December 5th
The Death of Jesus

I remember thinking when I read Fulton J. Sheen's Life of Christ that, considering how the whole book is about how every moment of Jesus's life on earth was about His death, that the actual Passion was either going to be the best part or the worst.

I feel like I've been very...careful of the Sorrowful Mysteries. Perhaps it was just a function of being surrounded by so many people that I love all weekend at the wedding of one of my very best friends to her best friend. I've focused on their allegorical significance, on very academic-y points almost.

And I could certainly do that here, but really the most powerful thing about this moment for me isn't any of the Tearing of the Veil or even the ultimate Point of this event. It's the idea of a man suffering and gasping for breath. Of God, letting Himself be that human and alone.

The movie The Last Temptation of Christ posited what Jesus might have been thinking on the Cross, but we don't need an elaborate Hollywood imagination to know. He told us. My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?

Terror and reduction. God let himself be that human. Desperate and frightened and dying in terrible pain. Forgetting that death is nothing. Forgetting that the resurrection will follow. Not able to think through the pain and the stink and the utter panic of the death what will lie on the other side.

God let that happen. He chose that.

When we think of martyrdom, of those willing to give their lives so others will die, even those of us who pretend different think of a sudden erasure - a sudden death. And then it's gone. We don't think of the panic and the pain and the fact that everyone dies alone, going into the dark.

But that we would all have to experience, one way or another. Except Him.

And none of us really know what that's like until we reach it. Except Him. He knew that it was coming. He chose anyway.

Was there ever such love as this?