Meditating on the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary this Friday, I had a clearer notion of Christ’s personal situation during His Passion.

Everything Christ did during His life, and especially during those awful last hours, point to His great love for us. 

But our human notion of real love is sketchy at best. Only through examining love in action through Jesus can we grasp the real essence of love.

Stopping the Pain

God in His three Persons is almighty and all powerful. At any time throughout His torture, Christ could have said, “Enough!” and halted the process.

He could also have revealed Himself as the transfigured Christ – with all wounds healed.  Can you imagine how terrified and in awe of Him the Jews and Romans would have been had He done that?

Instead he endured being whipped repeatedly with steel tips, spat upon, hit, jeered at and mocked. He was clothed in a purple cloak which was then ripped off His back after the blood from His scourging had dried on the material.

Thorns were pressed into His head and He was forced to carry His own heavy cross, when he had no energy left. When had he last eaten or drunk? At the Passover meal with the Apostles. That was hours ago.  

The cross dug into his shoulder, inflicting even more pain, well before he was nailed to it and hoisted, naked, for all to sneer at while he took three hours to die of suffocation.

And at any point during this excruciating ordeal, He could have said, “Stop!”

But He didn’t.

Doesn’t that give us pause for thought? Do any of us love even one person enough to go through such agony for them, let alone the whole of flawed humanity?

It takes unbelievable humility to act as if you have no power over your persecutors.

That’s real love.

Makes one think, doesn’t it? 

He Descended into Hell for Us

I've often wondered what the phrase in the Creed ‘He descended into Hell’ means.

Hell is separation from God. No one can enter communion with God in Heaven if he or she is not pure. We must be purged in Purgatory of our remaining impurities before we can enter Heaven.

Christ took on all the sins of the world – past, present and future – when He let Himself be crucified. He became impure. For the first, last and only time, He was separated from God.

And not because of anything He had done wrong. Completely pure, He became impure out of love for us. He’d been one with the Father from the beginning of time, and now, because He wanted to save us, He agreed to be separated from His Father.

No wonder he cried out, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The agony of being split from the Trinity must have been far worse than any physical pain. Even though He knew it was temporary and necessary to conquer death, it was going to be – well, Hell for Him.

And when we realize that He was fully aware that this horrible moment of separation was imminent, the Agony in the Garden takes on an added dimension, doesn’t it?

Yet Jesus did this out of love for us.

Another beautiful truth.        

Saved or Not?

He knew already in the Garden of Gethsemane just how many souls His sacrifice would save. He also knew the exact number of those who would spurn His sacrifice and descend into Hell.

Those latter souls will have refused to believe in God during their lifetime, only to discover His existence when they die. At the very moment when they believe in Him, they will be separated from Him.

Just when they desire Him above all things, it will be too late. They will never be with Him in Heaven. 

Imagine how the knowledge of these truths increased Christ’s agony! We can readily sympathize with His prayers to have the chalice removed from His lips. 

Yet He still went through His Passion out of love for us all. Even if only a few of us make it through that narrow door, Christ wanted to show us just how much He cared about every single human being, by dying a horrible death to give us all a chance to be saved.

Isn’t that another beautiful truth?  

So how are we going to show Him our appreciation of what He went through ‘for us men and for our salvation’?

I guess it’s become almost a cliché to watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ during Lent, but I’d managed to avoid watching it ever since it came out in 2004. That’s 10 years of successful evasion!

I was quite happy to keep it that way.

Not being a fan of gore, and fully aware of Mel Gibson’s penchant for bloodiness, I had a good enough imagination to visualize Christ’s sufferings without seeing his extended version of it.

The Escape Is Over

This Lent a friend of mine bought the DVD and wanted me to watch it with her. No one had asked me to see the film before, and I felt this was God’s way of telling me It Is High Time I Did.

Reluctantly, I agreed. Two other Christian friends were invited to come the very next evening to my house. I wanted to get this thing over and done with! It wasn’t the kind of movie I looked forward to viewing.

They said they’d love to join us. There: I was going to have to suffer through Christ’s Passion with Him.

What Does ‘Satan’ Mean Again?

