as well as the radicals' rejection.  But a Christian can only start from the Scriptural evidence.

Key Scriptural quotations:

• Mark: the Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many.
• Eucharistic words of institution emphasis that Jesus body is given and blood shed for remission of our sins.
• Hebrews: Christ is both priest and sacrifice, spilling his own blood and thus securing our eternal redemption.
• Peter speaks of Christ's suffering as an example for us to follow.
• While Paul to the Colossians speaks of the cosmic and eternal consequences of Christ's death and resurrection over principalities and powers.

Many Christian today pass over Jesus' violent death quickly.  In Australia we have more at our Christmas Masses than at Easter.  So too outsiders and even Catholics, who believe in a one dimensional kind and tolerant Jesus, are disconcerted when reminded that Jesus was killed for his teaching and activities.  They are uneasy about crucifixion Christianity!

But Jesus' suffering is a wonderful help to us in our suffering.  Not only do we have his example, but we know that he, the Son of God, understands what great suffering is: God is not immune to human suffering, e.g. my first Easter at Notaresco for confessions.

It is a great consolation too to know that we can make up by our own suffering what is lacking in the suffering of Christ; that we can offer our sufferings, large or small, to Christ for a good purpose.

Redemption will stand us in good stead at the Last Judgement! If promise to good thief on cross.  Let me conclude with last three verses of the Dies Irae, dies illa:

Prepare me a place among the sheep,
and keep me from the goats
standing at your right hand

With the slanderers silenced,
sentenced to piercing flames,
call me with the blessed.

Kneeling I plead,
(my) contrite heart like ash:
carry my trouble until the end.