“Yet it was
our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured…he was pierced
through for our faults, crushed for our sins; it is his suffering which brings
us peace, and by his wounds we have been healed. For we had all gone astray like sheep, each following his
own way; but the Lord laid upon him the guilt of us all.” ~Isaiah 53:4-6
Psalm 127 reads:
“If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labor. If the Lord does not watch over the city, in vain does the watchman keep vigil. In vain is your earlier rising, in vain is your going later to rest, you who toil for the bread you eat: while God pours gifts on his beloved while they slumber.”
“If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labor. If the Lord does not watch over the city, in vain does the watchman keep vigil. In vain is your earlier rising, in vain is your going later to rest, you who toil for the bread you eat: while God pours gifts on his beloved while they slumber.”
In this, the Psalmist tells us that
in all we do, unless we are doing what God has asked or prompted us to do in
the Holy Spirit (i.e. God’s will), it is for naught. In other words, everything
we have in life, even and especially the inspiration and strength for our
actions, is a gift that must be received from God. We pilgrims can relate very well with this psalm, since we
rose early (very early—at 4 AM!) the last two mornings to celebrate Mass at the
Holy Sepulcher. It was truly
awe-some and surreal; a true gift.
And yet, since the site of Christ’s burial and resurrection and his
crucifixion were so close (housed now in the same church, in fact), you cannot
arrive at the Sepulcher without at least passing Calvary. As in Our Lord’s own life, the
experience of the cross comes before that of the resurrection. “Darkness covered the whole land” (Mk
15:33) before the glory of the resurrection shone; death came before new
life.
This reality was no more clear on
this pilgrimage than today. We
visited a hauntingly powerful church called St. Peter in Gallicanto, the
traditional site where Jesus was beaten and jailed the night before his trial,
sentencing, passion, and death. As
can perhaps be parsed from the name, it is also the traditional site where St.
Peter denied Christ three times before the cock crowed.
We approached the church on a
downhill slope, overlooking a gorgeous view of south Jerusalem on a sunny day
with perfectly blue skies. As we
entered the crypt of the church, the sun vanished and we were led into an increasingly
dark place (both literally and spiritually).
As we descended further, our guide informed us that we were standing in the dungeon in the house of Caiaphas, the high priest, where Jesus would have been beaten and jailed the night before he was brought to Pilate for judgment and eventual execution. The holes where the chains would have been anchored confining the divine prisoner remain intact. However, the most disquieting of all was when we descended even further into a pit, the very pit, in fact, where it is believed that Jesus was lowered for the night after being beaten to await his passion and death…cold, dark, alone.
While here, we read aloud Psalm 88:
Lord my God, I
call for help by day;
I cry at night
before you…
For my soul is
filled with evils;
my life is on the
brink of the grave.
I am reckoned as
one in the tomb;
I have reached
the end of my strength,
Like one alone
among the dead,
like the slain
lying in their graves,
like those you
remember no more,
cut off, as they
are, from your hand.
You have laid me
in the depths of the tomb,
in places that
are dark, in the depths.
Your anger weighs
down upon me;
I am drowned
beneath your waves.
You have taken
away my friends
and made me
hateful in their sight.
Imprisoned, I
cannot escape;
my eyes are
sunken with grief…
Wretched, close
to death from my youth,
I have borne your
trials; I am numb.
Your fury has
swept down upon me;
your terrors have
utterly destroyed me.
They surround me
all the day like a flood,
they assail me
all together.
Friend and
neighbor you have taken away:
my one
companion—darkness.
It is
here that one realizes the full weight of Christ’s cross. Not just the roughness and cruelty, not
just the torture and pain, but the darkness, the aloneness, the absolute
privation of love, the very essence of his being. This was…this is hell.
Peter, one of his closest friends, whom Jesus loved with all his heart, denied even knowing him not once, but three times, when Jesus needed him the most! And if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we too have denied him. “If Our Lord’s goal was to find sinners,” our Mass celebrant preached, “then he truly succeeded in his selection of Peter. And, he has done it again with each one of us.” Even if we haven’t explicitly denied Christ in front of others, we all (myself first and foremost) have denied his voice in our hearts, the voice of his Holy Spirit. We prefer our way, or think we know better, or choose to rely on our own more ‘sure’ means of doing what we want to do and how we want to do it, rather than God’s. And, as the Psalmist reminds us, we do it in vain. “To rely on our own forces,” as one of our brothers said today in his reflection, “is a false and dangerous path, into which even the Prince of the Apostles fell.” And yet, lest we fall into a degrading guilt, we hear also Our Lord’s own words repeated in the day’s Gospel reading: ““Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. I did not come to call the righteous but sinners” (Mk 2:17). This is the Good News!!
