My heart overflows with the thoughts of Christ's Passion

My heart overflows with the thoughts of Christ’s Passion

There are many passions.  The most fundamental passion is love, aroused by the attraction of the good.  Love causes a desire for the absent good and the hope of obtaining it; this movement finds completion in the pleasure and joy of being possessed.  The apprehension of evil causes hatred, aversion, and fear of the impending evil; this movement ends in sadness at some present evil, or in the anger that resists it.  (CCC 1765) 

When one ponders the suffering that Jesus endured during his Passion, you must place  yourself in the moments that the Lord felt the absence of his closest friends.  To think of what this passion was directly infringing on his will to love we must also look at why his Father sent him to assume humanity.  

Reading the scriptures that portray the mission that Jesus undertook, it is not difficult to find the many reasons why God would allow this act of divine love.  Can anyone believe that the only way to redeem mankind from his continued sin was to come in love.   “Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.  In this way the love of God was revealed to us;  God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him.  In this is love; not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son  as expiation for our sins.”  (1 Jn 4: 8 - 10).  “ We love because he first loved us.”  (1 Jn 4: 19). 

Love from God is found and expiated through the Passion that our Lord Jesus Christ went through from the time of his birth until the burial of his broken body.  How we become absorbed in passion ourselves will depend on the feelings we render for our own desires and absences.  Most of all it is with a love towards others who are hurting and we become Chistlike through our

Passionate love for them.  By following the examples of our Lord Jesus Christ who showed passion for us through his suffering we then also will become the very passion of Christ.

In the Christian life, the Holy Spirit himself accomplishes his work by mobilizing the whole being, with all its sorrows,fears and sadness, as is visible in the Lord’s agony and passion.  In Christ human feelings are able to reach their consummation in charity and divine beatitude.  (CCC 1769).  

The perfection of the moral good consists in man’s being moved to the good not only by his will but also by his “heart.”  (CCC 1775).  

Jesus on his knees sweating drops of blood was his complete love for us and the full extent of his passion.  (Lk 22: 44).  

Ralph B. Hathaway