Union with the Cross of Christ

“He had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
Nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others;
A man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
And as one from whom others hide their faces.
He was despised, and we held him of no account.
Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases.”
(Isaiah 53: 2-4)

Isaiah’s portrait of the suffering servant who becomes the savior of mankind is jarring. We expect our redemption to come from heroes who can overpower evil with their might and skill. At Isaiah’s time, Israel was expecting a great leader, a new David, someone akin to Achilles or Æneis, not a tragic figure who would die in oblivion. Though by now we have grown accustomed to the idea of Jesus, we would still never choose a deliverer who looked like him. It is difficult to put our trust, our very lives in the hands of one who appears weak and despised. Why would God manifest himself as a suffering servant, rather than as a heroic leader?

Jesus came as he did in order to bring hope, through his own suffering, to those who suffered. If he had come in power he would have converted the powerful and won the respect, though not the love of the weak. But his sacrifice gives us the opportunity in our own suffering to be united to him. He carries our sorrows and feels the sharpness of our pain. Thus our suffering is eased by contemplating his suffering on the cross. Isaiah’s prophesy graphically depicts the physical torment which God himself was already preparing to undergo. Few of us will ever face pain so sharp, or rejection so deep. Yet he who was least deserving of suffering took on the greatest suffering of all.

That anyone could do what he did is incredible. That God did it is laughable. It turns on its head all notions we ever had of glory and grandeur. Why should God, being perfect, become not only something unperfect, but the lowest of all men? Logic fails in imagining it. Plato considered it “impossible that God should ever be willing to change; being the fairest and best that is conceivable,” for “would anyone, whether God or man, desire to make himself worse?” (Republic, II). How could he take on any other form than his perfection, lowering himself to a point where we would hold him of no account, having nothing in his appearance that we should desire him? Yet against all logic or explanation, Jesus “did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.” (Phil. 2:6-7). If God is perfect, powerful and glorious, how can he also be this suffering servant, the lowest of all?

God cannot be defined as power, or glory, perfection or even goodness. God can only be defined as love. Thus God is capable of taking on a lowly, inglorious, imperfect form exclusively to prove his love. While a conventional hero, redeeming through his might, also exalts himself through his strength, showing himself to be more powerful than those he has saved, this hero conquers with no other weapon than love. For the lover has no shame in taking a form lower than the beloved. Jesus’ passion and death are the most acute signs we have of God’s love, for he bears our grief on his own shoulders. His act does not free us from suffering, but it gives us God as a companion in our suffering.

When we observe the pain so prevalent in our world, we are tempted to question God’s power or goodness. Jesus’ passion does not answer all the questions surrounding suffering, but it does show that he can empathize with our suffering, for he has faced suffering much worse than our own. Whenever we feel weighed down by our pain, depression, or loneliness, we can remember that Jesus was betrayed and abandoned by his friends, ridiculed, scoffed, and finally executed. He can understand everything we suffer, because he has endured it as well. This is the God we worship—a God who suffered unimaginable pain and torture for us.

When we are despised and rejected by others, we may remember that Jesus was there. When we know suffering and infirmity, Jesus was there. When others turn away from us, hiding their faces, Jesus felt that rejection as well. When we are held of no account, as if our trials matter not, we share the fate of Jesus. Only from one who has shared this pain, can we feel the truth of sympathy, and that is why Jesus is our greatest companion, our truest friend, the one who has shared the road of misery. But while we walk that road because it opens before us against our will, Jesus put off glory and chose that way—the way that leads to death on a cross—as a sublime act of love.

Who can behold a crucifix without tears? Who can contemplate this act of love, performed by a free and perfect God out of love for us in our depravity and not be moved with pity and shame?

Nor was this act of crucifixion an isolated event two thousand years in history. No, it is a continual event. Our suffering is still God’s suffering. The words of the Catholic creed say “Crucifixus etiam pro nobis.” What this phrase says is not just that Christ died for us, but that Christ is still dying for us. Jesus’ love for us is so great that our suffering is his suffering, our pain is his pain, and our death is his death. He feels each moment of our suffering as if it was his own. As the nails pierce us in the daily crosses we bear, they pierce him afresh. For true love feels all the pain of the beloved. He loves us so much that he will do all he can to put our suffering on his own shoulders.

