• the blind see (Isaiah 29:18)
• the desert blooms and rejoices (Isaiah 35)
• the barren bear many children (Isaiah 54:1)
• the wolf shall dwell with the lamb [along with other unlikely companions] (Isaiah 11)
• the meek inherit the land (Psalm 37:11)

The primary example of the unexpected way in which God works is the cross.

How ridiculous it must have looked — that sign, “King of the Jews” above someone who was stripped, naked, and helpless on the cross!  The one who had claimed to be the bread of life, but now can’t even scratch his own nose, much less feed anyone!  Surely the invitation to take up our cross and follow Jesus is the height of folly.

This wasn’t even a noble death.  Crucifixion was the most shameful method of execution.  If Jesus had been a war hero dying in battle, it might have been considered an honorable death.  Even if he had been a great Greek or Roman philosopher who made a dramatic speech in his defense — that might have been less shameful.  But Jesus didn’t say much at all — a few words, a cry of anguish.  Even as a death, it was disappointing in human eyes.

But as Paul says:

The message of the cross is folly for those who are on the way to ruin, but for those of us who are on the road to salvation it is the power of God.

(1 Corinthians 1:18 NJB)

Who would have guessed that out of this weakness — when Jesus couldn’t use his hands, for they were nailed to the wood; couldn’t walk, for his feet were nailed; had wounds on his head from the thorns that were part of the clown costume that the soldiers had made him wear, and his chest wounded by the spear — who would guess that out of this weakness would come new life for the world, new life for each of us?

Who would guess that a public execution would show us the power of God?

Who would guess that God’s power would be made perfect in weakness?  (See 2 Cor 12:9.)

There is a skylight in the bathroom, and during the darker months of the year when the sun has shifted toward the south, the midday light shines right on the faceted cross, which acts as a prism, scattering the spectrum here and there around the room. You couldn’t avoid the colored light if you tried.

We are now moving out of the dark months of the calendar, at the same time that we are approaching Good Friday, the day when the sun was darkened and the One who is our Light was crucified. Nevertheless, we can’t escape the Light, even on Good Friday. It is never extinguished.

As the Gospel of John tells us. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (1:5).

Darkness cannot swallow up the light. This we know, because the light burst forth in splendor on Easter.  On Good Friday itself, as the sun’s light fails, we catch glimpses of the greater Light.

We see this, for example, in the “seven last words” of Jesus from the cross. Among them:

‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing’ (Luke 23:34).
‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’ (Luke 23:46).

We see it when the veil of the temple is rent, symbolizing our free access to the divine.

We hear it in the words of the centurion who says, “Truly this man was God’s Son” (Mark 15:39 and Matthew 27:54).

We glimpse it in the crowd of people who “returned home, beating their breasts” (Luke 23:48).

And, now, post-Resurrection, we may perceive it in our own lives, in our own dark moments, whenever there is a movement of love or trust or repentance, whenever goodness is apparent in the face of pain or evil.

In winter, in our bathroom, you can’t brush your teeth or sit on the toilet without rainbows adorning your body. Like the sunlight hitting the faceted cross on the bathroom wall, the holy light of Jesus’ cross and resurrection illumines all our human activities, including the ones we consider most earthly.

I would like to share with you a few thoughts on the Resurrection from James Alison’s book Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (28-31); for Alison finds it crucial that Jesus was “risen as crucified.” The risen Jesus, he says “didn’t appear to his disciples just as someone who had been dead, but was now better and risen….In contrast to this, the risen Jesus was dead.”

The risen Jesus was dead? Doesn’t this contradict everything we have been taught about the Resurrection? Then we remember that unlike Jesus, the raised Lazarus was not dead.  He had been returned to life – and so would have to die again.

Alison continues,

But that death is nothing but a vacant form for God, something whose reality has been utterly emptied out, which can only be detected in the form of its traces in the human story of someone who has overcome death.

The marks, then, of Jesus’ death were something like trophies: it was his whole human life, including his death, which was made alive and presented before the disciples as a sign that he had in fact conquered death.

The risen Jesus was dead, but this death no longer had substance – it was “nothing but a vacant form for God.” It was empty of any death-reality and filled with God.

“Whatever death is,” says Alison,” it is not something which has to structure every human life from within (as in fact it does), but rather it is an empty shell, a bark without a bite. None of us has any reason to fear being dead, something which will unquestionably happen to all of us, since that state cannot separate us effectively from the real source of life.”

