(Reprinted from Pulpit and Pew, by Vincent Kerns, MSFS, India: 1976)
Our Lord chose death on a cross {2} to show his love for us -- a love which the choice of an easier death could never have satisfied. The greater a man's love, the more he longs to suffer for what he loves.
Don't think that our Lord chose death simply to win us redemption. After all, one sigh from him would have been enough to save us, to deliver us from the hand of our enemies. {3} No, but his infinite love could be satisfied only by dying of love itself. The greatest love a man can show, as he said himself, is to lay down his life for what he loves. {4} How wonderful that God should love us so much as to let his own Son die for our sakes, when it was we who had deserved to die! {5}
No ordinary death would do our Master, when he came to die for us. He chose the worst, most humiliating form of death possible. How inscrutable are God's judgments, how undiscoverable his ways! {6} Even the little we know and understand of God's providence is deep and wonderful; but the grandeur arid goodness of what we don't know is beyond compare.
The Son of God was nailed to a cross. Surely it was love, and love alone, that held him there! Since his death was a token of his love for us, the least we can do in return is to make our Jives signs of our love for him. {7} Love finds nothing impossible: it can root out everything in our lives that is displeasing to God.
The second reason why our Lord and Master chose death on a cross was to teach us to cultivate humility -- the best way of putting our pride to the blush. Adam wanted to be like to God, to live by God's life; the serpent assured him of this when he set aside God's commandment. {8} I want you to take note, if you will, of our Savior's infinite goodness in dying a human death so that we can live, as Adam longed to, the very life of God.
If we would discover our Lord's humility, let us listen to what St Paul said of him: His nature is, from the first, divine, and yet he did not see, in the rank of Godhead, a prize to be coveted; he dispossessed himself. {9} This means that he confined his glory for a while to the higher part of his soul, leaving its lower part exposed to the mercy of all the sufferings, humiliations and horror which his passion would bring. The wonder of it: the eternal Word obliterating himself -- you might say -- lowering his own dignity, taking the nature of a slave, fashioned in the likeness of men who remain so cold to his love!
Since he accepted an obedience which brought I him to death, death on a cross, it is only right for us, l surely, to obey him-even though it bring us to death, death on a cross-and so prove our love for him! People will sometimes face death bravely when it brings glory with it. But it is not for us to choose what we would like, but to accept cheerfully whatever God in his goodness has in store for us. And this goes not just for death, but also for all kinds of sufferings, trials, upsets and humiliations. All these will amount to very little, after all; and the depth of our wretchedness merits nothing less.
The third reason why our Master chose death on a cross was to strengthen our constancy by his example of a long-drawn-out agony. One sigh to his Father, as I have said, would have been enough to save us; but, in his goodness, he saw that we needed an example of everything we ought to do. That is why, determined to die, he did not seek a shorter way than crucifixion -- such as suffocation or strangulation. He was teaching us not to let the length or intensity of our sufferings wear us down, even though they last all our life long. They can never be anything to compare with those he endured for us.
We are to pluck up courage, then, and imitate our Master. We are never to give up, but goon struggling bravely right up to death, never dismayed by all we have to face. Dismayed we shall be, if we rely on our own strength. Trust is what we need -- trust that God is on our side all the time we are struggling for love of him. {10} We need to say like St Paul: When I am weakest, then I am strongest of all. {11} Even if our struggle involves failure, there is never any cause to be surprised or depressed -- as long as we intend to do better.
Now I come to the question: why was our Lord determined to die naked on the cross? The first reason was that by his death he meant to restore mankind to the state of original innocence. The clothes we wear are a sign of sin. There were no clothes, remember, before the original sin, and Adam went naked. It was not until after he had set aside God's commandment that he began to be ashamed, and covered himself as best he could with a girdle of fig leaves. {12} By his nakedness on the cross, our Lord showed that he was purity itself and that, in addition, he was restoring men to original innocence.
The chief reason, however, was to teach us how we are to strip ourselves as spiritually as he did physically, if we are to please him -- by laying aside every other desire and ambition, to concentrate on loving and seeking him. This stripping of self is the second result of meditating on the passion; love is the first.
The great Father Serapion was once found stark naked in the street. "Who's done this?" said his friends. “Who has stolen your clothes?" "This book," he replied, holding up the gospels; "this book it is that has stripped me." {13} Take my word for it too: nothing can prove so effective in leading us to strip ourselves spiritually as reflecting on the utter physical nakedness of our crucified Savior.
The Jews, before they crucified our Lord stark naked, put a crown of thorns on his head. To my mind, this was a sign -- unintentional on their part -- that, though he seemed an object of scorn and dishonor, he was still truly king. Our Master allowed himself to be crowned with thorns, to show us that our heads too must bear this crown by a complete mortification of our own judgments, opinions, passions, moods and wills - the head being the source of the soul's main functions.
