Holy Week- to Die with Jesus

There is always a dying in each of us. A sense of losing a part of us. It could be a loss of meaning and purpose due to lack of direction, physical sickness, or just that emptiness. It could be a sense of not knowing who we are. There is a LOSS. There is SOMETHING MISSING.

But there is also a holy death that brings forth life, a re-creation, a transformation. We know and we believe Jesus died and resurrected. This is our holy death - to experience Christ Crucified in our suffering and the suffering of others.

"As the cross of Christ demonstrates, God also speaks by his SILENCE. The silence of God, the experience of the distance of the almighty Father, is a decisive stage in the earthly journey of the Son of God, the incarnate Word. Hanging from the wood of the cross, He lamented the suffering caused by that silence: ' My God, my God, why have you forsaken me ( Mk 15:34; Mt 27:46). Advancing in obedience to His very last breath, in the obscurity of death, Jesus called upon the Father. He commended himself to him at the MOMENT of PASSAGE, through death, to eternal life: 'Father, into your hands I commend my spirit' ( Lk 23:46)." (Benedict XVI, Verbum Dei)

We all experience pain. Yet, it is a loud call that beckons, or even begs us to accept the love of God. When we do, we, in turn, can continue to love, to hope, to believe. Our life, even in suffering, becomes a prayer. This experience of dying is not limited to sickness. Parents, most esp mothers, would know the pain of going through this passage to new life. In Pope Benedict XVI, he must have experienced this, too, when he accepted the papacy. And moreso when he renounced it.

"Yet at the same time, Jesus' suffering is a Messianic Passion. It is suffering in FELLOWSHIP with us, in a solidarity - born of love- that already includes redemption, the VICTORY of LOVE." (Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth vol 2, p 216)

With the Cross, God loved me and you. He fought the battle with us and for us. He conquered death with new life.

“And so it turns out that the confrontation with physical death is actually a confrontation with the basic constitution of human existence. It places before us a choice: to accept either the PATTERN of LOVE, or the PATTERN of POWER. The God who personally died in Jesus Christ fulfilled the pattern of love beyond all expectation… The Christian dies into the death of Christ himself. The uncontrollable Power that everywhere sets limits to life is not a blind law of nature. It is a LOVE which puts itself AT OUR DISPOSAL by DYING FOR US and WITH US. Man’s enemy, death, that would waylay him to steal his life, is conquered at the point where one meets the thievery of death with the attitude of trusting love, and so transforms the theft into the increase of life.” (Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life)