The Passion of Christ

 Today is Palm Sunday, where we celebrate the passion and death of our Lord, Jesus Christ. 

The Palms are a reminder of our Lord's entry into Jerusalem, where Palms were raised before him to glorify him in his entrance. 

We read the passion, and contemplate in silence the death of our Lord. 

The silence too is a reflection of the silence at his death, after his last words "Into your hands Lord, I commend my spirit" and again "It is finished", and then, silence. 

Then, the corpses of those upon these crosses, and so the Body of Christ as well, were taken down. "Surely this man was innocent" and again "Surely this man was the Son of God" The words of the centurion who pierced his side, and so made the fifth of the Five Holy Wounds. 

Mary Cradles her dead son in her arms, and by the aid of Joseph of Arimathea, as though by a certain remembrance of St. Joseph her husband, is led to place Jesus in a tomb, with a stone now closing over it, as though to see him for one last time; as though a final realization of that sorrowful prophecy of Simeon to her: "And your soul too, a sword shall pierce, that out of the hearts of many, thoughts may be revealed", scripture says she treasured such things and pondered them in her heart, what pain now must she suffer, in seeing the death of her son, his body now gone behind a stone; how similar, yet how much more painful is this, to the time when she had lost him in Jerusalem for three days; and now she would have to wait again for three days, in a much deeper sorrow, the immaculate heart receiving her most devastating wound, the sword piercing now fully through her soul, the Holy Family, reduced to now but to one. 

I"m reminded of a story about what happened after the bombing of Nagasaki, of the great darkness of that time. Jesus here is the lamb of God, slain in sacrifice, both victim and priest, and a native of Nagasaki who went through the bombing, one Takashi Nagai, a doctor who worked to save many lives, but who lost his wife in the bombing and whose own body suffered greatly from it's effects, but when reflecting upon the event, thought of it as though Nagasaki had become, as it were, a burnt sacrifice offered up to God, sufficient to atone for the fighting and the war, required to fill up the demands of God's just wrath. He was not immediately received well in this view, but he connected the destruction of Nagasaki with the emperor of Japan finally deciding to sign for peace, an event which he had heard happened only moments after the bomb was dropped. 

On the human level, it's hard to imagine a darker moment in history than the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the horrors those who survived the bombing had to suffer in the aftermath. One apologist, Trent Horn, when speak of the danger of a Nuclear bomb likes to use the language of our Lady of Akita to describe it: "In those days, the living will envy the dead" itself perhaps a reflection of revelations "During those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them." (Rev 9:6) yet Takashi Nagai managed to see light in this darkness, however dim and perhaps even unjust that light may have first seemed; but he saw the terrible even through the lens of divine providence, and in the light of the love and goodness of God. 

Now his faith enabled him to do this, and so it was in the light not of mere reason, but of faith, that he saw these terrible events, but how much greater was the faith of Mary? For faith is a grace from God, and who was closer to Jesus than Mary? Who but Mary is called 'full of grace'. 

What then did she see, in this horrible darkness, her son, her very God, dead, separated body and soul; and this after having been mocked and tortured, suffering through an exact reversal of what was his right; a cruel and mocking inversion of a kings coronation ceremony, a sorrowful and bloody inversion of his being seated down on a throne in the form of his being strung up on Cross. If even the centurion who cooperated in his death could not deny his innocence, thud terrible injustice of what had been suffered, how much more so his mother?

If, in the light of faith, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be seen as a burnt offering of so many souls to end the horrors of the War, what terrible evil must be being payed for, if God himself must die, before God could consider the atonement sufficient? If the terrible darkness of the bomb and the days afterwards were required for the light of peace to return to the world, what then that seemingly supernatural darkness of the very death of God? 

Just as there were those who took Takashi Nagai's faithful interpretation of events with some anger, so it may perhaps make sense that those, seeing these events through the eyes of reason, may be angered at me comparing the death of one man to that of so many, but if in the eyes of faith that one man is God himself, the very God who, seen in the light of faith, could give Takashi Nagai a source of light in that dark time, and inspire many others to hope in so hopeless a time as well, then what light could we say that Mary had, when the very God who is the source of that light had faded from her world, and not only faded; but had been tormented in so terrible a fashion? Yes, perhaps in the light of reason the death and suffering of many is a far greater darkness than the the death and suffering of one, but you who can at least sympathize with those who can use their faith in God to endure through the death of one, even if not with many, and all the more so those of you who can sympathize also with how Takashi Nagai used his faith to deal with the bombing and it's horrible darkness, consider how difficult it would have to be to endure in faith, when the very grounds of that faith have been torn asunder; when the body and soul of her faith, united in the human being of her son, were torn apart: how terrible a darkness could she have suffered? How horrible a wound? How defining a silence, in the last breath of her only son?

Mary, Mother of Sorrows, pray for us.