The Cross

The cross is a very personal thing. Jesus knew this. The cross of Jesus affected his whole body. The pain he was feeling was so severe that the temptation to prove his power by removing himself from the cross had to be running through his head.  Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, it is this fact that makes the cross relevant. If Jesus were just human He could not use the cross to show God's great love for us, He would have been just another sacrifice like those being made at the temple. On the other hand if Jesus was just divine, He would not have experienced life and the dying process as we His creatures do. Both of the elements, humanity and divinity,  had to be and were present.  So the first way the Cross affected Jesus was mentally.  He had to refuse the all too human facility to go against the desires of the Father by using the power that He had as the Son. This required Jesus to put complete trust into God and surrendering Himself as a human to the will of the Father.  

The next way the Cross affected Jesus was physically. Death by crucifixion was a death by inches. The major process was suffocation.  The woulds caused by the nails were just "minor" injuries that the body could healed if the person had been taken down from the cross while still alive. The process that a person goes through while dying on the cross is this. You had to hold yourself up to breathe and that strain on your arms was monumental and the fatigue was cumulative as lactic acid built up in the muscles. The condemned used their legs and the nail that had been pounded through the feet to give some purchase to stay where one could breath. But the pain from the wound in the feet was great and the arms tired and the culprit would sag down into a "Y" formation. The pressure on the diaphragm would make it impossible to breathe and the victim would have to push himself up again.  Depending on the strength of the one on the cross, this could go on for days.  In the case of Jesus, He was already battered and beaten and so his strength was expended in mere hours.  Death on the cross as I said was a death in inches.  The merciless sun beat down upon the criminal and insects of all types alighted on the body. There was the psychological aspect of the punishment as well to consider.  In most of the empire the criminal was exposed naked on the cross. In Israel, the benevolence of Caesar allowed the wearing of a loin cloth because the Jews were scandalized by nudity.  

So for hours Jesus suffered through the dying process. Then near the end he did several things that showed that this was no ordinary execution.  He awarded sainthood to a fellow criminal suffering with Him on that day. On the cross a criminal could be counted on to answer the scorn heaped upon him with curses. Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing." Jesus perfectly fulfilled his obligation to honor His mother and father when he put the Virgin Mary, who had no other relatives to help her into the care of the apostle John for a widow with no relatives would have to resort to begging to meet the needs of the day.  Just before He died, he said, "I thirst."  A sponge was soaked in cheap wine and held up to His lips. He took some and he then said, "It is finished."   What was finished?  Do you remember the last supper? It ended before all of the ritualistic rubrics had been completed. They sang a long hymn. After the hymn there was supposed to be a final cup of wine that would conclude the Passover meal.  It was never consumed and the Passover meal was never completed.  By taking that wine on the Cross, Jesus, the Lamb of God, completed the New Passover and redeemed us,  Then one of the evangelists says "He uttered a loud cry."  A loud cry? From the cross? After being scourged, beaten, bled and bloodied?  The loud cry was followed by Jesus handing over His spirit.  voluntarily for us.  It was very hard to speak at all from the cross. To hear a loud cry come from someone near to death must have been  startling to the onlookers.  The loud cry shows that Jesus handed over His life, that it was not taken from Him, He gave it willingly. 

Today at Mass we read the Gospel where Jesus asks who do the people think I am.  After a few answers he asks the apostles who they think He is. Peter answers "The Christ of God."  He then tells his followers that to be his follower we have to take up our cross daily and follow Him.  What does this mean?  The cross is a very personal thing.  But we as followers of Chris, what we need to do is this,  We need to wake up each morning and pick up our cross and follow Jesus with it.  A cross is a very personal thing.  For many of us it may be a fault we are working to correct and never can seem to conquer it and it is causing us anguish. For some of us it might mean going to a job you hate because you receive no recognition for your contributions and to contribute to the best of your ability anyway.  It may be dealing with any number of things, but we must pick it up, put it on our shoulder and carry it every day for that is what is means to be a follower of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. 

Good Friday

The Apostles, the chosen men that followed Jesus every day were especially happy on this day, the day when they remembered how God saved them from slavery. The twelve were ordinary men. They were fisherman, there was even a former tax collector among them/  The Seder had progressed though three ritual cups of wine. These men did not drink wine for solace, they drank when they were commanded by the law to do so.  Jesus had not completely followed the ritual. He passed bread and wine to his Apostles and told them that it was his Body and Blood.  They did not understand at first what he had done. Then he said, "Do this in remembrance of me."  They were to the same thing he had done. He had given them something new. He continued the Seder, they drank the third cup of wine and sang the Great Hallel and instead of drinking the last cup of wine, Jesus led them to the Mount of Olives where He prayed and his followers slept. Judas, one of the twelve arrived with soldiers and representatives of the high priest and betrayed the Son of God for thirty pieces of silver, the price of a slave. He was taken to Annas, the real power behind the temple who looked Jesus over, shook his head and sent him to the High Priest.  There in the dark of night, he was illegally tried and convicted of blasphemy.  They gathered again in the morning and confirmed the sentence of death and after a brief appearance before Pilate and Herod, the criminal Jesus was whipped and he was forced to carry the cross to the place of the skull.  He was nailed to the cross and above him a sign hailed him as King of the Jews. The sun beat down on his body. Insects attracted by the smell of blood came and landed upon him.  The pain in his arms was intolerable but he had to pull himself up to breathe. His mother, Mary, was at the foot of the cross as was John the Apostle. In a tender act of love he took leave of his mother and put her under the protection of John. That was the last earthly thing he had to do. He uttered the words, "I thirst."  And a sponge was soaked in some common wine and held up to his mouth. He took the wine and said the words, "It is finished."  In saying this he let it be known that he had concluded the Seder from the previous night by drinking the wine and then he cried out in a loud voice, "Father into your hands I commend my spirit." And with that Jesus died. 

Jesus is the Lamb of God.  His blood saves us all. Be at peace on this Good Friday and in your prayers remember the man from Galilee who died this day so very long ago and changed the disobedience of man into obedience and in doing so destroyed sin and death.