“Peace be with you,” says Jesus to the disciples hidden and trembling behind locked doors on the first day of the week. Then he shows them his wounds and says once again, “Peace be with you” (John 20:19-21).

- – - – -

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
(1 Corinthians 1:18,25)

The cross is at the heart of God.

Does God Have a Heart?
For better or for worse, early Christian theology was strongly influenced by Greek philosophy. One (for me) infamous notion inherited from the philosophers is the impassibility of God. The belief that God is not capable of suffering was axiomatic for many Christian thinkers in the early centuries of the Church. It was later embraced by Thomas Aquinas, and it can still be found in the work of some contemporary theologians – this in spite of the biblical witness of a passionate God, a God who is afflicted in all our affliction (Isaiah 63:9, see RSV) and who grieves when we are unfaithful (Hosea 11:7-9).

If you believe that God cannot suffer, then it follows, as Thomas Aquinas says, that “Christ’s Passion did not pertain to his divinity” (Summa Theologica, III, Q 46, A 12). In this view, Jesus did suffer on the cross, but only in his humanity. If we carry this schema a step further, we are faced with a disturbing scenario: God the Father in no distress as he witnessed the Son in agony.

Suffering was viewed as a sign of imperfection.

However, we would probably argue — we who are made in the image of God — that the inability to suffer would itself constitute a grave flaw. It would certainly be a flaw in a human being. We know from our own experience that human maturity requires not only the ability to feel our own pain, but also the capacity for compassion, a word that literally means “suffering with.”

And from where does the ability to be compassionate come? Human beings receive this gift, like all good gifts, from God, whose own “compassion is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9).

If Jesus who died and was raised reveals God to us, who is the God whom he makes known?

Jesus reveals a God who is compassionate toward us like the best of fathers (Psalm 103:13), who loves us even more than a mother loves her child (Isaiah 49:15). Karl Rahner, speaking of the Incarnation, says that God’s Word who is Christ says to us: I am there. I am with you… I weep your tears. I am your joy… I am in your fear, because I have suffered it myself. I am in your death… I am your life.Kleines Kirchenjahr (Muenchen: Ars sacra, 1954)

We dwell in God. We are infused throughout our being with God who permeates every atom and electron and quark of our being.

The divine compassion assures us that whatever we do and experience, whether joyful or sorrowful, all is held and valued in the heart of God.

The divine omnipotence assures us that just as the pain and sorrow of Jesus were not wasted, neither will our own pain and sorrow be wasted.

The cross of Christ is at the heart of God. Our human life is in the heart of God.

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.

Pensacola is yet another hurricane-ravaged city, still recovering from Ivan which hit in 2004. More than two years later, the devastation is still visible in some neighborhoods. Many trees are dead or nearly defoliated. The house Sister Rosalie and I stayed in was heavily damaged by the storm, but has been recently repaired. The two houses on either side of us there on the bay were virtually destroyed. One is being rebuilt from the ground up. The other is best described by the reaction of a deliveryman who came to our door and exclaimed,

“That house is nothing but garbage!”

This is true, the house is mostly rubble, flanked by huge piles of debris. The deliveryman was astonished, but not, I imagine, in the way Oliver intends in her poem — with rejoicing and gratitude.

What do we do with the sorrows and horrors of the world as we stand before the manger this Christmas season? Can we stand still and learn to be astonished? And what do we make of our astonishment when faced with storms, war, poverty, cruelty, disease, and death? Or is it possible that we are no longer capable of astonishment, either at suffering or at the numinous, when the song of the angels is so regularly drowned out by news reports of violence and corruption or by bombardments of the terminally trivial?

It is tempting to forget that the cross is always implicit in the nativity scene. The gifts of the Magi, for example, are more than a welcome source of revenue for a young couple with a baby. Gold was the kingly gift; frankincense an offering for God; and myrrh… ah, there’s the rub. Myrrh was used for embalming. This kingly, godly child was going to die — like every child born into the world, but with a difference. His death would be an execution, premature, shameful, and expressing the love of God who emptied himself for us.

Nevertheless, if the cross seems to hang over the manger, as it does in this woodcut of the Nativity by Durer, so does the promise of the Resurrection. Since we know the rest of the story, we also know that Jesus was raised from the dead and brings us into his own divine life.

