FRIDAY IN PASSION WEEK
“I have shown you many good works from my Father; for which of these are you stoning me?”
—John 10:32
When Jesus saw the crowd harassed and dejected like sheep without a shepherd, he felt with them in the center of his being (Matt. 9:36). When he saw the blind, the paralyzed, and the deaf being brought to him from all directions, he trembled from within and experienced their pains in his own heart (Matt. 14:14). When he noticed that the thousands who had followed him for days were tired and hungry, he said, I am moved with compassion (Mark 8:2). And so it was with the two blind men who called after him (Matt. 9:27), the leper who fell to his knees in front of him (Mark 1:41), and the widow of Nain who was burying her only son (Luke 7:13). They moved him, they made him feel with all his intimate sensibilities the depth of their sorrow. He became lost with the lost, hungry with the hungry, and sick with the sick.
In him, all suffering was sensed with a perfect sensitivity. The great mystery revealed to us in this is that Jesus, who is the sinless son of God, chose in total freedom to suffer fully our pains and thus to let us discover the true nature of our own passions. In him, we see and experience the persons we truly are. He who is divine lives our broken humanity not as a curse (Gen. 3:14-19), but as a blessing. His divine compassion makes it possible for us to face our sinful selves, because it transforms our broken human condition from a cause of despair into a source of hope.
Everything that Jesus has done, said, and undergone is meant to show us that the love we most long for is given to us by God, not because we’ve deserved it, but because God is a God of love.
Jesus has come among us to make that divine love visible and to offer it to us. In his conversation with Nicodemus he says: “This is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but so that through him the world might be saved.” In these words the meaning of the Incarnation is summed up. God has become human — that is, God-with-us — in order to show us that the anxious concern for recognition and the violence among us spring from a lack of faith in the love of God. If we had a firm faith in God’s unconditional love for us, it would no longer be necessary to be always on the lookout for ways of being admired by people, and we would need, even less, to obtain from people by force what God desires to give us so abundantly.
Our Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ,
you suffered for us
and left an example
for us to follow in your steps.
You had done nothing wrong,
and had spoken no deceit.
You were insulted
and did not retaliate with insults;
when you were suffering
you made no threats
but put your trust
in the upright judge.
You were bearing our sins
in your own body on the cross,
so that we might die to our sins
and live for uprightness;
through your bruises
we have been healed.
—After 1 Peter 2:21-24