“‘Where is He? This is where – hanging here from this gallows...’”
I recently read an account, written by Elie Wiesel, of an execution of a Jewish child during the Second World War, in one of the Nazi concentration camps.
One day, the Nazi guards decided that it would be entertaining to execute one of the Jewish children by hanging in front of all the other inmates of the concentration camp. And so, they randomly selected a child and took him up to the gallows that they had constructed. They tied a oose around his neck and dropped him down to hang by his neck until he was dead.
But, that child had been starved over a very long period of time prior to his hanging and so his little body was very very light and was not heavy enough to cause his neck to snap once he was hung. And so, he did not die instantly or suddenly or quickly. To further complicate matters, the knot of the noose was not positioned so that the little child’s neck would break, and the end would come quickly for him. Instead, that child struggled, gasping for air for over thirty minutes until his death, while he slowly and painfully suffocated while the inmates of that camp stood watching.
While this child was dying Wiesel writes that one of the prisoners asked, “Where is God now?” And then another asked, “For goodness' sake, where is God?”
And Wiesel wrote, “And from within me, I heard a voice answer; ‘Where is He? This is where – hanging here from this gallows...’”
And I have been reflecting on that story and on that poor little martyred child tonight as I have been reflecting on the martyrs over the ages.
And the martyrs that I have focused on in my reflections today have been the Holy Innocents, the little children who were killed by Herod when Herod was hunting for Our Blessed Lord…
“An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Rise, take the Child and His mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there till I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the Child, to destroy Him.’ And he rose and took the Child and His mother by night, and departed to Egypt... Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men.” (Matthew 2:13-18).
You see, Hitler (and Stalin and Mussolini, and all the other dictators who have caused such harm to innocents) was not the first… Others came before him. You see, evil existed since the fall of human kind. And what better way to observe evil than to observe it in contrast with innocence and goodness…?
And I have been thinking about that today, because Christ’s agony did not end twenty centuries ago on that Cross. No. It continues today and shall continue tomorrow – even unto the end of the world.
And though I compare this with evil, I can see the goodness there. And when they ask, “Where is God now?” I can answer, “‘Where is He? This is where – hanging here from this gallows...’”
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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