ADD PASSION TO YOUR LIFE

Our daughter, Kristen, is a soloist performing Bach’s “St. John’s Passion” this week in Los Angeles. When the conductor asked if she would sing the part, she replied, “I have passion for the passion.” We like her choice of words.

Today is a day for passion.

Matthew tells us that Mary Magdalene and Mary, mother of James and Salome, had gone at dawn to tend to Jesus’ body. Instead, they found an empty tomb and an angel who told them that Jesus had risen, just as he had forecast. Go quickly and tell the disciples, the angel instructed. “Afraid, but full of joy, they departed.”

How can you be afraid, but full of joy? Yet, it is with those emotions that Mary and Mary lead us these centuries later from our focus in the past two days on the fearsome passion of Christ, that is, his suffering and death, to the joyous passions of Christ to which he dedicated his life and his ministry.

As Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan in their book, The Last Week, tell us: “The first passion of Jesus was the kingdom of God, what life would be like if God were king, and the rulers, denomination systems and empires of this world were not.”

Indeed, the joy for us this Easter are those things Christ was passionate about – the lessons of his teaching and his example to love the unloved, to be faithful to his family and friends and to serve those in need of special care.

These passions of Christ are the true calling of this church and of this family of worshippers gathered in the name of the Good Shepherd. We see these passions of Christ in the faces of our children as they sing and study and in the care and patience of their teachers. We see the passions of Christ in our members’ Lakota and Katrina mission trips and in the work of our teenagers. We see the passions of Christ at the Bethany Women’s Center. We see the passions of Christ in our time together as a church family as we work, sing and celebrate and grieve together and in our daily lives at work, at school, in our community and with friends and family.

Our prayer then is that as we remember the life of Christ, we especially remember his passions – his ministry to the poor and suffering, his challenge to the rich and privileged and his care for the people he loved. Remember in particular that it is the calling of this church and of this group of people to be the hands of God in this community. Passionately and joyfully.

— Haydee and Jim Toedtman

Courtesy of The Church of the Good Shepherd United Methodist