Feast Day: March 31st
The Gospels tell us that an entire cohort of Roman Soldiers participated in mocking Jesus before His crucifixion, something like 600 soldiers abusing and jeering at Him. Just the night before, Jesus had reassured His apostles, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” [Matthew 26:53] A legion is ten times the size of a cohort, and Jesus has more than a dozen of them, of angels, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of angels. But Our Lord said that while calling Peter back from his sword wielding, and as the soldiers sneered and struck the King of Kings no angels ever appeared.
Jesus instead chose death, self-sacrifice, giving His life in my place, loving us till the end.
Now, this kind of love is amazing, and we must pause and let it sink in that Our Lord would have embraced all that suffering for JUST me or JUST you. But I think His choice to NOT defend Himself challenges us on a deeper level. If you or I were faced with a tortuous death, an unfair trial, the absurdity of senseless and unjustified suffering, wouldn’t we look for a way out?
Jesus could have called upon angels, obliterating those trying to kill Him.
Jesus could have refuted the charges, casting on us the consequences of our sin.
Jesus could have accepted the gall, numbing the excruciating pain of the cross.
Jesus could have asked God for comfort, at least feeling the consolation of His Father’s presence.
But at every turn Jesus instead chose love, the kind of love that hurts, that costs, that accepts suffering and scorn from the one being loved. Jesus did not just suffer, He chose suffering, He accepted it for you and me.
And He asks us if we’d be willing to accept it with Him.
“So the soldiers did these things,but standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.” [John 19:24-25] How easy it is to brush past this poignant line: The soldiers doing their thing … Do we allow our minds and hearts to consider the full horror of crucifixion?… and then the brief mention of those standing by the cross. Do we know how hard it was for Mary and John and the other Mary’s to stand there, to watch Jesus die so horribly?! Do we realize how hard it was for Jesus to see His friends suffering with Him?
I gave up many little things for Lent – probably all of us did – and I failed in every one of my sacrifices. I chose YouTube to distract myself from a long todo list. I succumbed to dessert at the end of hard day. I took a hot shower when feeling drained or under the weather. Now none of these things are intrinsically evil, but they are all ways that I avoided suffering, said “no” to the cross, told Jesus I would rather find my own comfort somewhere else than stay with Him on Golgotha. I chose the golden calf. I denied Jesus. I embraced Him, and then abandoned Him, because His way wasn’t the one I signed up for.
And then He rose from the dead.
And when Jesus steps forth alive and glorious after that horrible death, He does not just show us that eternal life is possible, and the cross is not the end, but He comes back to me, and you, and Peter and the rest, and gives us another chance to choose Him, cross and all.
Balbina was the daughter of a Roman Tribune named Quirinus. He would have commanded one of those Roman legions, and was currently holding Pope Alexander I and another Christian named Hermes in prison, pressing both to renounce their faith in Christ. Hermes did not know how to answer Quirinus’s interrogations, and so points the tribune towards Pope Alexander, telling him that the Holy Father had raised Hermes’s son from the dead. Quirinus breaks down. His own daughter Balbina has a crippling and disfiguring goiter. Can the Holy Father heal her? Pope Alexander points Balbina away from his own chains to reverence those that held St. Peter just a few decades before. She finds and kisses the shackles of the first pope and is healed, and she and her father are baptized at the hands of Pope Alexander, eventually themselves becoming saints.
The story is beautiful, but the most amazing thing that happened was not the conversion of Quirinus, or the healing of Balbina, but what happened when they were baptized. Quirinus, baptized, no longer needs to scramble to uphold his position. He is a son of God, His identity is secure. Balbina, baptized, is cured of the far worse crippling and disfiguring of original sin. She is pure and free and beautiful as God always wanted her to be. But baptism also plunged them, and us, into Christ’s death. Of course, our being baptized asks us to continue to fight sin in our lives. And to continue to choose to live from a spirit of adoption (rather than that of an orphan). BUT, we must also continue to embrace the cross with Jesus, and receive the gift of His new life in God’s good time.
– Fr. Dominic always loves to be wished “Happy Easter”, and nothing is happier than Easter, but Easter is no less real when happiness is harder to find.