MEDITATION ON THE PASSION

Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P.

"Christ suffered." These are two words that we repeat without knowledge and without understanding. "He suffered," and we do not know, anatomically, the refinements of acuteness and diversity in suffering, moral and physical, which that represents. "He suffered," and we cannot imagine what must have been His secret calvaries before the Calvary. [1]

Fr. de Chivré

 

"He suffered" and no man has the right to fathom that word when God is the one who gave it depth. "He suffered? Saying it over and over is like saying the Ave Maria over and over: though we say it always, we never repeat it. We never repeat it, it is true, because each time the emotion penetrates a little deeper, the vision becomes more precise, the inconceivable generosity of His act overwhelms us. We are left dumbstruck and disconcerted. "He suffered" we murmur. We are ashamed. "He suffered" for me, who was not worth the trouble. "Passus est." –"He suffered." Who amongst us has been able to appreciate the freedom that He brought to it or the kindness that He infused into it? He suffered truly Alone, and that solitude was among His greatest sufferings.

"Et tenebrae factae sunt" [from the Office of Tenebrae on Good Friday, Second Nocturn]– "We make the night." That's always the way it ends when we are angry. We make the night: the anger of the violent, who breaks the lamp; the anger of the weak, whose bad faith disturbs a limpid sincerity; the anger of the lustful and the darkness of lust. We are the sons of anger who make the night. We are the sons of the Leaders of Good Friday. We are the hypocritical anger of the High Priest. We are the frenzied anger of the mob against Him: "Tolle, tolle..." – "Take Him away."

We sin. We eat the grapes of wrath: the grapes of pride, which darken our judgment before the humility of Jesus; the grapes of conceit, which dispense us from loving Him; the grapes of excuses for doing wrong, which distort our conscience; the grapes of lust, whose satisfaction we seek.

Calmly, as though nothing were more natural, justifying our attitudes of anger in the name of open-mindedness, hygiene, medicine, service, and temperament, we weave in ourselves and around ourselves a tapestry of the night: of inability to love; of absence of desire; of blindness to sin; of the false light of self-satisfaction, of incapacity to grasp the gravity of life, of problems, of evil, of eternity.

We are always busy protesting, enraged and furious that He asks far too much, that He should ask for less, that it is not for us. We spend our life in anger against Him. And the earth remains in night. Whenever God dies somewhere, the darkness appears. We have a talent for drawing down the night on Him: on desire for Him; on battles for Him; on reasons to love Him; on reasons to follow Him.

With our elegant lies and our revolting formalism, we are the makers of Good Friday, sons of anger who make the night. And against the backdrop of this night, He stands out, scarcely recognizable. The sinner has a talent for disfiguring God.

Tortured: the sinner finds it natural to corrupt the integrity of the Good.
Bleeding: the sinner finds it normal that someone else suffer in his place because of him.
Nameless: the interior gaze of the sinner is so rotted out that he is incapable of recognizing the God he has crucified or of naming Him as the Crucified.

He stands out silent, with infinite meekness, knowing that there is no dialogue with the anger of men but that He has to use it to preach His pardon, His love, His patience, His goodness and (in three days), His Power. Juxtaposing the anger of the betrayal is the calm sermon of the Agony; against the anger of the scourging, the groaning sermon of reparation; against the anger of the crowning with thorns, the stupefying sermon of silence; against the anger of the Crucifixion, the sermon of affectionate heroism.

Our anger was necessary to make appear definitively among us the transcendence of His goodness. Until the end of time, we will call Him the Good God.

"Et tenebrae factae sunt..." In calling down the night in order to make Him disappear, we made to rise (without knowing it) the definitive dawn of Redemption. May we who have called down the darkness of our sins to make Him disappear from our heart, our memory, our life, freely merit from the immense pity of Jesus Christ. May the night make rise in us the dawn of definitive repentance and amendment of life.

Before such a mad excess of mercy flowing in response to the torrent of human anger, the Church forgets her songs, decorations, and rejoicing. She is at the foot of the Cross, overwhelmed with gratitude. She knows He is all the beauties of life and yet willed the ugliness of the Cross. She knows that He is the most fitting subject for acclamations of love and yet willed the reprobations of anger. She knows that He is the most predilected, the most worthy of respect and courtesy, and yet willed the scenes of derision, humiliation, and shame.

He willed: "No one takes My life, but I lay it down." "I lay it down" in the hands of anger, to write definitively on a page of human history.

The love of God has revealed itself greater than the anger of men. The power of a God has been found more irresistible in His suffering than admirable in His miracles. The mercy of a God revealed itself broader than the hateful absurdity of men.

