1. This was in the monthly Magnificat a number of years ago today from Saint Ephrem the Syrian:
Our Lord was trampled by death, and turned to tread a path beyond death. He is the one who submitted and endured death, as it willed, in order to overthrow death, contrary to (death’s) will. Our Lord carried his cross and set forth as death willed. But on the cross he called out and brought the dead out of Sheol, contrary to death’s will. With the very weapon that death had used to kill him, he gained the victory over death. Divinity disguised itself in humanity and approached death, which killed, then was killed: death killed natural life, but supernatural life killed death.
Since death was unable to devour him without a body, or Sheol to swallow him without flesh, he came to a Virgin to provide himself with a means to Sheol. They had brought him a donkey to ride when he entered Jerusalem to announce her destruction and the expulsion of her children. And with a body from a Virgin he entered Sheol, broke into its vaults, and carried off its treasures. Then he came to Eve, mother of all the living. She is the vine whose fence death broke down with her own hands in order to sample her fruit. And Eve, who had been mother of all the living, became a fountain of death for all the living. But Mary, the new shoot, sprouted from Eve, the old vine, and new life dwelt in her. When death came confidently, as usual, to feed on mortal fruit, life, the killer of death, was lying in wait, so that when death swallowed life with no apprehension, it would vomit it out, and many others with it.
So the Medicine of Life flew down from above and joined himself to that mortal fruit, the body. And when death came as usual to feed, life swallowed death instead. This is the food that hungered to eat the one who eats it. Therefore, death vomited up the many lives which it had greedily swallowed because of a single fruit which it had ravenously swallowed. The hunger that drove it after one was the undoing of the voraciousness that had driven it after many. Death succeeded in eating the one fruit, but it quickly vomited out the many. As the one fruit was dying on the cross, many of the buried came forth from Sheol at the sound of his voice…
This is the Son of the skillful carpenter who set up his cross over all-consuming Sheol and conducted humanity over to the place of life. Since humanity fell into Sheol because of a tree, it passed over to the place of life upon a tree. And so, on the tree where bitterness was tasted, sweetness has been tasted, so that we might learn who it is who has no rival among his creatures. Praise to you who suspended your cross over death so that souls could pass over on it from the place of the dead to the place of life.
2.
3. This is in the Liturgy of the Hours today, From the Catecheses by Saint John Chrysostom:
If we wish to understand the power of Christ’s blood, we should go back to the ancient account of its prefiguration in Egypt. Sacrifice a lamb without blemish, commanded Moses, and sprinkle its blood on your doors. If we were to ask him what he meant, and how the blood of an irrational beast could possibly save men endowed with reason, his answer would be that the saving power lies not in the blood itself, but in the fact that it is a sign of the Lord’s blood. In those days, when the destroying angel saw the blood on the doors he did not dare to enter, so how much less will the devil approach now when he sees, not that figurative blood on the doors, but the true blood on the lips of believers, the doors of the temple of Christ.
If you desire further proof of the power of this blood, remember where it came from, how it ran down from the cross, flowing from the Master’s side. The gospel records that when Christ was dead, but still hung on the cross, a soldier came and pierced his side with a lance and immediately there poured out water and blood. Now the water was a symbol of baptism and the blood, of the holy eucharist. The soldier pierced the Lord’s side, he breached the wall of the sacred temple, and I have found the treasure and made it my own. So also with the lamb: the Jews sacrificed the victim and I have been saved by it.
There flowed from his side water and blood. Beloved, do not pass over this mystery without thought; it has yet another hidden meaning, which I will explain to you. I said that water and blood symbolized baptism and the holy eucharist. From these two sacraments the Church is born: from baptism, the cleansing water that gives rebirth and renewal through the Holy Spirit, and from the holy eucharist. Since the symbols of baptism and the eucharist flowed from his side, it was from his side that Christ fashioned the Church, as he had fashioned Eve from the side of Adam. Moses gives a hint of this when he tells the story of the first man and makes him exclaim: Bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh! As God then took a rib from Adam’s side to fashion a woman, so Christ has given us blood and water from his side to fashion the Church. God took the rib when Adam was in a deep sleep, and in the same way Christ gave us the blood and the water after his own death.
Do you understand, then, how Christ has united his bride to himself and what food he gives us all to eat? By one and the same food we are both brought into being and nourished. As a woman nourishes her child with her own blood and milk, so does Christ unceasingly nourish with his own blood those to whom he himself has given life.
