Beyond the Sanitized Cross

In the first part of this series I introduced the brief prayer, doce me passionem Tuam—teach me Your suffering—a simple aspiration to our Lord that we can repeat many times a day. I explained how this prayer turns our gaze away from our own sufferings and towards the suffering of Christ, which, paradoxically, can liberate us from our own anguish.

The Christian Faith offers the only fully compelling answer to the problem of evil—the age-old question of why an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing God would permit so much human pain. For a Christian, the fact that we cannot escape suffering is not necessarily a tragedy. For in our suffering we can find the Cross, and in the Cross we find the full manifestation of God’s love for us. We Catholics have read the Gospels, but perhaps we do not yet really know Christ’s Passion. We must learn it anew, and He must teach us. Lent is the perfect time for us to do this.

We tend to flee suffering, to avoid the Cross at all costs. But at the center of the Christian claim is God who became man in Jesus Christ, and as a man suffered all that could be suffered—for you and for me, for each of us alone and individually. And He did not teach us to seek a life of comfort and ease, but to deny ourselves, take up our cross daily, and follow Him (Lk. 9:23). The American “prosperity gospel”—a distortion that infects so many of our parishes, both Catholic and Protestant—is false because it ignores the Cross of Christ, which is at the center of our redemption. It’s not that Jesus suffered so we don’t have to; on the contrary, Jesus suffered so that our suffering can unite us to Him. Our Lord did not die on the Cross so that we could be free of suffering, but so that we could discover that which transcends our suffering—His love.

The world and even many in the Church today have forgotten the Cross. Naturally, everyone loves the miracle-working Christ, who heals the blind, the lame, and the lepers, who turns water into wine and multiplies loaves of bread and fish to feed the hungry crowds. Everyone loves Christ the wise teacher and brilliant preacher. Everyone loves Christ the good shepherd, carrying the little lost sheep on his shoulders. Everyone loves the glorified and risen Christ who overcame death. But we often prefer to ignore the crucified Christ.

Even devout Christians tend to sanitize Christ’s Passion. Protestants have removed the corpus from the Cross, and even Catholics have rendered Christ’s body bloodless on most of our crucifixes. Occasionally we might encounter an old bloody Spanish crucifix or a painting or sculpture of the battered and scourged Christ from times past: these images tend to shock our contemporary sensibilities. But such renditions are a bit closer to what the actual scourging, the crowing with thorns, and the crucifixion would have looked like—as realistically depicted, for example, in the film, The Passion of the Christ. Those images should arrest us, even shock us: for in His Passion Christ suffered every pain, every agony, every horror—whether physical or psychological—that any of us have experienced or could experience. He went to the deepest depths of human misery in order to draw us up with Him.

As Pope Benedict XVI observed, our culture’s impoverished and misguided understanding of freedom is reduced to the freedom not to suffer. But Christians should realize that this is a counterfeit freedom: for it is only in Christ’s scandalous Passion, with all its horrors—all the blood, the dirt, the grit, the sweat, the tears—it is only there that we find freedom and peace. True freedom is not found in power, wealth, or accolades—or even in a contented and decent family life, though that is a worthy thing. But those are all limited goods. True freedom requires more, precisely because our ability to be virtuous and faithful is incomplete if it is not rooted in the Cross. There is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday.

We have examples of true freedom in the saints, especially in the martyrs. Terrence Malik’s film, A Hidden Life, tells the true story of a 20^th Century Catholic martyr, Blessed Franz Jaggerstatter. Franz was an ordinary husband, father, and farmer living in Austria when Germany invaded during World War II. He was conscripted in the German army, and he was willing to serve. But he was not willing to swear the mandated Oath of Fidelity to Adolf Hitler. His friends and neighbors, the mayor of his town, even the well-meaning parish priest all pleaded with him to be reasonable: just sign it, they told him, even if you don’t mean it. Just a pinch of incense to the emperor, then the authorities will leave you alone.

But Franz could not do this in good conscience. In one pivotal scene in the film, he is being beaten senseless in jail by a prison guard. After intense physical torture, the guard looks down at Franz and says, “just sign it, and you’ll be free.” Bloodied, bruised, unable to even stand up, Franz looks up through his blackened eye and says, “But I already am free…”

When we join Christ on the Cross, there will always remain something in us—the most important part of us—that nothing else can touch, that no malice or evil can ever destroy. In his last letter from prison, just before he was beheaded by the Nazi regime, Franz wrote, “Although I am writing with my hands in chains, this is still much better than if my will were in chains.” It’s not that the Christian martyrs like Franz were especially brave, humanly speaking; they were simply madly in love with Jesus Christ. They learned His Passion in their own lives. That was the source of their supernatural strength.

Like them, as we proceed on the path of Christ’s sufferings, which leads us to unity with Jesus on the Cross, we begin to realize that the veil separating time from eternity is very thin. If we are quiet and still, if we seek our suffering Lord with our heart, we will sometimes get glimpses of the other side. We will find Jesus in the Eucharist, in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. We will find Him in the giving mother, in the grateful recipient of a life-saving organ transplant. We will see Him in the morning dew, in the first petals of spring, in the thunderstorm, in the vast ocean. Our Lord still walks among us. Miracles still happen.

The saints also still walk among us. They are typically not the people receiving plaudits and awards; like Blessed Franz, they live a hidden life. They include the old man quietly praying the rosary while he rides the city bus to the market. They include the young woman who forgoes brilliant career opportunities to care for her disabled child. They include the girl dying of cancer who offers her pain for her brother to return to the Church.

To help us go deeper into the meaning of, doce me passionem Tuam—teach me your suffering—this Lenten series will conclude with a prayer of Consecration to the Most Holy Cross of Jesus. The next article in this series will offer some suggestions on how to prepare for this consecration during the remainder of Lent. I will not pretend in this series to present a step-by-step itinerary, but rather a general map of the terrain, an overview the landscape that we all must traverse on our own. A mountaineer can tell others the best way to climb to the top of a mountain, depending on the level of difficulty they can handle and the amount of time they have; but ultimately, they will only learn by taking one step and starting to climb it on their own. As a modern Spanish poet put it, the path is made by walking.

At the end of this journey, with the help of God’s unfailing grace, you will discover that the paradoxical secret of happiness is found by becoming one with Christ on the Cross. Doce me passionem tuum—Teach me Your suffering.

Author’s Note: This is Part 2 in a weekly Lenten series on the Christian meaning of suffering and the Cross of Christ.

Photo by Danique Godwin on Unsplash