9781644135945

The Time After Pentecost
become entirely too worldly. Christ gives His choicest graces to those who follow Him into the
desert, who walk the way of Christian self-denial.
Would that we might understand the language of the liturgy, which teaches us that mortification
and self-denial are the way of Christ, and that they must also be the way of the members
of Christ.
Prayer
O God of power, from whom are all good things, implant in our hearts the love of Thy name,
increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and by Thy mercy keep us in the same.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saturday
“We . . . are baptized in His death” (Epistle). By means of voluntary and joyful participation in
our Lord’s passion and cross, Christian self-denial attains to its highest perfection.
“If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me” (Mt
16:24). The Son of God came to us on this earth to share His life with us. He became man
and toiled incessantly to care for souls. He was insulted and opposed by men until at last they
condemned Him to death and crucified Him. His life was a life of suffering; He Himself so
willed it. Voluntarily, with complete subjection to the will of the Father, He drank the chalice the
Father had commanded Him to drink for our salvation. He spent His life in suffering, sorrow,
and self-denial in order to reconcile us with His Father, to open heaven for us, and to save us
from eternal damnation. A “man of sorrows” (Is 53:3) from the manger to the cross, He embraced
the cross, poverty, and mortification. When He was led out to be scourged, He offered
no resistance. He suffered in silence, perfectly resigned to the will of the Father, even when He
was scoffed at in a most rude and humiliating way and mockingly crowned with thorns. Silent
and resigned to the will of the Father, He took up His cross and carried it up to the heights of
Calvary, where He suffered unutterable agony. After three hours, during which He shed the last
drop of His precious blood, He consummated His life of sacrifice. The life of the Son of God
was a life of suffering leading to the cross.
“We . . . are baptized in His death.” Many Christians like to meditate on our Lord’s passion,
whether by means of a meditation book, the Stations of the Cross, or by frequent glances at a
crucifix. Our being Christians, however, our being “baptized in His death,” requires more than
the mere meditation on His passion. It calls for a real union of suffering with Christ, an efficacious
union which we must experience in actual life. To this union of suffering we have been
baptized, and by this union we are called to possess and enjoy with Christ His transfiguration.
In order to become coheirs of His glory, however, we must follow in the way He walked and win
glory as He won His: we must share His suffering. In being “nailed [with Christ] to the cross”
(Gal 2:19), and in being “planted together in the likeness of His death” (Rom 6:5), we have
the only assurance of attaining this glory. “We . . . are baptized in His death”; and “we who live
are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake; that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest
in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor 4:11). Our suffering is a suffering with Christ. We long to be found
in Him in “the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death” (Phil 3:10).
479