28-Mar-2018 Dear Friend, The oft repeated question is: Why suffering? Why Pain? Why should an innocent child suffer? Why are good people made to suffer for things they have not done? There is no answer! Suffering is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved. Jesus on the Cross provides no answers but suggests a way to make every cross a means of life. Let’s celebrate God’s undying love for us this Good Friday! -Fr. Jude Sunday Refl. Good Friday: “Christ became obedient even unto death on the Cross!” 30-Mar-2018Isaiah 52: 13 - 53: 12; Hebrews 4: 14-16; 5: 7-9; John 18: 1 - 19: 42; The first reading from the Prophet Isaiah does not explain why the Servant of Yahweh has to suffer, rather it tells us how he bore suffering. “He was silent and opened not his mouth. The Lord laid on him the guilt of us all.” There is no satisfactory explanation to the problem of suffering. For the Christian, like the Suffering Servant portrayed by the prophet Isaiah, suffering is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. The reading hints at the redemptive nature of suffering. “Ours were the sufferings he bore, ours the sorrows he carried. We thought of him as someone punished, struck by God, brought low. Yet he was pierced for our faults, crushed for our sins.” The crown of thorns…There is a strange legend of a monk who was walking in the monastery garden alone, thinking of the passion of the Lord, just before Holy Week. As he slowly paced along he saw something lying in the path and picked it up. It was the crown of thorns which our Lord had worn, and he reverently carried it to the little chapel and laid it upon the altar. Never before had Holy Week been so well kept, for the sight of the crown of thorns had made them realize the sufferings and the love of Jesus more than they had ever done before. At last Easter Sunday dawned and the monk rose early for his Easter preparations and came to the chapel. As the suns hone through the window, it lighted up the altar, it touched the crown of thorns, and there in the Easter sunlight the thorns had blossomed into the most beautiful flowers. It is a little parable. For it is suffering and sacrifice that brings forth the most splendid fruits.Anthony Castle in ‘More Quotes and Anecdotes’ The gospel story of the passion tells us the extent not only of the sufferings of the Lord Jesus but the great love of His father who suffered with the Son and let His Son die for us. The narration of the passion brings us face to face with suffering and what it does to humanity and to our God. The suffering of Jesus reaches its peak just before He died with his awful cry of abandonment: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” We may wonder how the Father feels about the question. Why did God seem to abandon Jesus? Why, for that matter, does God seem to abandon us to our fate? Is the Father totally oblivious to the fate of His Son? Does He not care? Does He feel nothing? Which Father worth his name enjoys seeing his son suffer? It has been suggested that the Father is not an executioner, but a fellow sufferer. At that moment He can do nothing for His Son except suffer with Him. When God does not reveal His power He always gives His presence. We are used to the notion of a powerful God and we want to always experience His power in our lives. Yet it is love that makes Him powerless and vulnerable. “If I never loved, I never would have cried” is our own experience of loving. The mystery is that the all-powerful God allowed His Son to suffer such a death at all. The only explanation is the overwhelming love of that God for each and every one of us. On Good Friday we ponder the mystery and bask in that love. We realize that each one of us is so precious that He was ready to pay any price. The awesomeness of this love is both reassuring and challenging. It strengthens our belief that we are lovable so He loved us and at the same time it evokes in us the desire to belong and live as children of this loving family of God. We glory in the Cross because it is no more a sign of torture and death but the ever-present reminder of the greatness of His love for us. Light on C.S. LewisIn Jocelyn Gibb’s Light on C.S. Lewis, Nevill Coghill tells a story C.S. Lewis once told him. Lewis married late in life. In his marriage he found the very perfection of love, but soon the wife he loved so much died of cancer. Once when Lewis was with Coghill he looked across the quadrangle at his wife. “I never expected” he said, “to have in my sixties, the happiness that passed by me in my twenties.” “It was then” writes Nevill Coghill, “that he told me of having been allowed to accept her pain.” “You mean” said Coghill, “that the pain left her, and that you felt it in your body?” “Yes”, replied C.S. Lewis, “in my legs. It was crippling. But it relieved her.”Jocelyn Gibb in ‘Light on C.S. Lewis’ Cut away the bundleIn the movie, The Mission, one of the leading characters is converted from being a slave-trader of Brazilian Indians to be a Jesuit priest. But he insists on doing penance, dragging a heavy bundle through the jungle back to the Indians he used to enslave. One day, in a dramatic cliff-side scene where the bundle threatened to make him fall, the Indians cut away the bundle. The people he had formerly enslaved forgave him and set him free. We have the power to do that for each other. - As Martin Luther pointed out centuries ago, we are a priesthood of believers who are to be priests for one another, forgiving one another as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven us. We do have the power to forgive as God’s sons and daughters. Or as Jesus said even centuries earlier, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”Maurice A. Fetty in ‘The Divine Advocacy’ That’s the man who died for me!A mother living in a tenement house went shopping for groceries. While she was in the store, a fire engine raced by. She wondered, “Is the fire engine going to my home?” She had left her baby asleep at home. Forgetting about the groceries, she ran toward home. Her building had fire hoses aimed at it. It was burning like a matchbox. Rushing to the chief she cried out, “My baby is up there.” He shouted back to her, “It would be suicide for anyone to go up there now; it’s too late.” A young fireman standing by volunteered, “Chief, I have a little baby at home and if my house were on fire