Reflections
on the Passion
by Father
Doyle
October 12, 1956
NIHIL OBSTAT:
JOANNES A. SCHULIEN, S.T.D.
Censor liborium
IMPRIMATOR:
+ ALBERTUS G. MEYER
Archiepiscopus Milwauchiensis
Monday
of Holy Week:
THE whole
sordid story of
Christ’s appearance before Pilate is one
calculated to set the least of us to some deep thinking, It is
frightening to ponder how close Pilate came to justification rather
than to the depths of scorn earned by him for his weakness of character
and the abuse of his authority.
Every possible way
consistent
with the preservation of his free will
was used to save him.
Divine Providence was at work to spare the
governor from consummating his guilt. First, there was the
silence of Christ. The Savior Who had cringed under the weight of
our sins in the Garden of Gethsemani now stands erect, composed and
silent - a demeanor bespeaking supernatural dignity. This
affected Pilate so much that St.
Matthew says “the
procurator wondered exceedingly” (27:14).
And even when Pilate had said the fateful words: “Take Him
yourselves and crucify Him” (Jn. 19:6), yet another appeal was made to
his conscience, for the Jews replied: “We have a law, and
according to that Law He must die, because He has made Himself the Son
of God” (Jn. 19:7). This open and pointed claim to the
supernatural, superhuman rank, did for a moment startle the weak
Pilate, for Scripture says: “Now when Pilate heard this statement
he feared the more” (Jn. 19:8).
Certainly, the
involuntary
awe that first came over him as he faced the
Innocent Christ must have settled over him now with greater
force. No one, no matter how sinful and callous, could ever look
upon the face of Christ and not sense His deity. Hence came forth
the earnest question: “Where art thou from?” (Jn.19:9).
There was never a moment during that dread scene of judgment when
Pilate was far from doing the right and noble thing - never a moment
when he was far from salvation. But alas, he succumbed to
criminal irresolution, he resisted impulses, he fled from the prods of
conscience, he banished the warnings of his wife, and made instead a
weak concession to the fear of man. When Pilate condemned the Son
of God without evidence and against his own convictions, he prostituted
his high office.
Not until we stand
before
Christ in judgment will we ever know how
often and with what great effort Christ has tried to save each one of
us. We shall be confused and confounded when we learn the amount
of grace Christ showered upon us, often at the very moments when we
were resisting the warnings of conscience, the pleading of parents,
teachers, priests, and friends - bent upon doing our own will and
seeking our own pleasures, albeit this involved the breaking of God’s
Own laws.
Pilate had one
golden
opportunity, and he lost it. How much
more culpable are we than Pilate, who, times, without number, have
rejected God’s grace and resisted His agents, and been influenced to do
evil through fear of what our fellow men would think or say?
Base and weak as
Pilate was,
he is in the record as having called
Christ “A just Man.” When you have thought long and well on what
Christ has done for you, the graces with which He has showered on you,
I am sure you will be compelled to thank Him with all your soul because
His mercy has outweighed His justice in your regard.
Tuesday of Holy Week:
IT IS
strange how often
a person who is too weak of character to
do what he knows is right, will rack his brains for something to excuse
him from doing his duty and thus will seize upon the first thing which
comes to mind to relieve him of his dilemma. So it was with
Pilate. He knew after he had questioned our Lord that He was
guiltless, and that he should release Him. Then the thought
struck him that perhaps if he offered to follow an ancient custom
of releasing a prisoner on the eve of the great Jewish feast of
Passover that he could manage, somehow, to have them choose Christ as
against a murderer, and thus he would be rid of the problem. So
he mentioned the custom to the Jews and the alternative to Christ, he
chose Barabbas - a robber, a rioter, “one who in the riot had
committed
murder” (Mk. 15:7).
Pilate said: “Which of the
two do you wish that I release to you?’ And
they said ‘Barabbas.’ Pilate said to them: ‘What then am I to do with
Jesus Who is called Christ?’ They all said, ‘Let Him be
crucified’” (Mt. 27: 21,
22).
Never in the annals
of human
history has there been a greater example
of criminal evasion of personal responsibility. Here was Pilate,
who in his heart knew that Christ was innocent of any crime, and had
said so in public, but now, in fact says to the mob, “you pick the
victim and I’ll sentence Him whether he is guilty or not.” Many
of us today, who decry the weakness of Pilate, get much the same way on
many occasions. We often allow others to determine our
duty. Have we not all at times said something like this:
“But every one does
it”; or
“Everyone else in the office tells
off-color stories”; or “If my husband didn’t drink, I wouldn’t drink,”
and so on.
Let us beg of
God the
grace to do what we know to be right and
just, and for the grace to manfully withstand those who would even
suggest our making concessions to evil for fear of man.
