Through one man, sin entered the world and
through another it was destroyed. Where death dwelt, came life, because the
same God who knows us so personally, so intimately, that He knows every single
strand of hair upon our head is the same who has taken each and every one of
our individual sins and nailed them to a cross with Himself, making an
instrument of torture and execution, a fountain of grace.
This is why the cross is no longer nor
meant to be a symbol of fear, a burden too heavy to bear, because its power
does not kill the soul, as Jesus warns as the only fear we are to have, but
rather strengthens it, testing the very depths of our love, because it has
itself become a demonstration and a symbol of the greatest love, that of our
God becoming man so that He could stretch out His arms to embrace every single
one of us.
In fact, this is why Jeremiah, in our first
reading, is not scared of persecution, of embracing that cross he was given, of
being betrayed by his very friends, watching him closely for the slightest
misstep, because his confidence is in that same cross that Jesus embraced, and
let fall upon His shoulders, for our sake. It was St. Pio, one intimately
familiar with the cross, who puts it beautifully, he says: “The Cross will not
crush you; if its weight makes you stagger, its power will also sustain you.”
And, yet, if it gets too heavy and feels
like the weight of the world is literally upon our shoulders, that is when the
cross is the most powerful because it is changing us and shaping us, it is,
indeed, one of the greatest mysteries and one of the hardest realities to
endure, but, at the same time, one that teaches us the way to holiness.
I may have shared this before, but I think
it bears repeating. One summer, as a seminarian, I went to something known as
the Institute for Priestly formation, and, in one of the classes a deacon was
teaching he said something that I will never forget, something that has stuck
with me even today, something that made the cross more real to me than it had
ever been in my entire life.
He said: “If it feels like things are so overwhelming, that the cross is too much to bear, that we scream out: “God, you’re killing me.” What he said next was the most eye-opening thing I had ever heard, he said, that’s exactly what God is doing, because, he said, when we scream those words, God’s response is: “I know.”
And, it’s not because God likes to watch us suffer, that He wants to see us give up, rather, He wants us to abandon ourselves to Him, to give our Will to Him, to recognize as many great saints have, that we cannot do it alone, that we need Him no matter what.
Because, despite what we might think, God does not abandon us, He does not leave us to our own merits, for if the Father knows when a sparrow falls, how much more must He know about us?
He said: “If it feels like things are so overwhelming, that the cross is too much to bear, that we scream out: “God, you’re killing me.” What he said next was the most eye-opening thing I had ever heard, he said, that’s exactly what God is doing, because, he said, when we scream those words, God’s response is: “I know.”
And, it’s not because God likes to watch us suffer, that He wants to see us give up, rather, He wants us to abandon ourselves to Him, to give our Will to Him, to recognize as many great saints have, that we cannot do it alone, that we need Him no matter what.
Because, despite what we might think, God does not abandon us, He does not leave us to our own merits, for if the Father knows when a sparrow falls, how much more must He know about us?
Ultimately, what these readings convey is,
indeed, this gift of the cross, while maybe a strange way of doing so, it
reveals a great mystery and an intimacy that can be found in that cross,
something that may, at times, go beyond our comprehension, but something that
stands as a symbol of love and sacrifice, a symbol of the greatest evil and,
indeed, the greatest good.
For, in the words of St. Alphonsus Ligouri:
“with our hearts nailed to the cross,” we imitate His love and experience His
pain, and we learn the most about ourselves, about our lives, from what many
saints call the “school of the cross.” So that, in the end, in the beautiful
words of St. Paul, from our second reading today: “The gift is not like the
transgression. For if by the transgression of the one the many died, how much
more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ
overflow for the many.”
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