Jesus would
not save Himself
Conclusion

What the crowds shouted turned out to be a perfect tribute to the Suffering Servant for it understood the necessity for sacrifice…vicarious sacrifice in our behalf.

Are we all called to follow Jesus in his way…in the way of the cross? Jesus has said even before the Good Friday event: “Anyone who comes after me must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

This word is addressed to all of us-to the old and the young, the learned and the uneducated, the rich and the poor-for, as St. Paul puts it, Jesus died his way of sacrificial death that we, too, may die with him.

We are generally cynical about the words of politicians. Quite a number of people are cynical about Pres. Macapagal Arroyo’s declaration that she will not run in 2004 and make the supreme sacrifice for the nation. She says it is her way of concentrating on the needs of our people without the constraints of a political struggle. We shall know after a year (Dec. 30, 2003) what GMA means. I am willing to accept her word that she has arrived at her decision after struggling with God in prayer. Lesser mortals than Gloria-some domestic helpers I met in Singapore-are are doing their human best to sacrifice working under exacting and sometimes overbearing employees for their college students back home. It is along the same principle that a man in Pangasinan saved a little girl from drowning, but in the process, he lost his life. Of course the sacrifice of Senator Ninoy Aquino comes to mind. He could have escaped being a prisoner had he bent his knees to the dictator, but he made the ultimate sacrifice for his people. He said: “The Filipino is worth dying for.” In former President Corazon Aquino’s speech before the U.S. Congress, she spoke about Ninoy’s ordeal:

Mr. Marcos detained my husband along with thousands of others-senators, publishers and anyone who had spoken up for the democracy as its end drew near. But for Ninoy, a long and cruel ordeal was reserved. The dictator already knew that Ninoy was not a body merely to be imprisoned but a spirit he must break. For even as the dictatorship demolished one by one the institutions of democracy-the press, the Congress, the independence of the judiciary, the protection of the Bill of Rights-Ninoy kept their spirit alive in himself.

The government sought to break him by indignities and terror. They locked him up in a tiny, nearly airless cell in a military camp in the north, they stripped him naked and held the threat of sudden midnight execution over his head. Ninoy held up manfully all of it.

But our best sacrifices are, just as I said, our human best. The most poignant story of Jesus’ sacrifice is recorded in the prophetic words of Isaiah (53):

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up out infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord ha laid on him the iniquity of us all.

And Jesus did not save himself.*

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