A page of History is written to our heart, to be read and learned by heart.

This page was written in the thirty-third year of My earthly existence, inscribed with the indelible ink of My blood, countersigned by the spittle of the mob, certified by the seal of Pontius Pilate: a basin full of water, and by the stamp of Caiphus, that is, his rent garments.
This page is historical, official, translated into every language. Certain people have tried to tear it, to rip it out, but they've realized their anger has only reinforced the text of human angers which wrote it. It can no longer be erased. The signature of God cannot be erased because it is written in Blood that flows from all the pores of His skin.
It is too late. You will be loved until the end of the world. And you will be judged on Love. Be assured, your anger will not have the last word. My Love will have the last word, in the abyss of My mercy or the abyss of My justice.

Christ is the Priest of His own sacrifice. The role of the priest is to immolate the victim; Christ the Priest therefore has to immolate Himself. There are two aspects to an immolation, of which the more visible is important only in relation to the invisible aspect. The visible aspect is what was violent and painful on Mt. Calvary. This aspect is brought about by the executioners, but executioners only go after two types of victims: victims taken by force (the two thieves) and voluntary victims (Our Lord Jesus Christ).

The death of the two thieves was an execution–not a sacrifice–for there was an opposition of will between them and their executioners. The torturers chastised the thieves in spite of their opposition. They were subjected to this death.

Christ, on the other hand, gave His life. He freely let the torturers act, for their cruelties secretly corresponded with what He desired and willed to endure by love and goodness. The executioners did not impose death upon Him; He offered His life to their death-blows. In so doing, Our Lord was living in pure active passivity which saw what was coming, let it come, and endured what came in accordance with His decision of love. He submits. He puts Himself freely under the blows to make them produce that something which can be produced only when there is consent-true suffering (in pure virtuous activity).

The whole of the priestly immolation of Jesus Christ is contained in this active submission to the passivity of the ordeal. It comes from His intense will to love, that is, to love more strongly than the strength of the violence which hated Him. He accepted to be hated in order to love absolutely. In this submission of His-in this active and affectionate consent to all that makes a true victim-all of the fruitfulness and holiness of immolation are present.

Obedience: in submission of His will, He is a victim in His independence.
Scorn: in submission of His heart, He is a victim in His affection.
Renunciation: in submission of His Body, He is a victim in His well-being.

This submission is a complete act of the person. It asks no help of nature [i.e., it is totally supernatural–Ed.] since it consists in the victim loving and accepting a distress of nature(!). It is the complete act of superior persons.

There is sacrifice only on this condition: to love in active submission the state of passivity that is immolation. Where there is no submission there can be no sacrifice, but only either chastisement or execution.

The first ingredient of sacrifice is a loving soul or a soul at least desiring to love.  Our Lord Jesus Christ's sacrifice of Himself was in proportion to the love in His soul. His submission was all the more perfect because He enjoyed a perfect autonomy [i.e., as the God-Man there was nothing to which He had to submit–Ed] in intellect (His teaching), in will (His authority), or His Body (His miracles). The quality of His autonomy inspired the quality of His submission. Free of evil and falsehood, Jesus Christ had the audacity to submit Himself to the effects of evil because He had in His will the means to draw out of them something better than what they usually produce. He drew out of them the good of the Redemption.

In face of His immolation, Christ disregarded the possibility for escape. Bound with ropes and immobilized by the soldiers, He used His power, which had just thrown to the ground the mob come to arrest Him in the garden of the Agony, to endure His capture rather than wielding it to free Himself.

This endurance of the greatest evil reveals the greater freedom of Jesus. He placed this independence at the service of a greater sacrifice, teaching us that the value of the sacrifice demands independence of a superior quality: that of no longer even depending on the soul's loathing to say "yes" and nature's loathing to accept suffering. Ultimately, a man is genuinely free who is sacrificed voluntarily and with full consent. He breaks through that layer of plea-bargaining and of intellectual and corporal resistance which reveal a natural vitality tyrannizing over the soul. Like Christ, he strikes the world dumb with stupefaction since the force of sacrifice imposes silence on nature, which in itself is totally oriented away from sacrifice.

Since our Lord's sacrifice was of religion and worship, it also had to be as visible as possible, which explains why the Passion had to be witnessed by the people. And since it was to be the sacrifice of a God, all that was human in Him had to efface itself entirely before God, under the effect of the power of God in that humanity. Hence the character of completeness in the corporal immolation of Christ who sacrificed human psychology in the agony; the human body in the scourging; human honor by the crowning with thorns; human life by the death on the Cross. Never had the divinity entered into such absolute activity in the humanity of Christ as in the Passion. Only the divinity could draw a man into such a folly of love-a love inspired by the vision of its redemptive consequences, a vision which only the divinity could possess.

