Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday B, March 24, 2024
Is.45:21-25 Ps. 22:1-11
Phil. 2:5-11 St. Mark’s Passion Gospel
The Ignatius Method is a method of prayer and reflection deriving from one of the founders of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola who was born the year before Columbus sailed for America.
The Ignatius method includes a guided meditation and reflection contemplation with vivid visualization and imaginations on the events in the life of Jesus, particularly, his Passion, as a way of experiencing a Christly presence in one's life. Of course, the Passion accounts were the inspiring textual sources for these exercises.
While we acknowledge the Ignatius Method as significant, we might also observe that the Ignatian Method is but a copy of what was already happening with the writing of the Passion Accounts. One might say the Ignatius Method is a Practice of a longstanding existing practice.
The Gospels were written methods of the remembrance of Jesus. They were the spiritual contemplation, reflections, and imaginations in the spiritual methods of the Gospel writers. The words were guides in the Gospels as discipleship manuals for those being trained in the mystagogy of the Jesus Movement.
Why would I call the Gospels a spiritual method of remembrance? They were not eye witness historical accounts written contemporaneously when Jesus lived. They weren't written in Hebrew or Aramaic but in the common koine Greek, a lingua franca that had been in use since the time of Alexander the Great and his successor generals.
The Gospels were spiritual reflections being made accessible to Gentiles who were coming into the early communities of the Jesus Movement. One can see the Gospels as directed meditations which arose to indicate that the early Christians believed that the Risen Christ could be known to be present again and through word and sacrament.
An important feature of words of Holy Eucharist is the notion of remembrance, or in the Greek anamnesis, which is more than simple remembrance; rather a dynamic remembrance which combines the recited words of Jesus with actions of serving the bread and the wine, and it has the effect of making the presence of Christ known again.
St. Paul wrote his own method of dynamic remembrance when he penned, "I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer l that live, but it is Christ who lives within me." His remembrance of the crucified Christ is so real that his own identity becomes known to be wedded with Christ.
As we read again the Passion of Jesus Christ today, let us accept these words as the dynamic remembrances of the Gospel writers who like St. Paul were sharing the mystical method of their community in coming to know an identity with the ever current presence of the Risen Christ.
Since so many treat the Passion Accounts more like historical accounts rather than spiritual practice of remembrance of being identified with the Risen Christ now, the result like so much of "church Christianity" is to dwell more on the external features of the person of Jesus. We can treat the Passion more like the Passion Play theatre or like the graphic cinematic "Passion of Christ." This can lots of emotions and we might miss the spiritual purpose of the Passion Account, namely, the deep inward personal identity.
In my view, I think we need to return to how the Gospel accounts of the Passion were written. They were written to be the early method of realizing the presence of Christ through the written words which helped to visualize what identity with the Risen Christ means for us now.
My prayer is that each would approach the Gospel passion account in a mysticism like St.Paul's, as a dynamic remembrance of the Risen Christ, whose realized presence can bring each of us to confess, "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but it is Christ who lives within me." Amen.
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