We are today in the Holiest Season of the year, we are in the midst of the celebration of the death and resurrection of Christ. Good Friday is a day in which all human activity should cease and we should stop to contemplate the Passion and death of the Lord. The Passion and death of the Lord should always be in front of our eyes because it is the central historical event of our salvation, but today we should give it absolute priority.
We should meditate on the theological motivation of the passion -- the way that God has chosen to redeem us from our sins. The sins of humanity constitute an enormous offense to the majesty of God, so the only way to erase this offense is for God himself to do so, man alone would be incapable. Christ offers himself freely as the pure and immaculate victim that would wash away our sins. The Lord could have chosen less painful ways of saving us, but He selected this dolorous Passion to show us His infinite love. At the same time we need to remember that all His life was marked by pains and sufferings. Since childhood He experienced the rejection of His own people, a rejection that increased during His public ministry and lead to His execution on Calvary.
There is a part of His Passion on which we do not meditate enough, that is His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. There we can see clearly the union of both His divine and human Natures. He suffered as a man anticipating the pains of the Cross, but His divine foreknowledge increased his human sorrows. It is a longstanding tradition that in that particular moment He knew due to His divine knowledge all the past sins of man for which He was offering himself, but He also had the divine foreknowledge of all the future sins of humanity for which He was also offering Himself. He knew all the contemporary sins that we are experiencing, first a total rejection of His saving mission, but also all the many sins against His commandments that are a consequence of the rejection of His revelation, in particular: Abortion -- the atrocious murder of an innocent child that has been absurdly elevated to the status of a human right; and the contraceptive way of life -- a refusal of one of the main rights and duties that God has given to man as collaborators in the generation of life.
We have recently seen another reminder of the effect of these sins on the Church and society. The fact that our Savior's pain was increased by the knowledge that so many members of the Church would be rejecting this teaching is underlined by a recent report reminding us that Catholics are contracepting at the same rate as non-Catholics. This Guttmacher Institute report has serious flaws and will be commented upon in a different article, but this troubling trend even in the Church is worth noting in this Season.
In the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane we see the sufferings of the Heart of Christ for the refusal of His love. We can meditate also on the scourging at the pillar; there Christ atoned for all our sins of the flesh, when His sacred flesh was tormented in a ferocious way. When Christ was mocked and crowned with a crown of thorns he atoned for our sins of pride. This leads us to see in pride and in the sins of the flesh the main roots of all actual sins in the world.
On Sunday, all the sorrows of the Passion and the Cross will be transformed in boundless joy when we celebrate the glorious resurrection of Christ. Here, against some gravely erroneous contemporary interpretations, we have to insist on the historical nature of the resurrection of Christ. This is a historical event in the same way that His incarnation was a historical event. It was an occurrence as Saint Paul underlines in the First Letter to the Corinthians (I Cor. 15:6) that was witnessed on one occasion by more than five hundred persons. Writing this letter more than twenty years after this magnificent event, Saint Paul notes that some of the witnesses have died but many are alive and as a consequence they could corroborate the accounts of His resurrection.
With His glorious resurrection Christ demonstrates His divinity and gives us the possibility of defeating the sorrows caused by sin. We will be liberated from all the sorrows caused by original sin at the moment of our death if we die in the state of grace, as this opens to us the doors of Paradise, even if most of us we will have to endure the suffering of Purgatory. Instead, in this world, in the here and now, if we live in accordance with the commandments of Christ we have the possibility with the assistance of His grace of defeating the consequences of actual sin. The resurrection of Christ is a strong call to evangelize the world, so that all men, no one excluded, would believe in Him and live their lives in accordance with His loving teachings. It is perfectly possible to envision a world in which abortion is banned forever, all persons are open to be generous with life, and married couples live in accordance with the loving plans of God. We have the right and duty to envision such a world, because it is the plan of God for us. We know that the reality of sin will always be with us until the second coming of Christ, but we should strongly strive for a world where more and more men live their lives in accordance with His loving teachings.
So let us pray that we accept with joy all the magnificent consequences of the Resurrection of Christ, and that the joy we experience this Sunday will remains always with us.