For us, too, under the influence of grace, the vision of the happy consequences of our sacrifices makes up for nature's loathing and gives us the strength and the joy to immolate it. Sacrifice is the most intelligent form of love, since to love is to decide in favor of a good, even at the price of what costs the most.

The Passion is but a succession of unceasing voluntary submissions on the part of Jesus to the supernatural occasions for saving men at the cost of His humanity. It is the contrary of human flightiness, whose natural movement is to flee the supreme independence which is sacrifice.


O Crux, Ave

As for the Cross...we are on our guard.
Never did man dream of making such a tool.
With it, we work on the same despair,

we work to leave behind and not to acquire.
We work to dig more than to reach a goal.
With it, we do the work of a giant.

The Cross?–Is it a burin? a chisel? a hoist?
It is an instrument constructed by Love
which slowly penetrates into the human substance
to extract from our hearts their cries for help.

Only Christ could bring it out of the workshop
and, in the measure of our weakness,
size it for us, rough or polished,
and then let it do its work, a work
that no one would dare undertake
but that we have to let Him accomplish, somehow,
while we weep, while we pray
until at last the moment of our resurrection.2


Did Christ Endure All Suffering?

First we have to distinguish between genus and species. [A genus is a "family-grouping" related to characters and characteristics, for example, "Cats." Within a genus, there are species of "Cat," for instance, "lions" or "tigers." Fr. de Chivré is going to say that there is the genus of "Agony," of which Christ could only suffer some of its species due to the limitations of time and space, yet by those species He experienced the breadth of the genus of "Agony."–Ed] It is impossible to endure all species of suffering at once, since they contradict each other, for example, burning and drowning, or, decapitation and scalping. But according to the genus of "Agony," He endured all human suffering.

On the part of men: Jews and pagans; priests and laymen; authorities and the subjects; honest and dishonest; young and old; friends and enemies.

On the part of His faculties:

Was His Suffering Greater Than Any Other?

Yes.

Reasons proper to Christ:

Reasons proper to His form of death:

Reasons proper to the Redemption:

Did Christ Suffer In Every Part Of His Soul?

The different powers of the soul are comparable to parts of a whole. If all of the faculties of the soul are affected by suffering, the entire soul suffers. Therefore, the entire soul of Christ suffered.

The lower part of Christ's soul (i.e., the sense-appetites) suffered horribly on the Cross because it experienced the total pain-agony of His body. The higher part of His soul (i.e., the intellect and will) suffered in relation to His desired end, that is, the glory of His Father and the salvation of souls. This caused Him joy and intellectual delight, but this end also included the mental pain caused by His awareness of the very reasons that made the Cross necessary-namely the sins and offenses of men. Hence, the higher part of His soul experienced a sadness, too, which was not only of the senses, but also affected the will of that higher life. Just as no physical movement gave Christ any relief but instead increased the suffering of His body, so no thought or idea gave Him consolation but instead tortured His mind even more: "My God, My God, why hast Thou abandoned Me?"

He brought together all the elements of the genus of "Agony" to experience them all at the same time.

The suffering of a single faculty of the soul makes all of the other faculties suffer. For instance, by the wounds inflicted upon His head by the crowning with thorns, the whole body would be exasperated by the intermediary of the nervous system. If we understand this, we have a better idea of the totality of the sufferings of Christ. All of His spiritual, intellectual, voluntary, imaginative, sensitive, and bodily powers suffered simultaneously. Each rendered the others more acute by a redundancy of suffering in an inconceivable combination and thereby formed an agony impossible for us to imagine.

As the One who was acted upon directly, Christ submitted to His executioners. As the One who acted, Christ was the indirect cause of His own Passion:

The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ is an act of astonishing self-possession, of self-control, and of self-mastery in an event of the most utter confusion and complete abandonment. Hence, it is absolutely redemptive and assures victory over all sin. To reproduce this possession of ourselves, this fullness of consent, this formal abandonment to sacrifice, is to continue the Passion of Christ.

Translated exclusively for Angelus Press with editing by Fr. Kenneth Novak for clarity. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. (say: Sheave-ray') was ordained in 1930. He was an ardent Thomist, student of Scripture, retreat master, and friend of Archbishop Lefebvre. He died in 1984.


1. Taken from the beginning of the text, "Contempler,”(p.80).

2. From: "Une idée sensée sur ses souffrances insensées.”