St. Thomas More Chicago

On this day when we have heard read the full account, in the words of St. Matthew, the passion and death of Our Lord, perhaps the most eloquent response to this particular word of God is silence.  Even the best of homilies may be a distraction from the deep meditation we should feel at the end of the narration of the suffering and death of Our Lord for us: so I have only a few poor simple words to offer.  

The reading of the Passion on this first day of Holy Week turns our minds to the cross of Our Lord, yet it is ironic that the crosses in church, especially that which hangs over the altar of the Lord’s sacrifice, are veiled until Good Friday.  But we see crosses and crucifixes so often, not just in church but in art and in jewelry—in the counters of Macy’s and Target—and everywhere we look, that it is very easy to stop giving the cross its deserved attention.  So the reading of the Passion directs our hearts and minds and souls to the cross, and the veiled cross helps us not to take the image of the cross for granted; rather, we can allow the image of Our crucified Lord to embed itself in our imagination—in our mind’s eye—and so to allow its meaning to penetrate into the depths of our understanding—and more importantly, that its meaning will find an indelible engraved resting place in our hearts and in our souls.  

We are used to looking at the cross, but the death of Our Lord, and the kind of death He died, is so appalling, horrific and grotesque that we ought to be shocked by it. We should be stunned into speechlessness at the thought that the Lord of the Universe, the Creator of the World, Word-made-flesh and Splendor of the Father ended His ministry of love choking out His last agonized words on a Roman cross, and that He did all this – He allowed all this to be done to Him only for us.  The image of Our Lord and Our God on the cross is a scandal to non-Christian monotheists—to Jews and Moslems—because the very thought of Almighty God tortured, whipped, pierced with nails—all this is impossible for them to comprehend.  And for us Christians—for us Catholic Christians—shocking as is this reality, it is not meant to frighten us but to show us how incredibly much He, God, loves us, and that He has already paid the penalty for our sins.  Our Lord dies on the cross not for what He has done, but for what you and I have done, because He loves us.  The simple truth of the Catholic Faith: God died for us.

The veiling of the cross helps us to see it properly again, not as a fashion item, nor indeed as a highly successful piece of advertising by the Christian Church, but as the awful—awful in the original meaning of awful—full of awe—the awful reality of the saving love God showed us in His Son.

How can we ever respond to this divine love, infinite, unmerited, and undeserved as it is?  In the same way one would respond to anything another does for us – with gratitude.  A gratitude that makes us to turn away forever from habits and patterns of sin; a gratitude that never lets a day go by without prayerful thought, oft-spoken thanks, for this infinite action of God’s incredible mercy and forgiveness; gratitude that makes us hate sin and Satan and evil; gratitude that impels us to speak the truth and fight the evils that infect our society and culture today, those evils of today that brought the Lord of all time to the cross.  

The Body of Our Lord raised on the cross – the same Body of the same Lord given us in this and every sacrifice of the Mass—is the proof that God’s love for us is absolutely limitless.  The only way it can ever be limited – the only barrier erected is done by us—that you or I choose not to accept it.  The cross of Our Lord calls forth from each of us a gratitude that will make us hate sin in ourselves, and sin in any other person; a gratitude strong enough to make us translate our love for God into our hatred and elimination of our own sin, so that in us, and in one another, there is only love, only the cross, only God.