Turning Up The Heat
The first four weeks of Lent are a time for introversion—a turning inwards to review and subsequently improve the state of our souls. We think of our sins, our terrible ingratitude to God. We force ourselves to remember that the bodies we pamper so constantly are nothing but dust and into dust they shall return. Armed and humbled by these four weeks of self-examination, we are now ready to embark on the last two weeks of Lent, an entirely different spiritual exercise that will lead us to the Passion and Death of our Saviour, and beyond to the Resurrection.
In Passiontide we turn our attention outwards. No longer is our main focus on self-improvement and the acquiring of virtue through penance. Now we must look away from ourselves and focus our attention on someone else. That someone is of course none other than the Son of God. He now appears to us in an entirely different form. No longer is he the majestic and transfigured Godhead we beheld at the Transfiguration. No longer the divine healer of the blind, the lame and the possessed. Not the inspiring teacher of the multitudes, not the miracle worker who fed those thousands of followers with five loaves and two fishes. He is now transfigured in an entirely different way, disfigured rather than transfigured, his body bathed in blood and spittle, his head split open by the long spikes of a thorny crown. Truly he is now a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”
Our long Lenten fast has been preparing us for this time. Our renunciation of some of the simple pleasures of life has partially broken our attachment to the material things of this world, making it easier to transition to these next two weeks of compassion for the suffering of our Lord and Maker. We should yearn now to serve him by obeying his commandments, by adoring his five wounds, by sharing a little in the sorrows of his blessed Mother.
It is time to remember a rarely considered aspect of our Lord. We very often think of him as the Judge of our souls, as the Good Shepherd, the Sacred Heart, as Christ the King. But in today’s Epistle, St. Paul reminds us that he is also “an high priest.” When we think of priests we picture a man with a black suit and a Roman collar, we think of Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary’s, and we imagine a priest to be some exalted social worker who solves everyone’s problems and wisely exhorts his flock to become more virtuous. However, all these things apply equally to the protestant minister and the Jewish rabbi, and even to the father of a family. What sets a man apart as a priest is the power to offer sacrifice to God. Thus it was with the tribe of Levi in the Old Testament, men set aside to offer the animal sacrifices in the temple. Christ was the true priest from whom all priesthood derives. He is the one, the only one, able to offer up the only sacrifice acceptable to God, the only sacrifice that could make adequate propitiation for all the sins of mankind. What sacrifice did he offer? Himself. “This is my Body which is given for you.”
Let our Passiontide be one of sorrow mixed with the joyful realization that God so loved us that he made such a sacrifice possible. We turn today from working on our own soul to consider instead the sufferings of him who died to save it. Behold the Son of Man in agony and let that soul of ours burst forth in adoration and gratitude for the sacrifice he made for us.