DOWN ON HIS KNEES

 

The Passion of Jesus was an experience which included every experience, except sin, of every member of the human race. The fourteen Stations of the Cross show not only the suffering but the psychology of Christ.  Above all they show His way of transforming suffering by love.  He shows us, step by step, how that plan of love can be carried out by all of us today, both in the loneliness of our lives and together in union with one another. In this day, when we all seem to be so separated, it is crucial that we see the suffering of our Savior as a way of placing our own sorrows in a context of salvation history. 

"At the very first step of the way to Calvary, Jesus stumbles and falls.  He is down on His knees in the dirt!   

What has happened to this man?  This man who had just now declared Himself to be king of a spiritual world with legions of angels at His command, who has been known to hold back the overwhelming force of the storm and still the raging seas by an act of His will, who by a mere touch of His hand caused a living fig tree to wither, and has fallen now under the purely material weight of the cross He so lately welcomed!

Only a few moments ago He held out His arms to receive it, seemingly with joy.  Now, at the very first shock of its weight on His shoulder, He has fallen!

The crowd thronging outside the judgment hall are laughing derisively.  Some of them remember Him say that – that any man who wanted to follow Him could only do so, carrying his cross.  Now it seems that He can’t even take the first step on the way to be marked out by His footprints without falling!"

"Yes, Christ is living through the experience of ordinary men, of each and every ordinary man in whom He will abide through all the ages to come.  He has not come into the world to indwell only exceptional men, or supermen.  He is not here and suffering His Passion in order to be glorified in those who succeed where others fail, or to make Himself an exception to ordinary men.  He has come to live out the life of every man, of any man who has any love for Him at all and tries to keep His word.  “If a man has any love for He, He will be true to my word; and then He will win My Father’s love, and we will both come to Him, and make our continual abode with Him,” (John 16:23)…

Because Christ identified Himself with us, because He suffers the humiliation of the first fall in us, His love transforms it.  The very wound can heal us.

The first fall is the first real self-knowledge.  Now we know our weakness, we know our helplessness before the difficulties of life, our total inability to shoulder our responsibilities.  We know that we cannot get up by ourselves, we cannot shoulder the burden for the second time by ourselves, we cannot face our own self-contempt or the derision of others, by ourselves.  We realize now that we are wholly dependent on Christ, dependent on Him to act in us, to lift Himself up in us and to lift us up in Him.  His weakness is our strength.

In the light of this new self-knowledge, in the realization and acceptance of our utter dependence on Him, the second start, look as it may before men, is infinitely better in the eyes of God than the first.  No longer do we seek to carry the burden with our own hands, but with His.  No longer do we try to walk in His footsteps, we tread the way with his feet."   (Caryll Houselander)

Art: Ang Kiukok- (1931-2005)  Philippines