Going to Jerusalem with Jesus

Imagine yourself in the scene of today's Gospel, Mark 10: 32-45: You are on the way with Jesus to Jerusalem. On the way Jesus tells you that He is going to be handed over to the chief priests, to Gentiles--unbelievers--who are going to condemn Him to death, mock Him, spit upon Him, scourge Him, and crucify Him and in three days He will rise from the dead!  JESUS, who has become your best friend. You have fallen in love with Him. For three years you have hung on His every word. You witnessed His healings, His raising people from the dead, giving sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf.  You have seen Him cast out demons and challenge those who condemn others. You yourself have been challenged to live a life of service to others, to forgive others, not seven times but seventy times seven times.  You had meals with Jesus. You've seen Him walk on water and calm storms, literal ones and emotional ones!  And He tells you of His impending crucifixion at the hands of unbelievers!  He tells you that His end is near! Life with Him, as you know it, will be over soon!

Imagine your conversation with Jesus following this information. It goes something like this:

No, Jesus! This is not possible.  It will not happen. I will not let it happen.

It will happen.  It is my Father's will.

No! It cannot be Your Father's will. No Father would want this for His Son.

You do not understand.

Yes, I do. It cannot happen. It will not happen! I won't let it happen.

In the midst of my suffering, you will flee out of fright. On the hill of my crucifixion, you will be no where to be found.

Jesus! No, no, no. It cannot be.

It must happen, __(your name),________________. Through my death I will ransom you from eternal death.  Three days after my death, I will rise from the the dead and return to My Father, from where I will send you the Holy Spirit, who will teach you all things.  Then, through the power of the Holy Spirit,  you are to travel throughout the whole world and baptize all peoples in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 

My Lord and My God! 

The Death of Jesus

Today we commemorate Jesus' death upon the cross.  The first reading of today's services is from Isaiah 52: 13-53:12, in which Isaiah reminds us that: "it was our infirmities that he bore..."--yes, mine and yours,  my sins and yours.  It was "our sufferings that he endured, while we thought of him as stricken, as one smitten by God and afflicted."  It was my sufferings and yours--sufferings we deserved for our sins, for our rebellion, for our disobedience to the Lord.  Jesus "was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins; upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed. We had all gone astray, like sheep" Isaiah reminds us, "each following his [or her] own way; but the Lord laid upon him the guilt of us all."

That guilt, the offenses of all humankind, including mine and yours--past, present and future offenses--crushed Jesus beyond words. The pressure was so great that Jesus' sweat in the Garden of Olives was actually blood oozing from his pores, leaving the slightest touch to cause Him great pain. The scourging was horrible, gouging chunks of skin from his back. Mocking Him and pushing a crown of thorns on his head and driving those thorns through His head--blood everywhere--was also torturous and inhumane treatment!

Being incredibly weak from the scourging and crowning with thorns, Jesus must have fallen many times on the way up to the hill where He would be crucified. Fearful that Jesus would not make it up the hill to Calvary, Simon of Cyrene was forced to carry the cross up to the place of crucifixion. Then Jesus was stripped of his clothes, thrown upon the cross beam and nails driven through His wrists. He was then hoisted upon the wood anchored in the ground waiting for the crossbeam. Once the crossbeam was in place, nails were also driven through Jesus' feet, one on top of the other.

To breathe, the crucified ones had to lift themselves up by their painful legs/feet. When the crucified could no longer lift themselves up, they died of asphyxiation.  That is why the legs were broken. The executioners did not break Jesus' legs because he had already died.

"When [Jesus] was cut off from the living," Isaiah prophesies, "and smitten for the sin of his people, a grave was assigned him among the wicked and a burial place with evildoers, though he had done no wrong nor spoken any falsehood....If he gives his life as an offering for sin, he shall see his descendants in a long life, and the will of the Lord shall be accomplished through him.....[H]e shall take away the sins of many, and win pardon for their offenses"--yours and mine. That is how much God loves you and me!  He held nothing back!  Will you? Will I?

God's Delight in Us

In today's responsorial psalm, Psalm 149, we make the following proclamation: "The Lord takes delight in his people."  I invite you and me to rephrase that to say: "The Lord takes delight in me."  When you are awed by the sunrise or sunset, think of God gazing at you with awe as well. When you are overcome with an intense sense of gratitude for your son or daughter or the new child that you have just brought home from the hospital following his/her birth, think of God being filled with intense gratitude for you.  Yes, God delights in you day and night!

In our darkest moments, you and I might totally disagree that God could ever "delight"  in us. We might deeply deny this possibility when we are filled with a sense of shame and guilt, when we may have just exploded in anger or made an assumption about someone and that assumption is proven totally untrue, or at moments when we may have failed to defend another person when such is being bullied or when we join a "gossip party".

