Christ’s Suffering from the Incarnation to the Ascension

In my last article I began to unpack the meaning of the brief prayer, doce me passionem Tuam—teach me Your suffering—a simple aspiration we can pray many times a day. I also offered some suggestions on preparing for a Consecration to the Most Holy Cross of Jesus, which I will publish here during Holy Week, and which can be prayed on Good Friday.

One of the suggestions for preparing for the consecration involved spending time daily meditating on a different mystery of the Holy Rosary, in light of the sufferings of Christ. As I wrote there, one might think that only the five Sorrowful Mysteries would be suitable for this; but in fact, the other fifteen mysteries are also imprinted, each in their own way, with the sign of the Cross. Christ’s suffering is not limited to Good Friday. The entire Rosary is a compendium on the life of Christ, and the Cross is engraved on His life from the Incarnation to the Ascension.

Consider the Joyful Mysteries. At the Annunciation, Our Lord’s suffering began when the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became a human embryo, reduced to a vulnerable and helpless babe in His Mother’s womb. Mary’s Visitation to Elizabeth is a selfless act of service and a joyous encounter; but remember also that Our Lady was then a young, unwed, pregnant girl who was doubtless wondering how to explain this pregnancy to her betrothed, not knowing how Joseph would respond. Our Lord’s Nativity is overladen for us with Christmas charm and, dare I say, sentimentality, until we recall that he was born in a cave and laid to rest in a feeding trough for cattle, surrounded by animals. The rough wood of the manger would one day become the rough wood of the Cross. At the Presentation in the Temple, the first drops of Jesus’ blood were shed at His circumcision, and Simeon prophesies future suffering: Jesus will be a sign of contradiction, and a sword will pierce the heart of Mary, who will share in Christ’s Passion. Finally, the distress and anxiety of Mary and Joseph during the three days of fruitless searching before the Finding in the Temple is every parent’s worst nightmare. When we mess up as a parent, imagine how it must have felt to lose the Son of God!

The Luminous Mysteries are likewise etched with the Cross. Christ’s public life was not free of suffering prior to his arrest on Holy Thursday. Taking our sins symbolically into the waters of death, Jesus the sinless one was Baptized in the Jordan by his friend and cousin John, who shortly thereafter will be imprisoned and eventually beheaded for his witness to Christ and to the commandments of God. The Wedding Feast at Cana is a joyous occasion, to be sure, but Our Lord’s first miracle there marks the end of his private life: Our Lady must now let him go from the intimacy of the home into a hostile world where Jesus will encounter fierce opposition and hostility almost immediately. The Proclamation of the Kingdom of God brings our Lord’s beautiful teachings to the masses; but His preaching also triggers the ire and envy of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Sanhedrin, who quickly begin to lay traps for Him, and before long hatch a plot to utterly destroy Him. Christ’s Transfiguration prefigures his resurrected glory; but recall that He discusses there with Moses and Elijah precisely His soon-to-be-accomplished Passion. He allows Peter, James, and John to witness this extraordinary event to prepare and strengthen them for his impending death. The Institution of the Eucharist anticipates his sacrifice on the Cross the next day, as he says farewell to his friends who still, at this late hour, do not understand that He must suffer and die. The sign of the Cross grows more apparent with each mystery.

The sufferings of Christ and His Church are not even absent from the Glorious Mysteries. After His Resurrection, He didn’t immediately go to Heaven but still humbled Himself to stay and walk among His disciples for forty days, to instruct them on establishing the Church and Kingdom of God here on earth. In this sense, His Passion didn’t end with the Resurrection, but with the Ascension, because for God to continue walking among His people in a fallen world—even as the resurrected Christ—was a humiliation for the Second Person of the Trinity: until He was at His rightful place in Heaven, His passionem, his self-emptying, was ongoing. With His Ascension, the apostles felt the absence of his bodily presence (though this presence remained with them in hidden form in the Eucharist); and without Him at their side they cowered in fear until the Holy Spirit came. Pentecost cures the apostles of their tepidity, but their boldness in preaching the Gospel will lead all but one of them to martyrdom for Christ, with the lone survivor John dying in exile. Our Lady’s presence consoles the early Church until she is Assumed body and soul into Heaven, and the disciples are left without her. Mary is then Crowned Queen of Heaven and Earth; but her children still labor in this vale of tears, where her Immaculate Heart is wounded by the horrors of sins within and without the Church, like the abuse and trafficking of her precious children. The Church’s life, like her Lord’s, is marked with the sign of the Cross.

Christ’s suffering, from the Incarnation to the Ascension, is the greatest manifestation of God’s love for us. Real love is almost always hidden. It is found in the hidden pregnancy of Our Lady and her secret fiat, her yes to God. It is found in the hidden decision by St. Joseph to marry Our Lady out of love and devotion, and to protect her sanctity for the entirety of his remaining life. It is found in Joseph’s leading of his family to Egypt out of love for the infant not fathered by him. It is found in the hidden life of the Holy Family in Nazareth—poor, simple, obscure. It is found in the deep well of faith of the unclean woman and the blind man whom Jesus healed. It is found in the love of Jesus, alone in his Agony in the Garden, and abandoned on the Cross by all but His mother, St. Mary Magdalene, St. John, and a few holy women. It is found in the hidden pain of Our Lady, alone in her sorrow at the foot of the Cross and during the remainder of her life spent on earth. It is found in the faithful women who visited His tomb.

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts,” George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch. “And that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”  When Christianity was outlawed, sanctity was often found in the heroic martyrs who boldly proclaimed their faith and publicly died for Christ. In our day, it is most often found in hidden life—in the hidden Christians in Iraq, Iran, and China. In the poor country priest with a tiny parish and no accolades to his name. In the woman who takes the 2:00 AM Eucharistic Adoration time at the parish without anyone knowing it. In the faithful who tithe more than they have to give. True love is often silent, obscure, and done with no witness other than Christ. It is pure, sacrificial, and unattached to any external recognition, not expecting anything in return.

Authentic love for God means responding to every suffering of this life with an affirmative, “Thy will be done.” It involves accepting and seeking small sacrifices and mortifications that nobody else is aware of but oneself and God, out of love for God and neighbor. Charity of the purest kind is often hidden from everyone—even from our own hearts—in order to thwart our interior pride.

It may feel easier to express our love for God when we are feeling good, when life is easy and everything is going well. In a fit of enthusiastic piety or religious fervor we might tell Jesus how we long to throw our arms around Him or make some other such dramatic gesture to show just how much we love Him. While there is nothing wrong with ardent expressions of devotion, He is most pleased when we express our love for him in hidden, small acts of sacrifice—as He did throughout his life on earth. Doce me passionem Tuam—teach me Your suffering.

Author’s Note: This is Part 4 in a weekly Lenten series on the Christian meaning of suffering and the Cross of Christ. All other articles of the series can be read here.

Photo by Dolina Modlitwy on Unsplash