Meditation for Lent

February 23, 2010

By Rev. Anthony J. Rice, S.J.C.

The season of Lent is a holy, grace-filled time when Holy Mother Church exhorts her children to greater prayer, penance, and almsgiving. During these forty days, we have the opportunity to die to ourselves and to the world, to grow in holiness, and to prepare ourselves for a glorious Easter. The best way of accomplishing this is to meditate on the Passion of our Lord. The immense pain and suffering Christ endured from the Agony in the Garden until His crucifixion and death on Mt. Calvary was the source of our redemption and salvation. Christ could have chosen another way of saving us; a way that would not have involved pain and suffering. Only a few drops of His Precious Blood would have been sufficient to redeem us, but He chose to shed all of His Blood, every last drop, and give His life for us. This was an act of total and complete self giving. Out of His great, infinite love for us, the Son of God chose a horrible, painful death. We can never fully grasp the meaning of this mystery, but by focusing on the Passion and Death of Christ we can become more contrite and sorry for our sins, more aware of our own weaknesses and failings, and more grateful to God for His infinite and unconditional love and mercy toward us.

In his book, The Sacred Passion, Fr. Luis de la Palma, an early Jesuit (1559-1641) wrote,

“the Passion and Death with which our King and Savior Jesus Christ ended His life and preaching in the world is the most sublime and marvelous thing that has ever happened since creation. He lived, suffered, and died to redeem people from their sins and to give them grace and eternal salvation. No matter how one looks at it, whether focusing on the Person who did the suffering or on the reason why He suffered, the mystery is so great that to the end of the world nothing equal to it can ever happen.”

How can any Christian not think about the Passion of our Lord?

One of the great devotions the Church has given us to help us in meditating on the Passion and Death of Jesus is the Stations of the Cross or the Way of the Cross. In each of the 14 stations we recall the last few hours of our Savior’s life. We begin with Pontius Pilate condemning Christ to a horrible, ignominious death on the Cross. Next we see God the Son accept and take up His Cross and begin the journey which will result in His death, but which will bring life to us. Along the via crucis we see how weak our Lord becomes and the intensity of His pain and suffering, but we are also witness to the meetings Christ has with His Blessed Mother, Simon of Cyrene, Veronica, and the women of Jerusalem. Though there are many falls and the pain is excruciating, Jesus continues and perseveres knowing what awaits Him when He reaches Calvary. Christ continues to carry the burden of our sins and His love for His persecutors and for us remains ever strong. At each station we realize what God has done for us and we are given the most excellent example of how we are to carry the crosses in our lives.

We see our Lord as the Man of Sorrows and as the Suffering Servant of whom Isaiah had prophesied. Chapter 53 from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah is a prophecy of the Passion of Christ; this comes alive when we view it in light of the Stations of the Cross.

“Surely He has borne our infirmities and carried our sorrows; and we have thought Him as it were a leper, and as one struck by God and afflicted. But He was wounded for our iniquities, He was bruised for our sins” (verses 4,5). “He was offered because it was His own will, and He opened not His mouth. He shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer, and He shall not open His mouth” (verse 7).

Along the via crucis we can recognize our own sinfulness and how each one of our sins contributed to the agony, pain, and suffering our Lord experienced and endured.

Another way of meditating on the Passion is by simply looking at a Crucifix. We have all seen Crucifixes in our churches and our homes, but have we really looked at the Crucifix? Have we intently gazed upon Christ hanging dead on the Cross? Have we contemplated the wounds of our Lord and seriously considered that God died for us because of His incomprehensible love for us? It is easy for us to take this for granted because the Crucifix has become so familiar to us. So let us look at the Crucifix with an entirely new perspective. If you would like to know God, look at the Crucifix. If you would like to love God, look at the Crucifix. If you want to serve God, look at the Crucifix. If you hope for eternal happiness, look at the Crucifix. If you wonder how God tries to prevent you from hell, look at the Crucifix. If you wonder how much God will help you to save your immortal soul, look at the Crucifix. If you wonder how much you should forgive others, look at the Crucifix. If you wonder how much your faith demands of you in humility, poverty, chastity, meekness, and every virtue, look at the Crucifix. If you want to know what unselfishness and generosity are, look at the Crucifix. If you wonder how far your own unselfishness should go to bring others to Christ, look at the Crucifix. If you want to understand the need for self-denial and mortification, look at the Crucifix. If you wish to live well, look at the Crucifix. If you wish to die well, look at the Crucifix.

During these 40 days of Lent we have many opportunities for prayer, penance, fasting, and almsgiving. May we not waste one single day. With our main focus on the Passion of Christ, we will be following the example of many saints. As Blessed Columba Marmion said,

“It is from Calvary, it is from the Passion of Christ Jesus, that our suffering, our acts of renunciation and mortification derive all their supernatural value to destroy sin and allow the divine life to unfold within us.”

Our sufferings, hurts, sorrows, and pains will all be put into proper perspective when we think about the Passion. Meditating on the sufferings of our Redeemer will shed new light on our pride, our selfishness, our sensuality, our lack of charity, and indeed all of our sins.

“Let meditating on Jesus Christ and Him crucified be your daily prayer. Keep Jesus always before your eyes and keep ever near the foot of His Cross. Whether in life or in death, enter the tomb of Jesus so that when Christ, who is your life, shall appear again, you will rise with Him in glory” (Thomas ‘a Kempis).