On Passion

It's Passion week. As part of my own personal ritual, though I hate to call it that lest it actually become so, and not remain more the exercise I believe it to be, strengthening my faith and empowering my understanding, rather than deadening it through the accommodation of a practiced routine, nevertheless, I'm gearing up to watch "The Passion of the Christ" on Friday.

I went through it a week or two ago, sort of haphazardly looking for a spark of emotion, just because, and I managed to find one, though I may yet regret it. I thought about it a few days later, my seeming lack of emotion, when a co-worker came into the office complaining that she was sick.
I've had little-to-no interaction with my co-workers. I'm on an off-synced schedule with the majority, working afternoons to nights, whereas it's mostly a morning job. At any rate, this sick young woman comes into the office nigh breaking into tears and I sat staring at a computer screen, listening to my i-pod, thinking what a crock it was that she wanted to go to the hospital for the symptoms she was describing.
I didn't care.
How horrible is that?
I thought about it while she was there, scrounging to go to a doctor, literally analyzing my utter lack of care, not worry, but total indifference, not knowing this person from any stranger I'd pass in the street, or perhaps knowing more, and thereby caring less due to biases and prejudices I've built from insignificant interactions that I found mildly grating.
Am I so petty?
She was back to work and smiling the next day which led me to reinforce my disinterest.

But I was thinking about the Passion: the suffering, the pain, the agony, the torture, and regardless of how you feel about the movie, the cast, Mel Gibson, or any other controversy surrounding that particular depiction, regarding it's veracity, or theological insertions or interpretations, it's one barometer by which to viscerally measure the true meaning of Easter.

It begs another question though: when did the word "passion", regarding the suffering and all the rest listed above, come to mean primarily sexual desire as it is most often used today? For my part, I get it. My own experiences in love have culminated in a lot of pain. Whether or not my "passion" was understood throughout my private ordeal as pain, or love, or forever interchangeable, is something I hope to one day figure out. In the context of the greater human experience does the connection hold? It's seems to me of late, more and more, that it does indeed.

There is no greater love than this.

Christ endured his passion for us, and I include my co-worker, those I hurt, those who've hurt me, my family, my friends, and even yourself. However the story doesn't end there. We are called to do likewise, to take up our cross, follow, lay down our lives, our wealth, our perceived tangible economic security, all things here and now, for the promise of the eternal. And I don't know how to do that steeped in indifference. I can't. In difference is an antonym for the word that encompasses this very idea: compassion. To suffer with, to take the pain of, to desire the alleviation of others' troubles.

The Passion of the Christ can not be separated from Christ's compassion completed, for it was our suffering he took freely upon his undeserving self, and not by sitting with his arm around us, not by offering anonymous thoughts into a void, but by actually doing what had to be done once and for all, declaring as the Word of God incarnate that "It is finished" and breathing the last breath of suffering on behalf of sin any need ever breathe. All we have left to do is declare to those in need what has been done, reconcile circumstances to reality, and not continue to fail miserably as seems to be my practice.

In ways I think I'd prefer to take the sickness; let me vomit on your behalf if it spares me having to talk to you. God help me. This isn't finished.