Throughout the day of our gathering, I was forcefully reminded that the name ‘Satan’ in Hebrew means ‘the opposer' as he is opposed to what God wants.

I’m not good at switching the TV into DVD mode. After twiddling the knobs for about an hour that afternoon, sweating buckets because I was getting nowhere, I called my husband for help. (I hate doing that!)

He told me that he ‘twiddles the knobs until it works.’ I thanked him profusely for his valuable help and texted my son in college.

He was in class and would get back to me at 3:15 p.m.  Relieved, I pottered around the house until the appointed time.

3:15 p.m. came and went with no phone call. To stop myself from obsessing, I twiddled the knobs a bit more and got the sound but no picture. After fifteen more minutes I could stand it no longer and actually phoned my son.

No response.

To calm my nerves, and praying to the Holy Spirit to make everything O.K. for that evening, I took my cell phone down to the barn and started brushing my horse.  Immediately my cell rang and it was my son.

I ran back to the house and my son directed me through the process. Two wires had come out of the back of the TV, and reattaching them was crucial to the outcome in addition to twiddling the right knobs.

Ha, take that, Satan!

Again, What Does ‘Satan’ Mean?

Flushed with success, I went about getting food ready for my soon-to-be-arriving guests.

In the middle of slicing the tomatoes I gashed my finger. My immediate thought was, ‘Satan, you really don’t want us to watch this film, do you? Well, we’re gonna, so there!’

I still wasn’t completely ready by the time my friends arrived, but luckily they’re my friends because they like me not for my food. (This is where I remind anyone who doesn’t know or remember that I’m British.)

We ate and chatted, while trying to calm down my English bulldog Jeeves,  who was thrilled to have so many people to say ‘hello’ to.

The Movie

The movie was tough to watch, as anticipated.

I doubt whether I have anything more meaningful to say about it than others who’ve done so before me. But that won’t stop me adding my two cents’ worth!

Imagining the sufferings of Christ is very different from ‘witnessing’ the gratuitous cruelty of the Romans in those days. Even if Mel Gibson included details that aren’t historically true, it is well documented how cruel those people were. The truth is, Christ suffered horribly for us.

It was also interesting to see the dilemma of Pontius Pilate, faced with either putting Christ to death or virtually being put to death himself. He knew he was sending an innocent man to a wretched torture.

There, But For the Grace of God, Go I

The Jewish leaders were clearly jealous of Christ’s authority. But some of them genuinely believed they were dealing with a heretic who had delusions of being God, who needed to be silenced.

If I had been a Jew in those days I, too, would have strewn Christ’s path with palm fronds as he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. Carried away by the sentiment of the crowd, I’d have shouted “Hosanna in the highest!” with the best of them.

And seven days later, swayed by popular opinion yet again, I’d have cried out for Christ’s blood: “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

Do you ever stop to think about how lucky we are to be born after Christ’s time? 

As wonderful as it would have been to witness His miracles, I’m pretty sure I’d have agreed with whatever the Jewish authorities told me to believe.

Being alive in this day and age, we have the benefit of hindsight. We have the support of centuries of faith, the example of the saints – ordinary people who exhibited extraordinary love and proved that it is possible to follow in the footsteps of Christ.

I love that last line in the Creed: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” It is wonderful to know that the saints and the angels are with us at every Mass!

Every Day We Are Redeemed

Not just at 3 p.m. on Good Friday, when He dies on the cross, but every day, we need to truly appreciate what Christ went through for our salvation: ‘we have been bought at a price’ (1 Cor. 6:20). A very high price.

Whenever we’re inclined to make selfish decisions, let’s remember His selflessness in suffering torture and humiliation to redeem every last one of us. 

Whatever wrong we’ve done, God wants to forgive us. We just have to repent and ask Him for forgiveness. His Son died so we could be forgiven.

This Easter will we spurn Jesus' sacrifice on Good Friday by refusing to beg forgiveness, thereby condemning ourselves to eternal damnation?

If you haven’t watched The Passion of Christ, our pastor - and I - recommend it as a way of grasping the awesomeness of what Jesus did for us in order that we might join Him in His Resurrection.