Our work, like the work of the poet, like the work of Jesus Christ, is “loving the world” (see John 3:16). So this Christmas season, fidgety and distracted though I am, I try to stand still before the mystery of the Incarnation and let myself be astonished:

astonished at the mercy shown me in God become flesh; and astonished at the mercy I am called to show others;

astonished at the presence of God — Emmanuel, “God-with-us” — in the most ordinary parts of life: “The phoebe, the delphinium / The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture” (Oliver, “Messenger”) — and in the birth of a baby in the midst of the pain and rubble of human existence;

astonished at all I don’t understand about life, human or divine (or human and divine);

astonished at my own powerlessness; and astonished to hear God say, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9);

astonished at the evil that seems to triumph in our world; and astonished that despite all appearances to the contrary, goodness is victorious.

_____

*”Messenger,” from Thirst (Beacon Press, 2006)

“Trees are hanging over almost everyone’s roof,” I pointed out, “and even over businesses. That’s how buildings in north Florida are kept cool in the summer.”

She finally accepted the blessing of the shade, and even grew accustomed to the occasional thud over our heads during a storm.

As we approach the Easter Triduum, I find myself singing about another kind of shade. The last stanza of the hymn, “Beneath the Cross of Jesus,” by Elizabeth C. Clephane, begins, “I take, O cross, thy shadow, for my abiding place.”

The shadow of the cross seems quite a different matter from the cool shade of our magnificent live oaks. Shade is something to be grateful for — but then there are the shadows that loom over our lives, making everything dreary. Why would I want to abide in the shadow of an instrument of death — in the shadow of the gallows, the electric chair, the gas chamber, nuclear weapons? This sounds too much like the evening news.

In the shadow of the cross, we are reminded that the poor and weak still suffer injustice and oppression, and the innocent are put to death.

But wait. In the shadow of the cross, we also learn that when evil has done its worst, when love seems to have perished, there is still hope. We are reminded that we are loved with a love that is passionate, life-giving, all-encompassing, and unconditional — a love unto death, yes, but also unto glorious life without end.

Because the Son of God loved us so much, we find that the shadow of the cross provides rest from the cold grip of fear, shelter from the scorching heat of ego, and healing from the sense of exile that may oppress us. We can rest in this shade.

We notice that the comfort of the shade found beneath the cross begins to remind us of an Old Testament metaphor: the shadow of God’s wings:

Be merciful to me, O God,
be merciful to me,
for in you my soul takes refuge;
in the shadow of your wings
I will take refuge,
until the destroying storms pass by. (Ps 57:1)

This is the image of God as mother bird, protecting her offspring. As strange as it may seem, in Christ, the shadow of the cross has become the shadow of God’s wings, the place where we are most at home.

You have been my help,
and in the shadow of your wings
I sing for joy. (Ps 63:7)

Lord Jesus, I unite myself to your perpetual, unceasing, universal sacrifice. I offer myself to you every day of my life and every moment of every day, according to your most holy and adorable will.
You have been the victim of my salvation, I wish to be the victim of your love.
Accept my desire, take my offering, graciously hear my prayer: let me live by love, let me die of love, and let my last heartbeat be an act of the most perfect love.
- Saint Therese Couderc

The following reflection on St Therese Couderc’s “Act of Oblation” is by Sister Elizabeth Hillmann.

I unite myself – to this sacrifice…
What is this sacrifice?
Humanity, not God, is responsible for the crucifixion. Crucifixion was an evil deed, a form of torture.

As Augustine says, it is not the physical suffering of Jesus that we love. It is the reality that he overcomes evil by love. “Having loved his own…he loved them to the end” (John 13:1). It is the returning of love for evil that overcomes the wickedness of all of us. And the Resurrection confirmed this. All is healed by the Resurrection of Jesus, which is central to the Christian. If Christ be not risen from the dead, Paul says, we are of all people the most foolish (1 Corinthians 15).

Paul also writes these mysterious and yet wonderful words:

“The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18 ).

So what in the world do we mean when we say, I unite myself to the sacrifice of Jesus?
I unite myself to the only real power: the power of love. Love is so easy to ignore, seemingly fragile, and indeed is fragile: yet in this fragile, disarmed self is the true power and the true glory of the world.

