The Passion II

Christ was offered up because He willed it, for the sins of the world. By the will of His heavenly Father, weariness, fear and sadness broke His heart. What a lonely stranger Christ was on earth, without true friends and in the midst of perverse, sensual and ungrateful men! How He must have longed for heaven, for His Father’s house, for the company of angels and saints, for the loving embrace of His heavenly Father!

But instead He saw God’s face averted from the sins with which He was covered, and God put Christ away from Him. God sent Christ on earth and led Him to a frightful desert, without way and without water, and He commanded Christ to hang on the Cross, dejected and despised. Fear entered Christ’s heart and hurled it into strange agonies. He trembled at the sight of the cruel prods which were to tear His flesh, the long thorns which would pierce His head, and the nails which would transfix His hands and feet.

An indescribable confusion fell upon Christ at the sight of the humiliations that were to come. He saw Himself in the fool’s robe at the house of Herod, stripped of His garments and shamelessly exposed to the eyes of the jeering, sensual multitude, ridiculed as a king in the court of Pilate, esteemed more vile than Barabbas, and suspended at last on a gibbet between two thieves. On top of all that, as Christ hung on the Cross, Satan himself hurled his defiance in His face: “If thou be the Son of God, come down from the Cross: He has saved others; Himself He cannot save.”

But how could the God of Justice and Holiness come to Christ’s rescue while He still bore, by His own will, the iniquities of men? Christ accepted that supreme desolation that His brothers might not be separated from His heavenly Father, and inclining His head He died in an agony of unmitigated pain.

Let us meditate upon the Passion of Christ each day.

In Christ,

Fr. Jeffery Fasching