THE CENTRALITY OF THE CROSS

Passion/Palm Sunday B.  Mark 14:1-15:47.

AIM:  To help the hearers meditate on the cross. 

Bible scholars tell us that the passion narratives were the first part of the gospels to be written down. From the start the Christian community wanted to preserve faithfully every detail of the Lord=s suffering and death. Mark, whose account we have just heard, says nothing about Jesus= birth and infancy. But he devotes approximately a fifth of his gospel to Jesus= passion. For him, as for all the gospel writers, the cross was central.

Take the cross out of our religion, and you have ripped the heart out of it.  The late Archbishop Fulton Sheen illustrated this truth with a personal experience from the somewhat chaotic time after the second Vatican Council. Some of you may be offended by Sheen=s story. But the cross has offended people from the start. Paul called it Aa stumbling block to Jews, and an absurdity to Gentiles@ (1 Cor. 1:23). 

In his posthumously published memoir, Treasure in Clay, Sheen tells about receiving a phone call one day from a Jewish jeweler in New York whose shop he  had often visited. AWould you like to see a large number of silver crucifixes?@ the jeweler asked. When Sheen visited the shop, the jeweler showed him a little brown bag with dozens of silver crucifixes about four inches high. 

AWhere did you get them?@ Bishop Sheen asked.

AFrom Catholic Sisters,@ the jeweler answered. AThey brought them in to me and said they were not going to use them any more C wearing the crucifix separated them from the world. They wanted to know how much I would give them for the silver.@ The jeweler added: AI weighed them out thirty pieces of silver. What is wrong with your church?@ 

AJust that!@ Bishop Sheen replied. AThe contempt of Christ and his cross which makes it worldly.@

Fulton Sheen would not have been the man he was if he had not concluded the story by writing: AThose words became the channel of the Holy Spirit working in his soul. I explained to him the cost of redemption, the blood of Christ. He embraced the faith, and died in it.@ 

The Vietnamese bishop, Nguyen Van Thuan, who spent thirteen years in a Communist prison in Vietnam, before Pope John Paul II brought him to Rome, were he died as a cardinal in 2002, wrote during his time in prison: ALook at the cross and you will find the solution to all the problems that assail you.@ He was expressing what countless others have discovered: to learn the deepest meaning of our holy faith, we must take our stand beneath the cross and contemplate the One who hangs there. All the great lessons of life are learned at the foot of the cross.