5. The late Fr. Benedict Groeschel
6. Through Him, with Him, in Him — a meditation by Msgr. John Esseff
7. Benedict XVI on the Way of the Cross
8. From Saint Thomas Aquinas:
We are advised to think diligently, that is, to think upon him over and over again. In all your ways, says Holy Scripture, think upon him (Prv 3:6). The reason for which is that no matter what anxiety may befall us, we have a remedy in the cross.
For there we find obedience to God. He humbled himself becoming obedient, says Saint Paul (Phil 2:8). Likewise, we find a loving forethought for those akin to him, shown in the care he had, when upon the very cross, for his Mother. We find, too, charity for his fellows, for on the cross he prayed for sinners, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do (Lk 23:34). He showed, also, patience in suffering: I was dumb and was humbled, and kept silence from good things, and my sorrow was renewed (Ps 38:3). Finally he showed, in all things, a perseverance to the end, for he persevered until death itself: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit (Lk 23:46).
So on the cross we find an example of all the virtues. As Saint Augustine says, the cross was not only the gallows where our Lord suffered in patience, it was a pulpit from which he taught mankind.
But what is it that we are to think, over and over again?
Three things:
–The kind of Passion it was. He endured opposition, that is, suffering from spoken words. For instance they said, You who would destroy the temple (Mt 27:40). It is said in the Psalms (Ps 17:44), You rescued me from the strife of peoples and it was foretold that our Lord should be a sign which shall be contradicted (Lk 2:34). Saint Paul, in the text, says such opposition, meaning so grievous and so humiliating an opposition. All you who pass by the way, look and see whether there is any suffering like my suffering. (Lam 1:12).
–From whom he suffered the Passion. It was from sinners, from those for whom he was suffering. Christ died once for our sins, the just for the unjust (1 Pt 3:18).
–Who it was that suffered. Before the Passion, from the beginning of the world he had suffered in his members, but in the Passion he suffered in his own Person. When the words against himself. Who his own self, says Saint Peter (1 Pt 2:24), bore our sins in his body upon the tree.
To think diligently upon our Lord’s Passion is a very profitable employment, which is why Saint Paul adds that you be not wearied, fainting in your minds. The Passion of Christ keeps us from fainting. Saint Gregory says, “If we recall the Passion of Christ, nothing seems so hard that it cannot be borne with equanimity.” You will not then fail, worn out in spirit, in loyalty to the true faith, nor in the prosecution of good works.
Saint Paul again gives a reason for our courageous perseverance when he says, in the following verse, You have not yet resisted unto blood (Heb 12:4). As though he said, “You must not faint at these anxieties your own troubles cause you. You have not yet borne as much as Christ. For he indeed shed his blood for us.”
9. The Wounds of Love of Good Friday
10. How the Weakness of the Cross Makes Us Strong
12. Peter Wehner in the New York Times today
13. Raïssa Maritain on Jesus on the Cross:
When Jesus felt himself abandoned by God on the cross, it was because the face of love was then hidden from him, and the whole of his humanity was subjected to the law, without any mitigation—something which no man except the Man-God would have been able to endure without dying.
Jesus on the cross, and very particularly at that moment of total dereliction, suffered the full rigor of the law of the transmutation of nature into another—as if he had not been God; it was his humanity as such, taken from the Virgin, which had to feel the full weight of this law. For the head must experience the law that he imposes on his members. Because, having assumed human nature, he had to experience this supreme law to which human nature, called to participate in the divine nature, is subject.
And if he had not suffered from the rigor of this law, it would not have been possible to say that the Word took a heart like our own in order to feel for our sufferings.
This law of the transformation of natures—which comprises in it all moral and divine laws—is something necessary, physical, ontological if you like—God himself cannot abolish it, just as he cannot produce the absurd.
But this law—the Law—is not he—he is love.
So when a soul suffers, and suffers from this inexorable Law of transmutation of a nature into a higher nature (and this is the meaning of all human history)—God is with this nature which he has made and which is suffering—he is not against it. If he could transform that nature into his own by abolishing the law of suffering and death, he would abolish it—because he takes no pleasure in the spectacle of pain and death. But he cannot abolish any law inscribed in being.
The face of the law and its rigor, the face of suffering and death is not the face of God; God is love.
14. (Hat tip: Mark Wright)
and Johnny Cash singing the same.
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