Holy Scripture -- describing Absalom's flight to avoid his enemies after losing a battle -- says that the tangled branches of an oak caught him by the head and kept him hanging there between earth and sky. {14} Because of Absalom's wickedness, the Fathers of the Church {15} -- in their reflections on this incident -- are against him being taken as a type of our Lord; rather, he represents sinful man, whose head, whose thoughts, are to be affixed to the tree of the cross.
It only remains for me now to urge you to listen to what St Paul recommends in today's liturgy: ours is to be the same mind which Christ Jesus showed for us on this day. {16} What does the apostle mean? Does he mean that we are to feel a purely spontaneous sympathetic love for our Lord on the cross? Does he mean that we are to weep with compassion? Not at all. What the Savior expects of us is not a spontaneous love that causes us to burst into tears or awakens ineffectual desires. Hell is full of desires like that. Such tender feelings, on which we often set such store, are a waste of time and effort. We ought neither to desire nor seek them; they are only for those weak characters who rely on sentiment to tickle their fancies. Deliberate love is what our Lord asks of us; and it is that deliberate love, together with the spontaneous one, that he showed us on the cross -- for he died of both at once.
When St Paul urges us to have the same mind that Christ Jesus showed, self-obliteration is what he means. He dispossessed himself; {17} that is what we are to do too. We are to obliterate ourselves away to our nothingness; we are to dispossess ourselves, as far as we can, of all our passions, our inclinations, our aversions, our dislike for what is good. Not only that: we must preserve this attitude for the rest of our lives, never seeking encouragement from our Savior's death, always preserving the sorrowful memory of it in our hearts. In this way we shall die to ourselves by constant mortification in the things we don't need – in imitation of St. Ignatius of Antioch who said that people ought not to think of him as being alive, since his love was crucified. {18} He meant that he had mortified his self-love to such an extent that it no longer existed; or rather, it was entirely spent on our Savior crucified. He was right, that great saint, in claiming to be alive no longer; to deprive our souls of love, deprives them also of life.
So don't think it strange if I say that we ought always to be sorrowful on account of our Master's death, for it was the death of our love. Was not our Lord the love of our souls, seeing that he is our bridegroom -- especially those of us who are religious? The Fathers of the Church {19} taught clearly and distinctly that religious are wedded to the Son of God. To this union are attributed the special relationships which God the Father and our Lady contract with such souls. The black veil they wear should remind them that they are betrothed to a man who died. Worldly marriages are broken and ended by death; with this one it is the other way round entirely -- it is made in and through the death of our Savior, our one and only Master.
Go ahead, then; give all your love to him who died for us all, to make us one with him, to prove his love for us. {20} Give all your love to him, so that it is he alone who is alive in you. Then you can say with St Paul: With Christ I hang upon the cross, and yet I am alive; or rather, not I - it is Christ that lives in me. {21}
Our Master died for Jove of us; it only remains for us to Jive for love of him. There must be nothing mediocre about our love, however; it must be a love, similar to his (not equal, of course, for that is impossible), a love that is strong and full of courage, a love that deepens amid the set backs of life, a love that never gives up the struggle for the sake of our lover, who is our God.
Let us be content to reproduce his humiliations in our own lives, crowning our heads with crowns of thorns after the example of that great king of Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon. When he conquered the Holy Land for Christ (it had been in the hands of the infidel), someone attempted to place a golden crown upon his head. "God forbid!" he cried in refusal; "God forbid that I should wear a crown of gold where my Savior was crowned with thorns! No, that shall never be. Bring me a crown of thorns like my Master had, and 1 shall willingly wear it."
If we choose the crown of thorns in this life we shall surely have a crown of gold in heaven after death. There we shall enjoy to the full our Savior's love, whose sole desire is to see us, like himself, burning with that fire which he told us he came to spread over the earth, and longed to see enkindled. {22}
Amen.
End Notes
1 This sermon was preached at Annecy, probably in the Visitation Monastery, on Good Friday 28. March 1614. (Annecy Edition, Vol. IX, sermon vi, pp. 39 - 45).
2 Ph 2: 8.
3 Lk 1: 74.
4 Cf. Jn l5: 13.
5 Cf. Jn 3: 16; Rm 5: 8, 9.
6 Cf. Rm 11: 33.
7 2 Co 5: 14.
8 Cf. Gn 3: 4, 5.
9 Ph 2: 7,8.
10 Cf. Rm 8: 31.
11 Co 12:10.
12 Cf. Gn 3: 7
13 Cf. Vitae Patrum, I. Vita S. Joan, Elememos., c. xxii.
14 2 S 18 : 9.
15 Cf. St Augustine: Enarrat, in Pss. 3:1; 142:4; St Gregory the Great on 7th Penitential Psalm.
16 Cf. Ph 2: 5.
17 Ph 2; 7
18 Cf. St Denis: The Divine Names, 4. 12.
19 Cf. Platus: De bono Stat. Relig., I. 33, 34; II, 13
20 Cf. 2 Co 5:14, 15.
21 Ga 2:20.
22 Cf. Lk: 12: 49.
