HISTORIANS SURMISE THAT ON GOOD FRIDAY, two days before Easter Sunday in 1727, devout families gathered on a spring evening at the Church of St Thomas (Thomaskirche) in Leipzig, Germany, where Johann Sebastian Bach was the school cantor and choir director. That night there would be special music in two parts, one part before and one after the sermon. That music was Bach’s newly completed St. Matthew Passion, some three or more hours of sacred music for several soloists, a chamber ensemble, three choirs (two adult and one boy’s choir), two orchestras and (initially) two pipe organs (it was customary to have a very large one and a smaller one in the more substantial churches).

By the end of this mammoth evening of edification, the congregation would have experienced a slow march through the events of Matthew chapters 26 and 27, from Jesus’ prediction of his death to His burial – with a substantial, early Reformation sermon inserted between Judas’ kiss and the interrogation before Caiaphas. All night Christ suffers want, temptation, betrayal, rejection. He experiences as no one else could the condemnation of the Father. He undergoes torture and heartbreak, expends and endures and exhausts His resources in a passion of obedience to the point of death and even hell. These events have come to be called The Passion of Christ.

But this is not the only Passion in the life of Christ, indeed, it’s hard to imagine anything He did or that surrounded the historical event of His coming to earth as not being a passion. What if we spent Christmas Eve in labor with Mary, heaven itself mystified, like those sober churchgoers in Bach’s time spent their Saturday with Christ in the grave and neither on earth nor in heaven? When you string together the pregnancies of Elizabeth and Mary, the visitation of angels, the struggle of Joseph to believe the woman he was engaged to marry was pregnant via the Holy Spirit, the journey to Bethlehem, the angelic choir: “Sing in exaltation,” the visit of the shepherds, the mystery of God in the form of a vulnerable baby, the attempt of King Herod to find and murder the newborn “Jewish king,” the wholesale slaughter of all Jewish male infants under 2 years old by the Roman emperor, the moving star in the heavens, the no longer moving star in the heavens, and the visitation of the kings, is there any less passion in these things? The human birth of God is a Christmas Eve Passion, and a profound mystery into which even angels long to look.

Marti, with some more thoughts on passion…

Passion – I love the word. But whenever I say it everyone starts to squirm.

Passion means to me to take chances; to celebrate; to create a life worth living. To be passionate is whole-hearted-ness. To momentarily dismiss the security guards of our cerebral matter to experience Passion is everything.

Don’t roll your eyes at me. And don’t be scared. The thing about Passion is to have the right Object, the one-you are passionate-about; to trust the Creator of the Universe that there is no shortage of worthy people to love, that one leads to the other up and down a Jacob’s ladder of goodness from God to us. Find a heart’s desire for which passion will always result in the right direction, if not always the perfect outcome – it is a step on that ladder. You can know everything and be wrong, you can know nothing and be right; Passion for what is good and the source of all good increases goodness, the sense of who God is, wherever it goes regardless of whether its path ends in exaltation or crucifixion, or anywhere recognizable at all.

Passion overcomes the barriers we are forever stumbling over. Passion makes our darkness bright – and who truly enjoys the utter loneliness of the self? Passion turns inside out our unloveliness into rapturousness. And isn’t the reflection a thing of beauty?

Experiencing passion creates energy – not the Red Bull kind but the genuine life-giving kind. We are not talking about nervous energy but life-producing energy, that can be felt down to the bottom of your toes, and at the same time is transmitted out to such a high degree that anyone who wants to can pick it up and run with it too.

The power of passion allows us to see who we really are, who we are becoming and who we are never going to be if we let go of it. Passion separates what is said and what really is.

Passion is willing to take risks and you cannot take risks without it. Fear – real disabling fear – cannot live in the same room with passion. One has to go – and you are a fool to let passion go just because you were once burned, went for it and failed, and/or loved and lost. Passion doesn’t get along with nays sayers, soulless reasoners and arrogant egos, all friends of Fear.

Passion can prick itself on the thorns. But when it bleeds, passion will always fall to its knees with exaltation. Passion cries, sings, inspires, welcomes change, loves, understands with empathy, encourages others to feel, and compliments conflicts.

Something is coming –
Out of the Darkness
Joy to the world – Passion is born!
This Christmas Eve – Passion is held in our arms and felt in our heart forever and ever and into eternity.