Light On Dark Water

St. Edith Stein 6

I treasure the Palm Sunday liturgy for the opportunity it
gives me to demand that Jesus be crucified. (For any
non-Catholics reading this, the traditional Palm Sunday liturgy
involves a lengthy reading of the Passion narrative in which the
congregation speaks the words of the mob.) Presumably we all like
to think we would have stood by Our Lord when his own people as
well as the Roman authorities were demanding his blood, but
surely we flatter ourselves. No, much more fitting that we should
put ourselves in the role of those who shouted “Crucify
Him!” To speak these words as part of a reading of the
entire story of the arrest and crucifixion is to discern in the
hatred of the Jerusalem crowd the same detestation of the good
which is spoken of in the book of Wisdom:
“He was made to reprove our thoughts.
He is grievous unto us even to behold.”

And it is to feel something familiar to us all, or at least to
anyone who has ever reflected on the psychology of his own sin:
the violent thrusting aside of that which is in the way of the
wrong we have determined to do. One need not have committed
murder or adultery to know it; it’s enough to recall the
ecstatic moment in which we surrender to an outburst of rage, or
crush the protest of conscience against malicious gossip.

There have been a few attempts in recent years to take this
role in the Palm Sunday reading away from the congregation, I
suppose because it’s too negative or something. That is at
best misguided. We need reminders like this. To attempt to remove
them from our lives is like attempting to keep a child from
burning his fingers by anesthetizing them. To attempt to remove
them from the practice of the Catholic faith is to make the faith
itself superfluous and meaningless.

If I do not see in myself the same conscience-murdering
impulse that drove the mob against Jesus, I become blind in the
only way that really matters. The knowledge of my own wish for
death is the only thing that gives me hope of life.

Against the grain of contemporary thought which wishes, either
sentimentally or in reaction to excessive harshness in the past,
to absolve of responsibility those who are unwilling to hear the
word of God, St. Edith Stein has a perhaps alarming
corrective:

Although we ought not to think it impossible that an
unbeliever (meaning someone completely ignorant of God) could
lack personal guilt and thereby be impervious to the
image-language of Holy Scripture, we should not reject all
human guilt….In most cases…the
‘unbeliever’ will share the responsibility for his
blindness.

And, a little further:

In the case of someone who from mental lethargy and
apathy or carelessness fails to gain any knowledge of God, his
inability should rather be taken as punishment.

I hear the gates of Hell swing open here. The more the
unbeliever refuses to hear, the more he becomes incapable of
hearing. This is the mystery which I brought up several weeks ago
in relation to Matthew 25:29 (“For unto everyone that hath
shall be given…but from him that hath not shall be taken
away…”): the culpability of one who fails to receive
the truth which can be known but not proven. Although it is the
practicing atheist who is referred to in this passage, the same
process and the same judgment may be operative in the life of an
ostensible believer. How can it be just that one should be damned
for not knowing? But how can it be just that he be saved if he
refuses to know?

When does ignorance become willful and
culpable? The psychological movements which constitute such a decision
on the part of a soul must be so subtle that we may well be
thankful that we are forbidden to judge them in others, and
have responsibility only for our own.