I firmly believe that my own salvation – should I ever merit it – will be gained through the intervention of Saints whose names I do not know and whose faces I could not even imagine.
I have been thinking about symbolism.
Nothing is really more symbolic than the Passion and Death of Our Lord. I listened to a talk about this Holy Event, and I heard the priest explain that in the Temple in Jerusalem during the Feast of the Passover, two gates were opened, one to let out the blood from all the sacrificed animals during the Passover, and the other to let out all the water that was used in the ritual cleansing. Now consider that when Christ was Crucified, after His death, a spear was inserted into His Holy Side and out of His Side came both blood and water – just as it came out of the temple in Jerusalem. Even in this point did the symbolism of the sacrifice as Christ, the Perfect Priest, Victim and Altar, become reinforced by what actually occurred and was recorded in Sacred Scripture…
But the symbolism goes a lot further than that. A.G. Sertillanges writes in “What Jesus Saw from the Cross” at pages 197-198, “There is a symbolic beauty in the circumstance that the tomb of Jesus was only a few paces from His Cross. Suffering and death are but two aspects of the same thing; the one lays us low, and the other completes the work of destruction. Yet through Jesus they both raise us up, and our joint ascension presents the three stages of the Cross, the tomb, and Heaven.”
And I have been reflecting about this – perhaps the greatest symbolism of all – the closeness of the Cross to the Resurrection.
You see, when a writer wishes to draw their audience’s attention to a certain element of the narrative or to a theme that they wish to express, they will often use symbolism as a way to draw (initially) the subconscious mind and (later) the conscious mind to the point at hand.
And God is the perfect and eternal writer. And so, when God Himself died on the Cross, He made sure that the place of His resurrection was near at hand. And He did this for a reason. You see, the closeness of the resurrection to the tomb is the predominant theme of our religion. We are taught through sacred scripture and the example of God Himself and all the Saints, that God suffering is but a precursor to salvation, and that suffering used well, not only helps us to unite with Christ – who is our redeemer – for our own sake, but also to unite with Christ for the sake of others too.
The greatest of the Saints agreed to suffer terrible sufferings for the redemption of souls who they had never even met. I firmly believe that my own salvation – should I ever merit it – will be gained through the intervention of Saints whose names I do not know and whose faces I could not even imagine.
And I have been thinking about that today, as I have been thinking about how close suffering is to salvation… you see, it is very very close…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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