Epiousius
Stations of the Cross (2)
Second Station:
Jesus bears His Cross
We adore you O Christ and we praise you,
because by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world.
The mock trial is over, the sentence has been passed down, and the march to Calvary begins. Jesus is given His Cross and the full magnitude of the burden He is undertaking hits Him for the first time. It is one thing to know that the cross is coming, and it is quite another to actually be laden with it. We can scarcely imagine what He must have felt at that moment:
Father, it’s too heavy! How am I ever going to carry this thing?
How am I ever going to climb that hill while lugging this cross?
But still, He trusted. Impossible as it might have seemed, He knew that, His Father would make up for His lack of strength, as long as He persevered in faith.
Several years ago, I met with our youth group at the parish to discuss Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. One of the kids said that the movie was not accurate because the cross that Jesus carried in the movie, was different from the one the two other men carried. I explained to them that, even though the producers of the movie may have used poetic license, it made perfect sense that Our Lord’s Cross should be different from the others. After all, the sacrifice He offered could only be offered by Him.
On that first Good Friday, Jesus took upon Himself the sins of the world, a burden that is incomprehensible to us. If we think for a moment about all the terrible things that human beings have done to each other over the ages, we realize that the weight of Jesus’ Cross was not measured simply in terms of pounds. If it were, maybe a stronger man might have been able to put the cross on his shoulder and been on his way.
But no! Jesus was weighed down with the incalculable burden of sin… ALL sin… EVERY sin that was ever committed in the past, or will be committed in the future — murder, war, terrorism, violence, crime, injustice, rape, slavery, abuse, and all the other ways people have sinned against each other and against God.
And yet, Our Lord didn’t pull away from the Cross. Instead, He embraced it because He knew that the power of His love could overcome ALL things, even death itself. His love was so great, that it could transform the worst instrument of torture of His time, into a victory over sin, and the source of eternal life.
And we might ask ourselves: “If Jesus’ Cross was so much heavier than ours, how can we possibly identify ourselves with Him?”
The short answer is that we’re not being asked to carry Our Lord’s Cross, only He can do that. All He wants is that we carry the crosses that come our way in the normal course of our lives:
“If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me.” (Luke 9:23)
To follow Christ means to follow His commandment to love one another as He loved us; to follow His example of self-sacrificial love; to wash each other’s feet; to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick; to listen to, and act on, the Word of God; to purify our faith by obeying the teachings of the Church, what St. Paul calls the “obedience of faith”. This is what it means to follow Christ. And yet, all this, by itself, is not enough — more is required.
Ultimately, to follow Christ is to follow Him to the Cross… to walk the way of Calvary.
Fr. Richard Ho Lung, founder of the Missionaries of the Poor, said that to follow Christ is to offer Him everything we have, so that Our Father in Heaven can give us everything He is.
That’s why this Second Station is so powerful. It reminds us that the way we participate in Our Lord’s saving work is by taking up in our own bodies what is missing in the sufferings of Christ, not as some worthless masochistic exercise, but as an act of faith and trust in Almighty God.
To the extent that we do this, we not only participate more deeply in Our Lord’s mission, we also allow His light to illuminate the darkness that surrounds us, to bring meaning to situations that don’t make sense, and hope to situations that appear hopeless.
And Heaven knows there are plenty of those for us to deal with.
Years ago, I spoke with a friend who was afflicted with leukemia and had just endured two years of awful medical treatments. As he went through his ordeal, there were several times when, despite his faith, he felt that God was asking too much of him: “Lord, I can’t do this… it’s too heavy… I had the best intention of dealing with this, but this time You have given me too much to bear… I just can’t do it!”
When he finally completed the process, he said: “I have just gone through what is impossible to go through!” What a beautiful and powerful statement: “I have just gone through what is impossible to go through!”
The question is: How did he do it? Where did he find the strength to do something that was humanly impossible? The answer is that it was not HE who prevail over his treatments, Christ did it for him… the same Christ who first felt the weight of the Cross and said, “Father, I can’t, but I put My trust in You.”
This Second Station invites us to reflect on the heaviest load we may be carrying at this particular time, a load so heavy we may feel Our Father in Heaven is asking too much from us. Maybe we’ve already rebelled against it, or maybe we’ve already fallen under the weight of our burden (we’ll talk more about this on the next Station).
But, as we reflect on the Cross of Our Lord, maybe we can find renewed strength to continue this journey of faith from the words of St. Paul:
… we hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us.
We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned;
struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus
may also be manifested in our body. (2 Corinthians 4:7-10)
We can never forget that it is precisely at those times when we feel that God is nowhere to be found that He is actually closest to us. All we have to do to find Him once again, is to say this simple prayer, over, and over, and over again:
Lord, without You, I can do nothing;
with You, I can do anything; and
through You, all things are possible… Amen.
