Signposts

It’s mid-Lent, so here goes with a Lenten observation:

What Jesus said sputters away into well-intentioned meaninglessness unless you understand what he did.

Richard John Neuhaus helped me figure this out.

Let this blog post be a requiem of sorts to the man, who died Jan. 8.

Neuhaus wrote a gem of a book called, “Death on a Friday Afternoon” in which he meditated on the seven last words of Christ on the cross.

By “words,” he meant utterances, as in, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

I wonder what was Neuhaus’ disposition as he himself approached death, that “undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.”

Jesus was not celebrating his own death as it approached. It seemed to fly in the face of all that he had taught.

The kingdom of God come to Earth? I’m about to be despicably betrayed by a close friend and crucified.

For nothing. The monumental injustice of it must have weighed on him.

Can anyone think of a greater travesty? Here was a brilliant, wise, compassionate man that healed people, inspired them, gave them hope, and what was his end?

To suffocate to death between two criminals in a public place.

Where is the kingdom of God now? A lot of hogwash.

As so Jesus uttered those searing words, said to be spoken on a grim Friday afternoon from the cross:

“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

Indeed.

If this isn’t affirmation for every Christian stumbling and staggering through periods of doubt and depression, what is?

How to understand this?

For Neuhaus, Christ’s suffering and death was literally a cosmic battle against all the evil infecting the world.

The infection was raging. The human race was sore afflicted. Even creation itself was groaning.

Somebody had to suck out all the pain, take it on himself, exhaust it.

Justice demanded it.

But for it to work, the person taking the evil onto himself had to be pure and blameless. Had to be free of the infection.

And had to be God, in order to take ALL the evil out of the world.

A simple human being, like Sydney Carton at the end of Charles Dicken’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” could take a man’s place at the gallows and thereby redeem on a small scale.

Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest in Auschwitz, could die of starvation with several Jews in an act of solidarity, thus giving them hope in their final anguished hours.

But to shoulder the whole wretched mountain of sin in the world?

Who else but God himself could do this?

Who else but God himself would do this?

As the Easter Vigil approaches, we Catholic Christians will relive the suffering of Christ. We will hear his lament.

And we will hear the summation in the “It is finished.”

“Into thy hands I commit my spirit.”

To be a Christian is to believe that the world changed radically at that moment, and that nothing – nothing at all – has been the same since.