As we walk the Way of the Cross with the Church during Holy Week, Our Lord poses many questions to us. Will we stay awake with Him or give into fear or the world? Will we deny Him when things get difficult and our reputation is on the line? If necessary, will we stand alone beside Him before Pilate, scourged and crowned with thorns? Will we accept our cross and crucifixion? Will we forgive those who persecute, hate, and betray us? The ultimate question Christ poses to us as we walk beside Him on the way to Calvary is whether our hearts will harden or become hearts of flesh brimming with love and mercy in the face of the trials and tribulations of this life?
The Passion of Our Lord is an invitation to move deeply into the love and mercy of God. We are asked to abandon our worldly desire for comfort, honor, power, pleasure, ease, esteem, and even a desire to be loved by others, in favor of following Him wherever He may lead us. This requires our willingness to be abandoned by family, friends, co-workers, strangers, fellow Christians, and the world. It is to embrace being misunderstood, and at times, hated for our love of Jesus Christ and His Church. What makes it more difficult is that sometimes, the very people who abandon us or betray us are our brothers and sisters in Christ, including bishops and priests.
When we find ourselves hated or persecuted, a great spiritual danger arises that can lead us down the path of hatred, bitterness, and a desire for vengeance. The enemy of our souls, Satan, comes swooping in with his demon cohort in order to draw us away from light into the darkness of unforgiveness. Unforgiveness enslaves our hearts in ways few things can. It is an immense battle to forgive the people who hurt us, whether they do so intentionally or not, especially in the face of repeated sins and no contrition.
Christ constantly teaches us to love those who hurt us, including those who persecute us. We are called to love our enemies. This is especially true of family and friends who, for whatever reason, end up becoming enemies. In fact, this is the hardest battle in learning to forgive. Impersonal persecution is much easier to bear than persecution at the hands of those we love.
To understand the depths of forgiveness we are called to, we must walk beside Our Savior in His Passion. He shows us how to love, forgive, and be merciful. We desire justice, but often, we must seek mercy. Christ calls us to remember our own weakness and the weaknesses of others and to pray for their conversion. We are called to learn how to love enough that we desire no soul should be damned, no matter what they have done to us. This is the essence of mercy. Begging Christ to save those who persecute us.
As we look at the Passion narratives, we see His mercy and forgiveness begins at the Last Supper. He sits in the same room as the man who is about to betray Him. Rather than call Him out, He allows Judas to betray Him. What deep pain this betrayal must have caused Jesus. He also knows the other Apostles, except for the beloved disciple, will abandon Him on the Way of the Cross. St. Peter blindly refuses to listen when He tells him about his coming denial. How often do we blindly ignore Our Lord’s loving warnings? He patiently, lovingly, and silently endures countless interior mortifications caused by His Apostles.
Our Lord then goes out to the Garden of Gethsemane where He is abandoned by His three closest Apostles who cannot stay awake one hour with Him in prayer. He is completely alone, except for the angel who ministers to Him. When His betrayal comes, St. Peter responds violently because He still does not understand the necessity of the Cross. St. John will come to understand much sooner than the rest as He finds Our Blessed Mother and walks with her throughout Her Son’s Passion. The rest of the Apostles flee in fear. How often do we flee in the face of the slightest fear or discomfort?
As Our Lord is led to the Pharisees, followed by Pontius Pilate, who sends Him to Herod, and back to Pilate, we are invited to walk the path of death to the world and a call to embrace persecution. Ultimately, we have a choice to make in each moment of our day: Will we stand with Our Scourged and Thorn-Crowned Savior or will we go with the powers that be and the crowd?
We deny Jesus every time we sin or when we flee to worldly comforts. We wash our hands of Him whenever we choose to belong to Caesar or the world over Him. And we abandon the truth when we turn a blind eye to evil or ignore erroneous teaching, especially within the Church, for the sake of ease and a false peace. We yell “Crucify Him!” when we persecute our brothers and sisters in Christ who raise high the Cross in the face of our comfort, sin, and worldliness or when we don’t want to be hated by those around us. We don’t want to suffer, so we go along with the mob.
