We all know the story of the Passion. The agony in the garden, the scourging at the pillar, the crowning with thorns, the carrying of the cross, culminating in the crucifixion. We know Christ suffered and died for our sins, that He opened the gates to heaven, and became the new sacrifice. We know that His sacrifice is manifested mystically on the altar at each Mass throughout the world until the end of time.
What I want to meditate on are the deep realities of those truths as they pertain to every person’s daily life. How His suffering then transcends time and remains mystically present until the end of time, whereby He unites His own suffering to ours, giving us the grace to unite reciprocally ours to His. I want to understand better how this sustains my life working out my own salvation, including lifting up my own crosses, and for you as well, for every person.
We are told that Christ’s death is complete, that He is in heaven in His resurrected, glorified body, that the historical event of the Passion is over, no longer. Yet at the same time Christ on the cross is mystically present at each Mass, a bloody sacrifice presented in a hidden, unbloody manner.
And through the Mass, Christ in His Passion is manifested in our daily lives. Christ in His suffering state is manifested spiritually in our personal lives due to the transcendent miracle of the Mass offered each day. Yet at the same time, Christ remains in heaven in His resurrected state, in the temporal dimension of time in which He had already died, rose from the dead, and ascended into Heaven, while His presence on Calvary also continues throughout time but mystically.
And then I reflect on the truth that He bore every single sin committed by every single person, from Adam and Eve until the end of time, during the Passion and Death. He not only merited saving grace for every sin and sinner, but literally felt the suffering spiritually, mentally, and physically for it. And because Christ came secondarily to restore the divine order on Earth, I would imagine His suffering was that much greater due to the consequences of original sin on Creation. All the illness, chaos, and death in nature and human society that followed original sin, He also atoned for by an immeasurable suffering, meriting grace to also build up a Christian civilization secondary and at the service of saving souls.
He really felt that level of pain that only the divine Savior of the world could endure and offer up as a sacrifice to satisfy the Father. He felt all of it completely in those hours, and continued to suffer in the Mass and Eucharist, and through it in our own lives.
I’ve talked recently about the mystifying reality of suffering in this life, especially illness. But it all makes sense, and can only make sense, in the union between us in our suffering and Christ in His.
Mystics encountering visions of Christ report that when we are happy, He is happy. That when we are sad, He is sad. Therefore, when we are in pain, He is also in pain. But it is the pain of the Passion and Death. A woman lying alone in a nursing home after a severe stroke, paralyzed, her suffering is intimately intertwined with Christ’s suffering as He carried and then hung on the cross. Not metaphorically, but literally.
Unfortunately, Protestants do not have this clear understanding because they do not believe as we do about the Mass, and a suffering Christ manifesting mystically through all points of time past and future. Nor does the modernist understand not believing in the supernatural and miraculous dimension that rules over our natural dimension. Though both can come to understand and believe once they read what the Catholic Church teaches on the Mass and Eucharist, as confirmed by a study of countless Eucharistic miracles. For example, hosts changing on the altar no longer resembling a host but instead muscle tissue, when studied under a microscope seem to be human heart tissue.
Part of the mystery of the Passion is also how it was done not only for collective humanity, but intimately for each person because of our life of sin. So when we suffer in just reparation for our sins, Christ suffered absolutely for those sins, and continued to mystically suffer, but in an intimate way united to each person.
Each singular sin we’ve committed, He suffered for and still mystically suffers for, united to our own suffering, big and small, in a way that helps us intimately. He died for each person as if each person was the only person He created. Even to just save one soul was enough for Him to suffer the level of suffering He suffered.
So when a man unjustly loses his job, suffering the severe stress of unemployment, having a wife and family to support, Christ is there suffering right along side him, Christ underneath the man’s cross helping to hold it up with Him, and in turn the man, if he is a devout Christian, also stands spiritually underneath Christ’s own cross helping Him to carry it as did St. Simon. We carry Christ’s cross with Him, and He carries ours with us. So we are really carrying one cross of redemption side by side in charity to the other.
There is a priest from India I listen to about his near death experience, being shown heaven, hell, and purgatory. His guardian angel told him that ten percent or less of humanity goes straight to heaven when they die, since they’ve already been purified by great humble suffering in this life. He gave an example of a woman still living who has been a bedridden quadriplegic for decades since an injury as a teenager, who is a devout Catholic. Christ was and is suffering with her even more than her, and she in turn suffering with Him until her last breath. They are under the same cross, suffering it, accepting it, lifting it up, and offering it as a living sacrifice to God the Father,
The Mass, the Eucharist, the Passion and Death, both two thousand years ago and still today, are manifested everywhere people suffer and need redemption by means of suffering in grace. When you see a homeless man begging for food, who looks severely mentally ill, and in torment, Christ is there feeling the man’s mental suffering and torment, and suffering with the man for his sins. When a woman loses her husband prematurely and is left to finish raising their children on her own, sitting up late at night in severe grief, Christ is there sitting next to her, omnipresent, uniting Himself in the most intimate, personal way possible to her, His creation, through the Passion.
It is mystifying to think how all of these truths work together in concert everywhere in the world, and throughout all of time. But through faith we can accept the mystical reality that in Christ’s Passion, is our own daily passion, that the two are perfectly united. By accepting and offering up our own cross, we are literally helping Christ carry the cross up Mount Calvary, both in the spiritual dimension reaching back two thousand years ago, and that reality re-presented on the altar at each Mass. In turn, when Christ holds up His Cross, He is really helping us hold up our own cross. The grace of the Cross helps us carry out cross, and in turn help Christ carry His Cross.
In conclusion, this is the Catholic understanding of the Passion, one reason it being true is that it explains why and how we are to suffer, how our suffering works with His. The Protestant or worldly quasi-Christian view would view Christ as the only one who must suffer, who simply covers over our sins, without requiring us to suffer and become redeemed. That false view would have us wanting an easy life of faith alone in Christ.
It would shun suffering as against God’s will, while ultimately giving no explanation or framework for the suffering God clearly allows and wills for mankind. That view would have me lay back passively confounded by my own suffering, yearning for creature comforts to sustain me, ultimately leading to an unsustainable approach and despair. Whereas, the Catholic view would have us stand up, wrap our arms around the cross God gave us (back pain, autism, poverty, the trauma of severe childhood abuse, tragedy, you name it) and offer it up with Christ in reparation for my own sins. That leads to hope. In the end, it is not us far removed from the Cross in mere belief and daily comforts, waiting for heaven, but us actively suffering working out or own redemption with Christ by our side. There is one cross, with both the sinner and Christ standing underneath it together, in an intimate bond of love, walking the narrow path to heaven. In my final conclusion, I thank God for the truth, clarity, and wisdom of the Catholic Church in its teachings that makes the most sense about the human condition and how it relates to what Christ did by laying down His life for us.