Day 10: Love Bears All Things

Paul Rubens "The Three Crosses"

I

n Mark's Gospel, when Pilate learns that Jesus had already died, he was "amazed"; i.e., he was filled with shock and utter astonishment. Pilate needed a centurion's help to verify, first, if Jesus had indeed died and, second, how he died. The initial disbelief of Pilate is perfectly understandable. He must have asked, "Why did it happen so quickly?" He saw with his own eyes the jeering and very angry mob which forced him, against his better judgement, to hand over Jesus to them. It is not impossible if Pilate had thought that Jesus could have been clobbered or stoned to death by the angry mob or perhaps when the mob saw him already hanging on the cross and still thought it was not enough. The number of centurions who accompanied Jesus to the gallows is evidence enough that violent things were done in the past to the criminals (see my note about the etymology of "gallows" below). St Ignatius of Loyola recommends to us his methods of "composition of place" and "application of the senses" to deepen more our understanding about the last few hours of Jesus. It does not have to change our view of the cross. We can continue pointing to the cross saying 'That's what killed our Lord!' But what if somebody tells you that something else killed our Lord? Would you be like Pilate? How would you react?

Jesus was lucky he died at three o'clock in the afternoon after only three hours of hanging, nailed on his cross. Criminals often hung for a week, no sooner than forty-eight hours dying of hunger, shock, thirst, infection, exhaustion, asphyxia and exposure. To hasten death the victim’s legs are thrashed over the shin with a heavy mallet. Have you ever fallen and hit your shin while climbing the stairs? Can you even imagine the pain of having broken shins? That was the last remaining part of the body of the crucified man that gives him bodily support to some degree.

When the soldiers arrived at Golgotha, "they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead. [T]hey did not break his legs, but one soldier thrust his lance into his side, and immediately blood and water flowed out" (Jn 19:33-34). "If the soldier’s spear was thrust into the left side of the Lord’s body and actually penetrated the heart, the outrush of ‘blood and water’ observed by John is further evidence of a cardiac rupture; for it is known that in the rare instances of death resulting from a breaking of any part of the wall of the heart, blood accumulates within the pericardium, and there undergoes a change by which the corpuscles separate as a partially clotted mass from the almost colorless, watery serum... Great mental stress, poignant emotion either of grief or joy, and intense spiritual struggle are among the recognized causes of heart rupture. In short, it appears that the actual cause of the Savior’s death was a broken heart, caused not by crucifixion but by the tremendous weight of sorrow and suffering He had endured..." (Adam Abrams, Gethsemane, © 2008 Adam Abrams.) I am reminded of a poignant line from Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" that goes, “maybe it was better to break a man's leg than to break his heart.”

To say that love bears all things means to love to the end as Jesus has done–giving up one's life unreservedly. Those who had such a death are called martyrs. “Who are the martyrs?” Pope Francis asks during the beatification of the Spanish Martyrs of the Twentieth Century. “They are Christians won by Christ, disciples who learned well the meaning of ‘loving to the end’ that took Jesus to the Cross.… Christ goes before us in love; the martyrs have imitated him in love to the end.” Although, it does not mean that forfeiting our lives is the only way to follow Christ. Such is allotted to those few who have been called to be martyrs. Pope Francis invites the greater majority to live out martyrdom in many different ways: “We always have to die a bit to come out of ourselves, of our egoism, our wellbeing, our sloth, our sadnesses, and open ourselves to God, to others, especially the neediest." Then he continues, “So what can we learn from the martyrs? The Holy Fathers say: ‘Let’s imitate the martyrs!’”

Our featured song for today is "Dwells God" by Fr Arnel Aquino SJ and performed by Fr RB Hizon SJ and Himig Heswita. God bears all things by his indwelling love.

Nota Bene: The term "gallows" was derived from a Proto-Germanic word galgô which refers to a "pole," "rod" or "tree branch." This points to the earlier execution style in which a person sentenced to death had been tied to a bent-down tree and then released. With the beginning of Christianization, Ulfilas, credited with the translation of the Bible into Gothic, used the term galga in his Gothic Testament to refer to the cross of Christ, until the use of the Latin term (crux = cross) prevailed (Wikipedia).

Fr JM Manzano SJ