Punishment or a Heart that Loves?

Our Loving Saviour

It is the love of God, that was made visible on the cross, not condemnation and punishment. He would not ask of us a sentimental attachment because we see that he has taken our wounds and pain upon him. The Crucified asks of us a committed relationship to him. Father himself loved the world and gave his Only Son. The love that we rejected, the heart that we never understood, he shows again on the Cross. In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself. Father gave him a chalice to drink he drank it faithfully.

The chalice was death itself, the death that we incurred when we rejected life. In our darkness we preferred death than life and healing. On the cross he also showed the horror of death that we may not cling to it rather we may desire for grace and life.

Jesus was faithful to his relationship to the Father, even when he experienced abandonment, disgrace and utter failure. His words, “Do this in remembrance of me,” also must mean this fidelity. It is a growth to that moment when we approach him just to love him. Being at the foot of the cross is the best place to learn it. There we do not find a mighty hero but a God probably incapable of solving my problems.  But he is able to know my pain. At the foot of the cross, we cannot ‘do many things for God’ as we usually attempt to do. We can just be in silence just loving. In that love we believe in him, and that bond will be touching the heart of God. Because we have here trusted a God and loved, not even for a peace of mind, but in a useless God just for loving him.

Love deeply is a much more responsible choice. It does not base on benefits, but enables one another to love even deeper. In a normal life, we do good to be a good person and it does make a commitment and promise of benefit or reward. How much more is it a responsibility when it is based on love.  Here sin can be better understood as loosing of such a commitment and makes wounds in that relationship of love. If it is true the pain of the wound itself will ask for re-commitment for a reciprocal belonging in love even in a moment we are unable to love ourselves. Being under the foot of the cross we must experience, we are really being accepted and loved in the silence and weaknesses of the Cross.

Sin and Punishment is an easy spirituality which keeps us childishness working on reward and punishment. It may have its own ways of enabling adherence to God. But growing into a responsible relationship to the Crucified is deeper, mature and lasting. It demands more, our heart.

The Anointing, a Burial

The Anointed One

For the Anointed Servant, the anointing in the redeeming function really meant a burial. For the Anointed One of God, anointing did not mean exaltation. In relation to humanity the anointing is the uniqueness of Jesus. He was anointed by God, and for us.

The Messiah had to take on himself the pain and suffering made by the destructive powers. All the darkness and death he nailed to the cross and buried them in his flesh. Without the Anointed, the Anointing, and burial there can be no priesthood, no Eucharist, nor a communion.

In one way or the other a Priest is a bearer of death, lifelessness or grace-lessness experienced by people. He takes on to himself their bruises. It makes Messiah tear his own flesh and shed his blood. He and his will had to be buried within the salvific plan of the Father.

To transform a bread into his immolated body, to extend the sacrifice to anyone who would believe in him, He anticipated the pain of the cross although his life. So intense was his desire to take upon himself the dryness and lifelessness that at the cross he cries out in reality, “I Thirst” to the extent in him there was no more life left. So intense was the way he felt the estrangement of humankind from God that he cried out, “Father, why have you abandoned me.” He buries beneath the bread all that he suffered along with the anointing with which he took it up. Any one who partakes of it, participates in the immolated sacrificial body of the anointed in which is buried various kinds of our deaths. We can touch those mysteries within the bread because we find our sorrows immolated therein.

In him, in his body, in the bread we find the possibility of our sorrows, wounds, loneliness, rejection and insecurities being anointed; not just ‘mine’ alone but we find the struggle of all of us. If I receive the anointing, I too can extend my wounds and pain in communion with them making up one body of Him who is the anointed one.

It demands the most sincere intention and strong will, to be anointed; not for being exalted but to be buried, to take upon us the sorrows and groaning of the lifeless, and to pour out lifeblood over those woundedness. Lifeblood of the anointed becomes the ointment for healing.

My Today, My Ways of the Cross

Hosanna to my Saviour

Hosanna is the word for praise today. Hosanna means ‘God who saves’, ‘God who cares’, ‘God who loves’.  We have entered into the week of the Passion of Christ. It is a time to closely watch and experience God who saves, God who cares, God who loves in the different events that we will be participating in this week. In one way we are trying to find the depth of meaning of these events God has done for us in Jesus. So Jesus invites us to watch attentively the journey of the passion. We listen to every word that is spoken by Jesus, we repeat every sincere word that is spoken of him and to him. Every step of that journey is redemptive and our watchfulness helps us to appropriate the power of redemption into those areas of our life where we need God in being saved, being loved and being cared.

Jesus also invites us to imitate these events in our life. As the images of the Passion scenes are there in our mind, it is not merely a resembling of those events but really living them in our life as we go through our own daily ways of the Cross. Prophet Isaiah speaks in the image of the Suffering Servant of Yahweh, “Each morning he wakes me to hear, to listen like a disciple. The Lord has opened my ear” (Is 50/4). God awakes his servant in suffering and gives a listening ear to see his pains touched by the grace of God.

The week of the passion is a time also to see our own pains in a graceful manner. To open our own wounds before others and acknowledge them as our identifying mark before them though they caused us harm, humiliated us or destroyed us. Jesus said: “See my wounds”. He was not ashamed because he was undergoing fatigue or because he was wounded. There was a flow of grace in his failures and woundedness. We are also unjustly condemned, betrayed and rejected. Perhaps we are ashamed of those who belong to us. Here in this week, it is a time we allow God’s grace flow into our pains. Then at the resurrection we can look at our own wounds and cry out, “My Lord, and my God”. Jesus endured suffering and entered into glory not because he was a hero. He did everything in living the faithfulness to the Father. There was a proud belonging to the Father. It is in this fidelity our pains are being transformed into the image of the passion of Jesus.