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Viewpoint from Rev Phil Rodd 04/04/2025
 Rev Phil Rodd
Team Vicar, Flegg South, Flegg Parish Churches
Serving the churches of: All Saints Billockby, St Peter’s Clippesby, St Margaret’s Fleggburgh, St Peter & St Paul Runham, St Andrew’s Stokesby, St Edmund’s Thurne
Passionate about Suffering?
This year Easter comes unusually very late – and although we’re already into April, there’s still over a fortnight to go till this, the biggest of our Christian festivals. So for now, I’m still counting the days till Lent comes to an end, and till I can enjoy the glass of wine and the nice piece of beef that I’ve so been looking forward to since Lent began early in March!
This coming Sunday, which falls a fortnight before Easter, is sometimes known as Passion Sunday. ‘Passion’ here isn’t about strong emotions; it comes rather from the Latin word for suffering, and connects to all that Christ went through leading up to his death on the cross
 Now, most of us hate suffering. Not without due reason. Yes, some good can come when things don’t all click into place for us – but suffering, well, that’s different. There are so many things that cause us to suffer: be it pain, loneliness, fear; and all too frequently, the treatment (if there is one) can be very daunting. So we do all we can to avoid suffering – sometimes, unwisely, even denying that there’s anything that needs attending to
Jesus, however, seemed to look at suffering in a totally different way. One of the later writers in the Bible says that he ‘endured the cross’, that brutally cruel form of capital punishment that the Romans had perfected. It certainly cost him, and without doubt the pain was beyond anything that any of us could ever imagine
And yet his suffering means that he knows about our suffering, and many Christians have spoken of an awareness of Jesus being present with them as they’ve gone through illness or tough times. I remember my mother in her final days holding a small wooden cross; it clearly helped her to feel Jesus there with her - to know that she wasn’t alone
As for Jesus, he ‘endured the cross’, and ‘scorned its shame’, as the writer I mentioned puts it, sure in the knowledge that he was achieving a ‘great salvation’ for our human race, and freeing us for all time from all that ties us to the selfish drudgery of our greed and sin – freeing us to fulfil our role as daughters and sons of God, created in his image
In the other sense of the word, that’s definitely something to be ‘passionate’ about!
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