However, God, I believe,  always sees us as redeemed by His Son, that is, clothed with a robe of salvation, made righteous by His Son's sufferings, death and resurrection (cf Isaiah 61: 10).  About you or anyone else,  God  says to us: "My thoughts are not your thoughts" (Is 58: 8-9).

The Death and Life of Jesus in Us

"...[W]e who live are constantly being given up to death for the sake of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal bodies." We know "that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and place us with you his presence.  Everything indeed is for you, so that the grace bestowed in abundance on more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow for the glory of God."  Truly, "we hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us"  (2 Cor 4: -15).

Dying with Jesus and rising with Jesus--all for the sake of others in order that "thanksgiving" will
overflow for the glory of God!  What a treasure and what a gift to be  an instrument in God's hands for "abundance" to be outpoured upon others, to be the "cause" of "thanksgiving" to gush forth from others in glory of God's holy name!

What a sacred mission! And as difficult as it is to be "given up to death for the sake of Jesus," what a grace to rise with Christ to new life in the dying to selfishness, to impatience, to pride, to fear, to avarice and greed and whatever blocks grace from flowing through us!  May we, each day, see patience, humility, courage, love, generosity, wisdom and all the gifts of the Spirit rise in us to the glory of God forever and ever. Amen!  

The Punishment of Reconciling Fell on Jesus

Good Friday:

“By 3:00 p.m. today, Lord, you will have been put to death. Your returning to the Father will occur very soon. Your journey back to the Father will include being tortured, scourged, spit upon, slapped, crowned with thorns, kicked, shoved, stripped naked, nailed to a cross and “hung up" to die.  Isaiah described you as “inhumanly disfigured” (Is 52: 14), that you “no longer looked like a man—so many nations will be astonished and kings will stay tight-lipped before…[you], seeing what had never been told them, learning what they had not heard before. Who,” Isaiah asks, “has given credence to what we have heard?...[You] had no form or charm to attract us, no beauty to win our hearts; …[you were] despised, the lowest of men, a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering, one from whom, as it were, we averted our gaze, despised, for whom we had no regard. Yet ours were the sufferings …[you] were bearing, ours the sorrows …[you were] carrying, while we thought of …[you] as someone being punished and struck with affliction by God; whereas …[you were] being wounded for our rebellion, crushed because of our guilt; the punishment reconciling us fell on…[you], and we have been healed by…[your]  bruises.”

“My bones were not broken,  Dorothy Ann (insert your name). My heart was.  I saw and experienced the ugliness of sin and its torturous effect on all of creation, male and female, humans and animals, all of the earth. It was not pretty. It was repulsive to look at, as was I on the cross.”

Crucifying the God-Man, the Word of God Incarnate

My mind is blown away by the fact that we have crucified the God-Man, God disguised in human form, God incarnate. How could we possibly have tortured the Son of Man, mocked Him with a crown of thorns, beat His body to pulp, made Him, after the loss of significant blood, to carry a heavy cross on which He would be nailed and left to die.  How could we ever have done such a horrible thing! 

This disobedience of Adam and Eve, the mistrust of God by our first parents,  the repeated rebellion of God’s people, including all of us,  since the beginning of the world is absolutely mind-bottling.  In this week’s news alone we are shown a group of kids forcing another kid to strip naked and then flogging him with their belts, a young man robs a young mother and shoots her toddler in the head, a white supremist kills several people on a murderous spree,  a double homicide followed by the suicide of a Marine in his barracks Thursday night, dozens of people killed in clashes between Buddhists and Muslims in the city of Myanmar today, the Syrian civil war that has left thousands dead, homeless, and orphaned; and on and on throughout the world we read of modern day “crucifixions”.  “What you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto me” (Mt. 25:45), Jesus tells us.  Yes, Jesus’ passion and crucifixion happens repeatedly throughout the world every single day.

And on the cross Jesus’ first words are “Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing” (Lk 23:34). To the thief who turns to Him and says: “Remember me when you get into your kingdom” (Lk 23:42) Jesus says: “This day you will be with me in Paradise” (Lk 23:43). Those are the same words Jesus says to any one of us when we turn to Him in our agony, our sinfulness, our criminality: “Father forgive them; they know not what they are doing” and, to repentant sinners begging for mercy who recognize the injustice they have done to others, “This day you will be with me in Paradise.”

God, truly is  a God “of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in faithful love and constancy, maintaining  his faithful love to thousands, forgiving fault, crime and sin….” (Exodus 34: 6-7) yet demanding justice for all.  That justice meant that one equal to God would be the only one who could atone for our rebellion against God. That justice is what we see on Calvary. That justice is also what is in play following our sinful behavior—the consequences we endure as the result of our sin is our opportunity to make amends, to atone for the injustice that occurred when we hurt others, when we are violent toward others in our words and actions.