The second
point of
this consideration is equally
important. Pilate poses one of the most striking questions
formulated when he asked: “What am I to do with Jesus Who is
called Christ?” - a question Pilate and all of us are compelled to
answer in the end. Jesus stands before each of us, as He stood
before Pilate, demanding reception or rejection. The question may
be postponed, but we cannot get it off our hands. Every soul must
stand in judgment on Christ and give a decision.
Resolve to make a
thorough
examination of conscience daily on how you
fulfill the duties of your state in life and to what extent you permit
others to determine your duty. Ask yourself, too, this burning
question:
“What have I done
today with
Christ?” The answer God expects us
to give is: “I have loved Him; I have obeyed Him in all things; I
have served Him faithfully.”
Wednesday in Holy Week:
THERE is one
more phase in
Pilate’s weak struggle with his conscience
and his sense of right. He thought that if he could have our Lord
scourged somehow the mob would relent and settle for His release.
So the scourging was initiated and carried out by Roman legionaries -
brutalized instruments of a race noted for its absence of all
tenderness. “Pilate, then, took Jesus and had Him scourged” (Jn.
19:1), but St. Matthew was more reportorial, for he wrote:
“Then
the soldiers of the procurator took Jesus into the praetorium, and
gathered together about Him the whole cohort. And they stripped
Him and put on Him a scarlet cloak; and plaiting a crown of thorns,
they put it upon His head, and a reed in His right hand; and bending
knee before Him they mocked Him, saying, “Hail, King of the
Jews!” And they spat on Him, and took the reed and kept striking
Him on the head” (Mt. 27: 27-30).
The Romans used
various kinds
of scourges. There was the stick
(fustis), the rod (virga), and the whip (lorum) which was of
leather-platted throngs and into the plats were woven iron spikes
(scorpio) or knuckle bones of
animals. Tradition has it that the
latter was used by the soldiers to scourge Christ.
Behold your Savior
bound to a
low pillar with the six scourgers
standing on a raised platform beside and above Him, and watch them, if
you can, laying those cruel lashes on the bent back of our Lord!
Let us go to His side and gaze into the pure eyes of Christ as He
suffers in the scourging and acknowledge that it was our sins - yours
and mine - that caused Him to endure such agony, and promise Him from
this day on we shall never deliberately offend Him again.
There is another
consideration I would have you ponder over in your
mind. It concerns the reed placed in our Lord’s hand during the
crowning with thorns as a mock gesture of a king’s scepter. Is it
not worthy of note that the lowly reed should play such an important
part in our Lord’s life? He began His public life by going to
Cana of Galilee, to begin as it were the reconstruction and redemption
of mankind with a man and his wife - since it was a man and his wife
who had opened the sluice gates of sin and flooded this world with
woe.
“Cana,” you see, means “a place of reed.”
And now at the end
of His
public life the reed appears again and is
placed in His hands in mockery of His royalty, and finally, it becomes
an instrument of torture in itself - since the soldiers beat His
thorn-crowned head with this same reed. I have always thought
that the special sufferings inflicted on our Lord by the blows from the
reed were in reparation for the mockery men and women make of marriage
and the sins, such as divorce, abortion, desertion, and birth control
committed by persons disdainful of God’s laws. Married persons
will beg for the grace to fulfill the duty of their state and the
unmarried will beg special graces for those to whom God has entrusted
such awful responsibilities.
Holy
Thursday:
“AND [they]
led Him away to
crucify Him. Now as they went out,
they found a man of Cyrene named Simon; him they forced to take up His
Cross” (Mt. 27: 31-32).
In the beginning
there was no
one to help our Lord carry His
cross. Weak from the loss of sleep and from the cruel scourging
and the crowning with thorns, and still more from the insults of His
enemies and the desertion of His friends, which caused Him untold
anguish, yet He was forced to carry the heavy Cross. He did His
very best until His nature gave way and thus He fell several times to
the ground.
We must never lose
sight of
the fact that while our Lord had to carry
the Cross unaided, in reality it was not for Himself that He bore it,
but for you and me. He endured unbelievable pain and endured the
shame and the insults, for all of us, that He might free us from the
burden of the curse of sin.
When St. John the
Baptist
encountered Christ at the outset of His
public life, he said to his followers: “Behold the Lamb of God,
Who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn. 1:29). We must say the
same words as we contemplate Christ Carrying His cross, for that is
exactly what He did. No, it was not only the wood of the Cross
that was so burdensome, rather it was the mountain of our sins.
It was the loathsome weight of sin that caused our savior to falter and
fall on the Way of the Cross.