Can we ever hope to love God as much as he loves us? We can express our own love for God through an appreciation of beauty, through charity and community, recognizing all our human companions as God’s creation, through obedience and goodness. But with our suffering we have the opportunity to love him in a new way. Because of his act of love—bearing our sorrows as he hung on the cross, the pain we are forced to endure places us in unity with him. Our suffering becomes, in the words of Pope John Paul II, an “apostolic expression.” “Christ has opened his suffering to man, because he himself in his redemptive suffering has become, in a certain sense, a sharer in all human sufferings. Man, discovering through faith the redemptive suffering of Christ, also discovers in it his own sufferings; he rediscovers them, through faith, enriched with a new content and new meaning.” (Salvifici Doloris, 20). Our experience of suffering thus becomes an honor. We are allowed to share in the Cross of Christ, and “to present our bodies as a living sacrifice.” (Romans, 12:1)

Only if we know suffering can we begin to love Christ in the same way that he loves us. Then we begin to feel compassion for his suffering. When we contemplate his cross we can feel the pain of his nails and his lashes. We as the lover have compassion for him, the beloved, and finally God’s gift of love is reciprocated in a truth that could not have been achieved unless he was willing to undergo suffering for our sake, and we endure our suffering in union with him.

Through our suffering we have learned compassion, and our compassion for Christ who suffers with us, is what will achieve our redemption. If we love him as the beloved, how could we wish him more pain than he has already suffered? He bore our sins, and it is the continuation of our sin that causes the nails to hurt him as badly today as they did on Calvary long ago. Our sin is what makes his crucifixion constant, that he is still dying for us—etiam pro nobis. Only with great selfishness could we look upon his act and not desire to turn away from sin. How can we, without a second thought, say “Yes” to Jesus’ bearing of our sins and still look him in the eye? (H. U. von Balthasar: “Love Alone is Credible,” p, 66)

By uniting our suffering to the suffering of his cross, we begin to understand his pain, and our sin becomes more terrible, as we continue to pile the sin of the world on his shoulders. In our love for him we are forced to reject sin. We turn away in horror from the sin that gives our beloved Jesus such pain. If by living with goodness and righteousness, we can release the nails and bring him down, love must desire to accomplish that mercy. Thus we are motivated to live in holiness, purely out of love. It is our suffering, and our understanding of his desire to suffer with us, which has taught us this love.

To Die for Me

Oh mighty God, who in glory
Art maker and master of all,
What foolishness to die for me!
With thy death to stay my dread fall.

Thou lookest upon my great guilt,
My shame for sin but weakly loathed,
But not with wrath, rather sorrow
For my heart not in virtue clothed.

Thou art not jealous of the life
Thou gavest me with love so free,
E’en though my freedom built the cross
That takes the breath of life from thee!

I should have died, for I have soiled
The perfect gift of thine image.
If thou wouldst judge me, I would go
To bear the weight of sin’s damage.

But instead I look up and see,
Upon the hill so grim and bare,
And on that dreadful cross hangs thee!
Thy bounteous love is nowise fair.

“Lord, let me die for thee,” I cried,
“Not thou for me! For I have sinned
Against thy blessed and holy law.
Come down, this foolish fate rescind!”

He looked at me, eyes wet with pain
Though tender with love ever true.
“Let me forgive you with my death,”
Said he, “for you know not what you do.”

I felt I killed my God that day,
And the guilt tormented my soul.
But three days thence he came to me
New in the garden to console.

“Now you see that if thou hadst died,
As rightly deserved from thy sin,
Death would have owned thee. But my love
Cannot die, and so I rise again.”

Oh my God, I was once shamed by
Thine ever pure and perfect love,
Let it now hold my sinful heart
And bear it to heaven above.