HIS DEATHBED

 

“He comes to it gladly!  This is a strange thing, for the cross is a symbol of shame, and it is to be His deathbed.  Already He sees the very shape of His death in the wide-spread arms.  From this moment He will be inseparable from it, until He dies on it.  He will labor and struggle under the weight of it until the end comes.  Yet Christ welcomes the cross.  He embraces it, He takes it into His arms, as a man takes that which he loves into his arms.  He lays His beautiful hands on it tenderly, those strong hands of a carpenter that are so familiar with the touch of wood.

This is not the first time that Christ has welcomed the wood of the cross.  It is only the first time that He has embraced it publicly before the crowds.  It is a tremendous gesture showing men His love for them openly, because this cross which He is receiving is their cross, not His; He is making it His own for love of them, taking their cross and lifting the dead weight of it from the back of mankind.  That is why Christ receives the cross with joy and lays it to His heart.  “Bear one another’s burdens,” He told men.  Now He takes the burden of the whole world upon himself.” 

"Look at this cross, so much bigger than the man whose body will be stretched to fit it.  So much higher than the height of the man who will be lifted up above the Earth on it and who, being lifted up, will draw all men to himself.  Christ receives it with joy because he knows that this is the dead weight that must have crushed mankind had he not lifted it from their backs.  This is the dead wood which at his touch is transformed to a living tree.  At his touch the hewn tree takes root again and the roots thrust down into the Earth, and the tree breaks into flower."

“Because Christ has changed death to life, and suffering to redemption, the suffering of those who love Him will be a communion between them.  All that hidden daily suffering that seems insignificant will be redeeming the world, it will be healing the wounds of the world.  The acceptance of pain, of old age, of the fear of death, and of death will be our gift of Christ’s love to one another; our gift of Christ’s life to one another.

No man’s cross is laid upon him for himself alone, but for the healing of the whole world, for the mutual comforting and sweetening of sorrow, for the giving of joy and supernatural life to one another.  For Christ receives our cross that we may receive His.  Receiving this cross, the cross of the whole world made His, we receive Him.  He gives us His hands to take hold of, His power to make it a redeeming thing, a blessed thing, His life to cause it to flower, His heart to enable us to rejoice in accepting our own and one another’s burdens.  “If any man has a mind to come my way, let him renounce self, and take up his cross, and follow me.  The man who tries to save his life shall lose it; it is the man who loses his life for My sake that will secure it,” (Matthew 16:24-26).”

Art: "Christ Bearing the Cross" Niccolo Frangipane - 1574,   Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga, Spain