Fearful that they
would be
deprived of the satisfaction of crucifying
Him, the soldiers compelled a passer-by, Simon of Cyrene, to help our
Lord. One can only imagine how much, at first, Simon must have
resented this task, but picture Simon and Christ carrying the Cross
together - Jesus in front carrying the heavier part and Simon coming
behind with its lighter end is both sad and a consoling thought.
This is a true
picture of
every follower of Christ. We must all
share the cross with Christ if we would reign with Him. Did our
Lord not say; “He who does not take up his cross and follow Me,
is not worthy of Me” (Mt.
10:38)?
There is great
consolation in
reversing the scene wherein Simon helps
Jesus carry His Cross and contemplating it in a new light - that of
Christ helping Simon carry the Cross. You see, once Simon was
pressed into service by the soldiers, our Lord did not abandon him and
leave him to struggle with the load alone. Indeed not.
Christ, weak as He was, placed His bruised and torn shoulder under the
heavier part.
Every cross we have
to bear
will find Christ’s shoulder beneath it,
and, indeed, beneath the heavy end of it. There is no cross we
are unable to bear with Jesus helping us. No load He shares will
ever crush us, for we have His infallible word: “Come to me, all
you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest” (Mt. 11:28).
Make acts of
contrition for
your sins that added to the weight of the Cross on the way to Calvary;
thank Him for having taken away your sins;
and thank Him for having always helped you carry your crosses thus far
in life.
Christ refused that
potion
that His sufferings might not be
lessened. But Christ gives us His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity
as our food to strengthen us to bear our sufferings and to carry our
crosses. In the Eucharist, the Stronger helps the weaker.
Good Friday:
“AND
they came to a place
called Golgotha, that is, the Place of the
Skull. And they gave Him wine to drink mixed with gall; but when
He had tasted it, He would not drink” (Mt. 27:34). “Then they
crucified Him” (Mk. 15: 24).
The object behind
the
offering of the stupefying draught for those
sentenced to undergo crucifixion was that it would produce a partial
unconsciousness, so that the terrible agonies might not be so keenly
felt. But it will be noted that our Lord would not accept
anything that would lessen His sufferings. He did taste it so
that the Scripture might be fulfilled, for David had said of the
Messias, in prophecy: “And they gave Me gall for My food; and in
My thirst they gave Me vinegar to drink” (Ps. 68:22). Scripture
thus fulfilled, our Lord refused to do more than taste of it, since He
did not seek to lessen in any way the bitterness of the cup which His
Father had given Him to drink.
There is an
important lesson
for all of us in this incident in the
Passion of our Lord and that lesson is that we are more Christlike when
we accept the crosses and trials of this life as they come to us,
seeing in them golden opportunities for making reparation for our own
sins and the sins of the world, and at the same time, seeing all such
crosses as sent to us by God for our spiritual benefit. As
Christians we are not bound to seek suffering, but when it comes in the
path of duty, let us meet it calmly, resolutely, and fearlessly.
“Then they crucified
Him”
(Mk. 15:24). To the devout Christian
every item of information he can gain concerning that dread scene at
Calvary is of the utmost value. The horrible act of crucifixion
itself was foreign to the Jewish people, for it was of Roman origin,
and the sufferings it caused signifies the extreme anguish to which
human sensibility can go. It was long and lingering in its
operation. Apart from the agony inflicted by the nailing of the
hands and feet, even greater suffering was inflicted by the constrained
posture on the Cross. And there hung the Son of God, the Redeemer
of the world, suspended between Heaven and earth for three long and
agony-filled hours until the full debt for your sins and mine was
paid. What a terrible thing sin must be, that its expiation
required such a sacrifice! The hearts of all who dwell on the
picture of Christ dying on the Cross must of
necessity be stirred to
beg for the grace to avoid ever committing a deliberate mortal sin
again. How can we ever in the future be careless about sinning
when we contemplate what our Lord suffered to save us from our
sins! And what can we say of the wonderful love God must have for
sinful man to cause Him to give His Son to endure such a death to save
him!
Make time today to go, in
spirit, to Calvary’s hill and take your place
beside the sinless Mary, the Virgin Mother of Christ, and beside the
sinner Mary Magdalen. Your own selfish sinful heart will know
what to say to Christ as He hangs on the Cross. Tell Him of how
you thank Him for what He has done for you and beg of Him the special
grace to know the vileness and tragedy of sin.
The price has been
paid. Christ died on the Cross. But men,
forgetting the awful ransom paid by our Lord, go right on
sinning. Hear out Lord say to Mother Marie Saint-Cecile of
Rome: “I understand human frailty. I forgive readily, I
forget indelicacies as soon as the soul returns to Me, but that does
not prevent My Heart from feeling the wound.”
Promise our Lord
today that
never again will you wound His Sacred heart
by sin. Make the slogan of St. Dominic Savio your motto: “Death
rather than mortal sin.”
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