c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ Christian theologians have explored the meaning of Holy Week for centuries, seeking a formula to explain how Jesus Christ redeemed us through his suffering and death. Amazing grace, indeed, but did God demand a payment for sin through the sacrifice of his son? Do preachers who rave on this theme know what they are talking about?

Or did God become man, less for our sins than for our sadness? For we may be ransomed from sin but we are never freed from our sorrows.

And of which do you think we have the greater supply, sin or suffering? And which, from a loving God, demands more mercy _ the human frailty that leads to sin or the human frailty that leaves us vulnerable to pain?

Still, we have grown up with the phrase,”Christ died for our sins,”sounding deeply in our souls. Perhaps the bookkeeping metaphor _ that Jesus paid for our sins _ unsettles us even as it leads scholars to speak of the”economy”of salvation. Did God send his son to participate in the central act of Christian history that is beggared by being described in the vocabulary of accountants?

In this desperate Holy Week, the last but one before the century closes, as the earth itself hangs crucified, can we not ask again, as human beings rather than theologians, why Christ was born and why he came into this world?

Can we be far off for imagining that Jesus came at least as much to share our sorrow as to lay down his life for our sins? Why else was Jesus referred to as a”man of sorrows”if not because he looked on men and women, as he did the multitude he was about to feed on the mountainside,”with compassion”?

Jesus beholds us all with compassion, revealing in the deep well of his own eyes how he regards the world. He had an eye, we know, for the downtrodden, for those bound by paralysis or by pain, for the lame and the diseased, for men and women bearing their burdens of pain and loss as communicants do the gifts of wine and bread to the altar of the Eucharist.

Jesus does not look on the human family to shame its members by seeing into their sins. Sin, as he observed, is easy to forgive. It begins when sinners recognize the truth of their actions and motives. Jesus commends to us the simplest of prayers because it fits our state,”Have mercy on me, for I am a sinner.” But if sin can be lifted away spiritually, suffering cannot. That is why, even physically, the weather sets off twinges in bones we thought long ago healed, and, spiritually, a few bars of music may instantly reinstate, at its full strength, a sorrow that we thought had lessened with the passage of time. Is it sin we see on the front pages or is it the grinding sorrow of the exiled and the afflicted? Rachel can be heard weeping everywhere for her lost children. These victims of war clutch each other and carry their children in those embraces that, along with memory, are all they have taken away from their burning villages. Their touch is all they have to give to each other.

Beyond them, streaming over the horizon, are those anxious people sitting in doctors’ offices or outside surgical suites, and the legions of the bereaved placing flowers on fresh graves, and beyond them, those in wheelchairs and nursing homes. It is the suffering rather than the poor we have always with us. Can we imagine that God does not understand this?

However the theologians explain redemption, we can, in this dread week, understand that sorrow outweighs sin in our world. Those whose sins have caused this melancholy pageant must be judged.

But the suffering of these innocents beyond number must be comforted and their sorrows made sacred by the suffering and death of Jesus. For Kosovo is Calvary and from its elevation we grasp that if God came so that we could lay down our sins, he may have come first to help us bear the burdens of sorrow that we can never put aside.

DEA END KENNEDY