Some questions:
- Does uniting myself with this sacrifice mean I am willing to go on loving and trying to be loving and pure of heart even if it looks totally unimportant in the great events of world history? Do I realize that the simplest acts of loving and kindness are greater that all the magnificent works of construction, of art, of music, of science, of bombs?

- Does it mean I am willing to live in the mystery of human existence with trust in God my only support?

- Does it mean that I am willing to accept what seems to be my total unimportance in the greater scheme of things, just another of the 6 billion people around?
(This does not mean giving up excellence; it does mean giving up one-upmanship. In the pursuit of excellence, we seek to do our own best, not to win over someone else.)

- Does it mean that I can live without anxiety in the midst of the demands of life?

- Could it also mean that I live more aware that I am intimately connected to other humans and am willing to feel my own connection to those who suffer? That whatever they suffer, I stand with them as Mary stood at the foot of the cross?

Does it mean standing with the homeless, the persecuted people of Darfur , the innocent victims of war – and also the people who make war and persecute others, the peaceful and the enraged as well?

Mary was there standing with Jesus but standing in the midst of the people who did the crime of killing Him. We are the Body of Christ. We have an intimate connection to the suffering of others – as if it were our own. “By what boundless mercy, my Savior, have you allowed me to become a member of your body?” asks St. Symeon.*

I am reminded of the two saints writing to each other. One said she had a sore toe. The other wrote back that her toe hurt him. Are we to feel the pain and suffering of others as our own because we are all one body?

Other possibilities:

- Does it mean forgiving from the cross, as Jesus did? As Augustine reminds us, “If, therefore you have learned to pray for your enemy, you are walking in the way of the Lord” (Sermon on I John 1:9).

- Does it mean that I have faith that God is with me when I am suffering, whatever that suffering might be?

- Is this what it means to unite oneself to the sacrifice of Christ: to give witness to God’s great love by our own forgiveness, our own compassion, our own kindness, our own simple care of another’s needs?

- Does it mean that I have no other desire except to do the will of God?
This is what St. Therese asks of God in her “Act of Oblation” – to live by love, to die of love. What a mysterious and wonderful gift – to live by love night and day. St Ignatius says to ask for what we want. (You know: like what do you want for Christmas.) Why not beg for this gift, to live by love, to die of love? This is greater than a want. It is the need of our hearts. Our hearts are restless till they rest in God.

What more could we ask for?
__________
* The Book of Mystical Chapters: Meditations on the Soul’s Ascent from the Desert Fathers and Other Early Christian Contemplatives, trans. John Anthony McGuckin.

Then I looked around me at the assembled faithful, who, if they were not in pain at the moment, would at some time in their lives have to suffer deeply. Each one was at that moment happy or sad, healthy or sick, at ease or in pain; they were all sinful; they were every one of them headed toward death — and they were all amazingly beautiful. In fact, an essential part of their beauty seemed to me to be their mortality — or rather our mortality — and our participation in the death of Jesus.

I suppose this loveliness shouldn’t have surprised me, because we share our mortality with the Son of God. I am reminded of a quote from The Chess Garden, a remarkable novel by Brooks Hansen:

…when a Christian observes the crucifixion either in the Word, in church, or, if he should be so lucky, in the moment that contains him — he sees something beautiful, and blessed and necessary and sanctifying, for there on the cross he recognizes God, and there on the cross God recognizes him. . . . [God] continues to recognize the nature of our condition, through Christ. He continues to see that we are crucified here, and we continue to see that He is crucified here as well. So we are understood, so we are welcomed to Him, so we are forgiven. (p 433)

May we have eyes to see the beauty of the crucified Christ, and the loveliness of our participation in the mystery of his death and resurrection.

And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.
(Psalm 90:17 KJV)

That brief conversation reminded me how foolish the mystery of the cross appears to people who have not experienced its power. As St. Paul says,

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . .For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:18, 25)

In the cross of Jesus Christ we encounter God’s merciful love toward us. In the spectacle of One stripped and hung to die we find life. In the total self-giving of Jesus we behold the power and beauty of God.

The cross undoubtedly looks foolish to those who hold society’s values. And what is more, we ourselves must be willing to appear foolish — which we do when we proclaim Christ crucified (1 Cor. 1:23), when we take up our cross to follow Jesus, and when we cry out with Paul:

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:19-20)