We are being invited into redemptive suffering. We are being asked to accept mockery, contempt, misunderstanding, jeers, and rejection for His sake because we love Christ above all else. If we think there is another way, then we do not fully grasp the Gospel. We do not understand the necessity of the Cross in our own lives as the means of salvation. Our Lord does not simply die on the Cross and free us from suffering. No, He calls us to follow Him with the heavy wood upon our backs, digging into our shoulder in excruciating agony, until we fall into the dust. Then, with each new fall—and there will be countless falls—He picks us up from where we cleave to the dust and asks us to go again with Him until we reach Calvary, where we must die with Him.
There will be moments in our lives when we will have to sit before the Pharisees of our day and silently endure injustice for His sake. There will be times in our lives when we will be invited to ignore Church teaching or turn a blind eye to the truth in order to avoiding rocking the boat and we will need to stand firm with the truth, even though we will be hated by others—both in the culture and within the Church. We will have to persevere and not despair when even members of the clergy seemingly ask: “What is truth?” These are the days we live in. This is our weak, sinful human condition. We need saving.
Holy Week is not a long-ago event where we remember in a distant, arms’ length sort of way. Our Lord is inviting us to truly walk with Him in those moments and in the difficulties we face in our daily lives. The Way of the Cross is the Way of Love. It is the path by which we learn to love. Our hearts are so often beaten, cut open, and wounded by our own sin and the sins of others are widened, deepened, purified, and transfigured by walking with Jesus to Calvary.
Every single one of us has a heart made of stone. We are selfish, egotistical, sinful, and willing to harm others to get what we want in life. Our hearts harden the more we sin and the more others hurt us. The challenge to us is to turn to Christ, asking Him to give us a heart of flesh. Only He can keep us from becoming bitter and hard-hearted in the face of betrayal, rejection, and sin.
He gives us the answer to the difficulties we face. He calls us to forgive and to be merciful. This doesn’t mean justice is unimportant. It is important, but often in the face of the sins of others and our own sins, we need mercy more than justice. We need to let go of our desire for apologies, reconciliation, or any kind of acknowledgement of past hurts from others by choosing to forgive. They often don’t come and we have to forgive them, anyway. This call of forgiveness goes a step further, however, because we are called to fight for the salvation of those who hurt us. To not abandon them to their sin and the loss of their soul.
The forgiveness we are called to is the same forgiveness Christ has given you and me in our sin. To truly grasp it, we must meditate on the how Our Lord poured out His loving mercy upon every single person He encountered throughout His Passion. His love is so great that He wanted the Pharisees to convert, but He knew how hard their hearts had become. There are plenty of Pharisees in our own day and they aren’t who we think they are because often they are the people who don’t think they have become that spiritually blind.
Our Lord forgave the men lashing Him in the scourging. The men who crowned Him with thorns and mocked Him. The crowds who cursed, reviled, and spat upon Him. Those who mocked Him. He even forgave the men who nailed Him to the Cross and left Him to die. This level of love is incomprehensible for fallen mankind. It is so completely gratuitous and counter to our way of operating it could only come from God. We would much rather cling to vengeance than forgiveness, but He calls us to forgive. Perfect justice will come in the next life, but here and now is the age of mercy when souls can still be saved.
This Holy Week, we are being invited to forgive and love those who hurt us. To stand firm in the truth. To pray and sacrifice for the salvation of those who persecute and betray us. We beg for God’s mercy upon them and for Him to have mercy on us because we are great sinners, too. Look into the eyes of Our Crucified Savior and ask Him to give you a heart of flesh, a heart of mercy, a heart of repentance, a courageous heart, and a heart that forgives. A heart of flesh is won through walking the Way of the Cross, fully united to Him every step of the way.
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