When Jesus heard the crowd say to him, “If you are the Son of God, save yourself”, he declares, “Don’t you think that I couldn’t call to my father right now and he would send a myriad of angels to stop all this?”
We believe three things about God. That God is all powerful, that God is all knowing. and that God is all loving. All powerful, all-knowing, and all loving. So, we have to think that if there was a better way for our salvation, God would have probably come up with it, but He knew that this would be the way that we would be saved. God the Father sent his only Son into the world that He might suffer and die to lead us into the resurrection.
The same is true for us. We all carry a cross and we usually don’t get to choose that cross, it is given to us at some point in life. Then we fully embrace our cross as Jesus did and we unite our wills to His as Jesus did, when He said, “Father not my will but if it be your will.” If we unite our suffering to His, it becomes what we call the Pascal Mystery. Then our suffering and the carrying of the cross that we carry become not only sacred, but also become salvific. That means it is part of our salvation to work through the Paschal Mystery in ourselves that each of us will suffer. And if we have suffered with Christ, each of us will die. And if we have died with Christ, each of us will rise to the life of the resurrection. If there were a better way for this to happen, I know that God would do it. He has given us all this Pascal Mystery to enter into.
I want you to think about the cross in your life right now. What is the heaviest thing that you are bearing? What is the largest burden in your life right now? That is your cross. I invite you in your mind and your heart, if you haven’t yet, to say, “Father not my will but your will.” Because it is through this cross that you will be saved.
A lot of times we think that when we have a cross that maybe God has abandoned us, but the greatest Saints and Mystics talk about the blessedness of having a cross. Some of the Saints and Mystics would ask God to suffer with them. We all carry a cross. It is important that we also understand that everybody else is carrying a cross as well.
The prophet Isaiah says in the First Reading to speak words of consolation to those who are suffering, just to speak the words that will rouse them. Rouse means to encourage, to get them to stand up again, to get them to keep fighting the good fight. But before he says this, he says, “In the morning, every morning, the Lord opens my ears that I may hear Him.” The cross won’t make sense for us unless we hear God’s voice in it, unless we hear Him speaking to us.
I think that it would be a wonderful way to enter into this Holy Week, every morning before we get up before we do anything else, open the scripture and listen to Him. Call to mind the cross that we are bearing and join it to His. Then as we go out throughout the day and we encounter all these other people with very different attitudes and emotions, remember that they too carry a very heavy cross.
Most people carry a cross that we will never know. Most people’s suffering is much deeper than we could ever understand. The prophet is telling us to speak a word that will rouse them. We have heard the word of God and now with our speech, we can encourage one another to carry our crosses.
If there were a better way, I know that God would come up with it. But He has given us this Pascal Mystery that each and every one of us, if we join our suffering to Him and we die in Him, we will also rise with Him.
