Suffering With Christ
One of the most poignant moments in St. Matthew’s Passion comes in the Garden of Gethsemane when Our Lord is so overcome with emotion that he falls down on his face. And lying there on the ground, he manages to lift his head a little, and raise his voice to his Father in heaven, with these words: “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”
We stand today on the threshold of Holy Week. A week filled with suffering, with the remembrance of our Saviour’s sufferings for us. As the week relentlessly proceeds, we are drawn closer and closer to the Cross, until at last on Good Friday, we walk the hill of Calvary with Our Lord, we stand beneath that Cross as he is raised upon it, we listen to his last words, and we watch him die. And if there is love in our heart, any love at all, for that Saviour who gave so much that we might live, we are moved to tears of grief at this terrible sight. We weep with Our Blessed Lady his Mother, we weep with St. John, his beloved disciple, we weep with the Angels.
It is good that we weep. But how quickly do we forget our tears as the joys of Easter replace these dark days with the glorious good news of our Salvation, as Our Blessed Lord rises from the dead. In one sense, this is as it should be. The glorious mysteries of the Rosary have every bit as much right to our attention and emotions as the sorrowful. But it is perhaps a sign of our own shallowness, that as soon as those happy festival days of Eastertide are come, we tend so quickly to forget our tears, to the point where we actually turn our back on the price of that happiness, that heavy price which is the bitter suffering of the Son of God made Man.
We’re all familiar with this phenomenon of our own superficiality. And deep down we know that it stems from our own unwillingness to accept our own sufferings, our own crosses! We are so very ready to pray with Our Lord: “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me,” – without daring to utter the second part, “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” “Thy will be done!”
At one time or another we struggle with the idea of a God who actually wills us to suffer? How can a loving God allow suffering in the world? All he has to do is snap his fingers and we could all be happy right now. So why doesn’t he?” Such thoughts usually come to us when we are actually suffering, when the overwhelming depths of woe we encounter in our lives threaten to drag us under into the cold, dark abyss of despair. But we will not fall into that despair if we can come to terms with the true nature of God—an all-loving, caring Creator, the dear Lord and Father of mankind.
An understanding of this apparent contradiction, that God loves us yet wills us to suffer, is perhaps not something you will need today, or tomorrow. But I guarantee that each of us will need to understand it some day. We all have to suffer eventually, some most bitterly. But there is consolation to be found in our suffering if only we would look at it the right way. Today’s bulletin goes into this in greater detail, and I would encourage those of you who seek a deeper understanding of God’s mercy to read it.
Meanwhile, we should prepare ourselves for heavier crosses by accepting the smaller ones we are given from day to day. We need to be men and women of courage to be able to carry our crosses with Jesus up the hill of Calvary. I’m talking about real courage, ‘true grit’. The kind of courage that allows us to pronounce with conviction the words of the Angelus, “Be it done unto me according to thy Word,” or to repeat those words of Our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Not as I will, but as thou wilt”. We tremble, yes… but we repeat those words anyway. We repeat them often without thinking, without realizing the commitment we are offering to God. Do we really mean what we say? “Yes Lord, I want to do thy will, not mine. Thy will be done. I willingly accept every cross you see fit to place on my shoulders.” The few Christians who are truly deliberate in this acceptance of the will of God in its entirety are the men and women God is looking for in his Church. These are the men and women who would never condemn themselves to mediocrity and advance no further. These are rather the men and women who will take up their cross and follow their Saviour to Calvary, true followers of Christ, true Christians.
One little saint who had such courage was St. Catherine of Siena. In a vision, Jesus presented her with two crowns, one made of gold, fashioned with diamonds and glistening jewels, and the other one made up of thorns. He asked her to choose which of the two crowns she would like to have. Her answer was astonishing: “I desire, O Lord, to live here always conformed to your passion, and to find pain and suffering my repose and delight.” Then, she eagerly took up the crown of thorns, and pressed it down upon her head. Do we have that kind of courage? Because, sure enough, her life was transformed into one of terrible pain and sorrow. We need to be careful what we ask for. But if we are generous souls, full of the love of God, not being content with a few forced tears of compassion for our Lord on Good Friday, if, and only if, we’re generous and courageous enough to repeat Our Lord’s words during his Agony, and mean them, “Not as I will, but thy will be done,” then we will surely merit to weep great torrents in our lifetime, and be swept along in the tidal wave of our tears of suffering into the eternal and immeasurable love of God.