(The Nationalist, 19 March 2006)
Palm Sunday marks the start of Holy Week, (not Easter Week, as it is sometimes called in the media; that’s the one after it.) It’s a day which marks the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, bringing to completion the period of his public preaching, and commemorating his suffering, death and resurrection. It isn’t the dying and rising of Jesus alone that we recall in Holy Week. It’s ours also – our past, present, and future suffering, dying and rising. As Christ, so also the Christian.
An example of this is found in a note, by an unknown person, left beside the body of a dead child in Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany at the end of World War II:
‘Peace to all those of evil will. Let there be an end to demands for punishment and retribution. Crimes have surpassed all measure and can no longer be grasped by human understanding. There are too many martyrs. So, Lord, do not weigh their sufferings on the scales of justice, nor lay those sufferings to the torturers’ charge to exact a terrible reckoning from them’.
‘Pay them back in a different way. Put down in favour of the executioners, the informers, the traitors and all those of evil will, the courage, the spiritual strength of others, their humility, their lofty dignity, their constant inner striving and their invincible hope; put down in their favour the smiles, the tears, their love, their ravaged broken hearts that remained constant and faithful in the face of death itself, yes, even at the moment of utmost weakness’.
‘Let all this, Lord, be laid before you for the forgiveness of sin, a ransom for the triumph of righteousness. Let the good, not the evil, be taken into account, and may we remain in our enemies’ memory, not as their victims, not as their nightmare, not as a haunting ghost, but as helpers in their striving to wipe out the fury of their criminal passion. There is nothing more that we want of them’.
In Ravensbrück, as in all concentration camps, there was suffering and dying aplenty. Where was the rising? One place was in the mind and heart of the writer of that note. That person rose above hatred, anger, bitterness, and vengeance. The person is probably now dead, but their message of good in the face of evil continues to live and to inspire. How much nobler is that than the relentless pursuit of vengeance (sometimes disguised as the desire for justice). Dying to vindictiveness enables a person to rise to freedom.
For those in a hurry: ‘Forgiveness is an act of freedom. Those who forgive do not allow themselves to be controlled by the evil their enemy has done to them. They create a new and different kind of relationship in which evil does not have the final say. The new justice does not consist in destroying evildoers but in freeing them from their own will to destruction. In vengeance, the roles are merely reversed’. (Hugo Echegaray, The Project of Jesus, p.106)