Since the beginning of time Christ – God Himself – anticipated that suffering and accepted it.
It is lent. Lent is hard for me. I have the discipline of a flea and cannot stick with a sacrifice if my life depended on it. And so, the season of Lent, where we are encouraged to make sacrifices in remembrance of Christ’s suffering during His Passion and Death on the Cross, is a particularly difficult season for me.
And I have been thinking about the difficulty of the season as I have been thinking about the suffering of my Beloved…
You see, Christ is PERFECT GOD and PERFECT MAN. That means that He is as perfectly a Man as He is God. In other words, when Christ felt temptations as a Man, it was His Human-self that suffered those temptations. It was His Human self that felt the potential Earthly merit of such temptations. And it was His Human self that could have given in to such temptations and left poor miserable souls such as mine (and yours also) to suffer the effects of sin and to be damned for all eternity – barred from the love of the Father and Eternal Life. After all, we give Him scant joy in our sinfulness and God is complete in Himself. He has no need to suffer and die for us. That suffering and death is for us and for us alone…
And I have been reflecting on that, because Christ suffered and died as God and Man. And that means that unlike ordinary men (and women) who suffer and die, Christ had the ability to stop the whole thing. He could – at any time – have come down from the Cross. He had the power to stop the torment. In fact – as GOD MADE MAN – Christ had the power to end the world rather than endure one single moment of suffering.
And yet, Christ did not end the world. He did not stop the torment. He did not come down from the Cross. And thinking about that today, as I struggle to restrict abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent, it occurs to me that Christ’s suffering and discipline truly was DIVINE. You see, Christ willingly held His finger in the flame and did not flinch. He willingly held Himself stead int eh course of unspeakable suffering and refused to move. He held himself to that Cross by an act of LOVE so INFINTELY DIVINE that no human mind could possibly fathom the love of God in that moment of destruction.
And when I think about that suffering today, and that unflinching determination to carry through with such suffering as that until the end, I am struck dumb.
And, just when I think that I cannot image a more extraordinary thing than that, I suddenly remember that Christ as God is outside of Time and Space. And that means that since the beginning of time in all eternity, Christ knew that He was going to suffer and die on that Cross. And since the beginning of time Christ – God Himself – anticipated that suffering and accepted it. And when I think about my own fear and anxiety in waiting for a small operation or a big meeting, or even just a diagnosis of a difficult illness, I am struck dumb. And I have come to believe that PERHAPS that anticipation – that peaceful and perfect acceptance of that anticipation – is perhaps the greatest miracle of all…
For my Beloved spends eternity anticipating the Cross. And when He hangs upon it, He remains upon it fixed by Love and Perfect Discipline. And when I think about that today, I wish that I had the words to express the magnanimity of God, who suffers and dies for love of me…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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