I’d want someone to go up to save my baby. I’ll go.” The young fireman climbed the stairs; he got the baby, threw her into the rescue net and just as he did the house collapsed and he was burned to death. The scene is 20 years later at a graveside. A 20-year-old woman is sobbing softly. Before her, at the head of this grave, is the statue of a fireman. A man stopping by asks respectfully, “Was that your father?” She replies, “No.” “Was that your brother?” “No,” she says. “That’s the man who died for me.”Ronald J.Lavin in ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’ “A man on a cross doesn’t have to say much.”Toyohiko Kagawa was born in Japan to well-to-do parents. He was converted to Christianity and renounced his treasure and buried himself in the slums of his native land. He developed cataracts on both eyes; his lungs became tubular, his frame developed a stoop. He suffered much. Towards the end of his distinguished life he came to one of the seminaries to deliver a lecture. When he finished, one of the first year seminarians turned to another of the freshly-arrived juniors and remarked, “You know he didn’t say much, did he?” A woman standing nearby overhead the remark and moved between them and set the matter straight. She said, “A man on a cross doesn’t have to say much.”John Pichappilly in ‘The Table of the Word’ Jesus has no hands and feetOnce upon a time there was a poor family that had worked for many years scrimping and saving to buy a piece of land of their own. Finally the day came and they took possession of it. The mother and half a dozen children gathered in the two-room shack which would be their home. The father walked the length and breadth of their land, marking the four corners. As he rounded the last corner and laid a stone in place, he noticed something sticking out from under a bush. On digging the earth he unearthed a crucifix. It had obviously been in the ground for a long time. Its hands and arms were gone, and its feet and legs were missing. It was mangled, scratched, cracked and the paint was gone. He carried it back to the house and laid it on the kitchen table. The father explained that he had found it on their land and asked whether they should take it to the church and give it to the padre, or burn it or bury it. They all stood and looked at it. Finally the youngest spoke: “Why don’t we hang it on the kitchen wall and put a sign underneath it?” “And what would you put on the sign?” the father asked. There was a long silence. Then the corpus was hung with care on the whitewashed wall of the kitchen and a small white paper was tacked underneath. It read: “Jesus has no arms or legs. Will you lend him yours?”Megan McKenna in ‘Lent- The Sunday Readings’ True worship of the heartThere is a story about some monks in France who were popular for their loving sympathy and kind deeds, but not one of them could sing. Try as they would, the music of their services was a failure and it became a great grief to them. One day a travelling monk, a great singer, asked for hospitality. Great was their joy, for now they could have him sing for their services, and they hoped to keep him with them always. But that night an angel came to the abbot in a dream. “Why was there no music in your chapel tonight? We always listen for beautiful music that rises in your services.” “You must be mistaken!” cried the abbot. “Usually we have no music worth hearing, but tonight, we had a trained singer with a wonderful voice, and he sang the service for us. For the first time in all these years our music was beautiful.” The angel smiled. “And yet up in heaven we heard nothing,” he said softly.Quoted from ‘Sunday Companion’ in ‘Quotes and Anecdotes’ Cross ConnectionLittle Johnny was doing badly in mathematics. His parents did everything such as getting tutors and flashcards, and taking him to special learning centers, until they decided to send him to a Catholic school. At the end of the year Johnny came out on top of the class. When his parents asked him what made him change so dramatically Johnny replied, “You see, the moment I walked into that new school and saw that guy hanging on the plus sign, I knew that the people here were very serious, so I decided not to take any chances.” The cross might have helped Johnny to improve his score but it is easy to see that Johnny has misread the crucifix. The man on the cross is not there to scare little boys but to show them how much he loves them. The cross is always powerful. It is always a positive sign. It is always a plus sign. On the cross a man is hanging with three nails. The greatest mathematical equation is said to be: 1 cross + 3 nails = 4giveness.John Pichappilly in 'The Table of the Word' The Way of the CrossAlone. Abandoned. Forsaken. How must it have felt for Jesus on that fateful Friday? The day we have come to call “good”; the first day of the celebration of the Lord’s passion. His crime? He healed the sick, he embraced the poor, he made the lame walk and blind see; he spoke of love, justice and mercy. The way of the Cross is a journey that each one of us will make in our own way. For some, it has been one that called them to sacrifice their lives to be tortured and imprisoned for the sake of justice so that others might live free from oppression. But for most of us, our way is often that of keeping vigil over loved ones in palliative care, or struggling to ensure that there is food on the table and a decent place for our children to live, or helping others who struggle to live day by day. Good Friday reminds us that Jesus is our rock, our refuge and our safe harbor. He knows what suffering and feeling helpless means. We need only call on him to find strength and the grace to help us on our way.Jack Panozzo May our acceptance of suffering and death and the Cross lead to new life! Fr. Jude Botelho botelhoj...@gmail.com PS. The stories, incidents and anecdotes used in the reflections have been collected over the years from books as well as from sources over the net and from e-mails received. Every effort is made to acknowledge authors whenever possible. If you send in stories or illustrations I would be grateful if you could quote the source as well so that they can be acknowledged if used in these reflections. These reflections are also available on my Web site www.NetForLife.net Thank you.
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