Realize Too Late

There's an old movie about the soldier who crucifies Christ and how he is haunted in the aftermath and eventually tries to return the cloak he won in a game of lots to the disciples.  And is then martyred along with his love interest.

He realized too late that Jesus was important and that killing was wrong in general.

And I've never realized before that that is precisely what Jesus says will happen to the scribes and pharisees.  To the soldier who exclaims, "Truly, this man was the Son of God."

“When you lift up the Son of Man,
then you will realize that I AM,
and that I do nothing on my own,
but I say only what the Father taught me.
The one who sent me is with me. 
He has not left me alone,
because I always do what is pleasing to him.”

Someday, you will realize too late that you had the truth in your hands and you threw it away.  Someday, you will realize too late that you had love on offer and you spit at it.  Someday, you will realize too late that the people you demonize are good people and you kicked them when they were down.  Someday, you will realize too late that the God you worshipped will disavow your deeds in His name.

Someday you will understand what it is you did to God and to others.  And, perhaps, that will be punishment enough.

What a fearful promise -- that someday we will see our sins in their full nastiness and horror and weakness.  That suddenly we will realize what we always would have known if we hadn't trained ourselves not to look.  That suddenly the world will turn and we won't be the good people we convinced ourselves we were.

Someday we will look up to see Christ crucified and really, truly realize that we put Him there.  God Almighty, so full of love He sacrificed Himself, His only Son.  And we hammered in the nails.

We won't survive that moment without God's love.  And there are two ways to respond to moments like it.  Repentance, humility, respect, and working to do better.  Struggling all our lives never to feel this way again.

And denial.  A litany of good works and excuses.  A reason to dismiss our detractors from speaking, even as we know that we see the truth in their words.

God grant us the grace to be humiliated when that moment comes -- but to turn that moment into a reason to rise higher.  To do better.  To repent by working to prevent the same mistake from ever happening again.