13 - The Passion
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And specific sayings from our Lord Himself, such as, "I am," the word king, the word lamb, new Moses, new Adam, bright room, the source of the church. Those are all very important themes throughout these two chapters. We're going to get into it in a minute. The governing thesis for the entire two chapters, I would say, would be that the passion
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does not make Jesus king.
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The passion,
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the death, burial, and resurrection does not make Jesus king.
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It reveals that He is king.
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It's a revelation of who Christ is. Christ always was.
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That's really important for us to understand what Jesus is affecting here. But I would say even more so for our own lives.
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Your successes, your failures, your regrets, your sorrow, your joys, none of those things make you who you are.
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They reveal who you are.
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What makes you you is the grace of God
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your correspondence to it by growing in virtue.
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That's what makes you you.
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The other important theme we want to see today is that the victory of Christ is not rooted in external success.
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I mean, you'd ask any marketing specialist about, if you go to a marketing specialist and say, "I want to start a religion."
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How about this? I'll only pick 11 followers, 12. Actually, one will betray me,
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only 12.
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And then I'll let my enemies kill me in the worst possible way. What do you think?
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Are you on board?
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So you can see
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it's not in the externalities of these events that the victory lies. The victory does not lie in some thing the Lord is doing.
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The victory lies in the Lord, in who He is. It's in His being that the victory lies, not in His doing.
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The doing is the extension of His being.
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And we've seen this over and over again where as soon as Jesus is with them in the boat there, they reach destination.
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It is the being of God
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that gives victory.
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That should change our outlook on how we approach God and what we expect from Him.
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So it is really His identity as the eternal Son who gives Himself in perfect love to the Father for us.
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So that's really what we're going to focus on as we walk through these events.
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So we enter the hour.
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We're going to show the passion as glory, not collapse. The cross is several things. It is judgment on the world. It's a sacrifice of atonement. It's a throne and it's a birthplace.
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And we're going to move thematically through the whole thing.
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So we've left the high room. We've left the upper room where Jesus had His high priestly prayer to prepare His disciple.
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And then now comes the hour that will scatter them.
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The central question for these two chapters is how can humiliation reveal glory?
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How can suffering become enthronement?
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How can death become victory? How can a pierced side become the birth of the church?
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I would argue that one of the main reasons for our troubles, for our pain, for our sorrow, for our suffering, is our inability to believe in the resurrection.
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Let me put it this way.
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Let's say you're really, really poor and you only have five bucks. That's all you got, nothing else.
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And I come to you and I say, "Buy this lottery ticket."
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When you're confronted with this choice to buy the lottery ticket, what goes before you? What goes before you is the fact that you only have five bucks for the day. You need to eat, you need to drink.
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If you buy this lottery ticket, you're left with nothing.
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That's scenario A. Scenario B. I come to you and I have this device that shows you the future.
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I show you the future and I'll show you that this lottery ticket is the winning one.
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Would you hesitate?
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Would you?
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Would you not spend your five dollars joyfully?
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You would, right? What changed? It's the same five bucks, the same action, the same ticket. What changed?
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Surtitude.
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Certainty.
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So what if this lottery ticket is your life,
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beginning to end? That's the lottery ticket.
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And then you look at your life and all the events in your life and you see five bucks. And that's all you see.
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And that's all you got. And that's all that you're holding on.
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You have nothing else.
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But what if I had a device that could show you that this entire life with everything that happened, all of it will,
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is actually a winning ticket.
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Would you be sad over your life?
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If I were to come then and tell you, oh, let's change something about your life, let's make you a little happier here, you probably would fight me over it.
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Because you're afraid that this little bit of happiness will take away the lottery ticket that you're going to win.
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You see?
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And this device to see that winning lottery
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is faith in the resurrection.
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That's where our struggle is.
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It's not that we doubt that Jesus rose from the dead. I don't think any of us here would doubt that,
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that he rose from the dead.
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But between his rising from the dead and our rising from the dead, there is a chasm.
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Why is there a chasm? It's because we haven't united ourselves to him. We don't think of our lives being his life.
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We haven't considered that they're the same.
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Why are they the same? Well, because there is a distance between him and us. And that's therein, right there. Back to what I said earlier, at the level of the being,
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we're chasing things instead of chasing the one who gives us everything.
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That's part of fallen human nature. That's part of concupiscence. It pushes away from us. And what St. John wants to show us here, what he's showing us, great pains, is this. How can humiliation reveal glory? How can suffering become enthronement? How can death become victory?
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It's one thing for me to, let's say, if I have an enemy that I want to beat, let's say it's the Roman legions.
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And I grab a bunch of Marines and travel through time to fight the Roman legions.
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We would decimate them
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because of our superior technology.
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Right? That would stand no chance against us.
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But that victory, right, that victory would keep a lingering question. What if you fought them at their own level, would you be able to win?
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What if you fought them with their own weapons, would you be able to win? That'd be that lingering question about who is strongest.
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You see, if you're the strongest, then you beat your enemy with his strongest weapon.
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That's how you conquer.
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And what is the strongest weapon of the devil?
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What is the weapon that all of us fear, or most of us fear?
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Death.
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Fear of dying is very widespread.
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Fear of dying is very widespread. Death is the one thing that the devil can hold us back with more than anything else.
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What does Jesus do?
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He wins by dying.
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He takes that one weapon that the devil has and turns it upside down.
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And then the fathers of the church then call death the anti-chamber of the wedding feast of the Lamb.
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The anti-chamber is the last chamber before the wedding feast.
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That is a distinctly Christian perspective on death that you will find nowhere else. That death has become the chamber that leads you to the wedding feast.
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Well, again, how many of us have that perspective? How many of us are actually looking forward to dying?
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How many of us are joyfully looking forward to dying?
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Not in some sort of morbid way, not in a sort of defeatist way, but truthfully looking forward with anticipation.
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That's what Christ did. That's what he affected.
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Those are the real themes behind all of these two chapters, more so than the historical event of the Passion. That is these themes that we need to really keep focusing on. And it's a focus that will take a lifetime.
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So again, humanly speaking, these things are a failure and we fear them. We all fear being humiliated. We all fear suffering. We all fear death. We certainly don't want our sight pierced.
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Humanly speaking, these are tools of defeat, of destruction, of pain, of sorrow.
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But supernaturally, these are the exact same tools that let you win that lottery. They're here. But they require that union with Christ, a deep abiding union with Him in order to be able to overcome our natural inhibition.
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Again, I'll say it again, the Passion does not make Jesus King. The Passion reveals He is King.
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So I should have moved that. I didn't. So we are number 13, not number 12.
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And then next week, I mean, in two weeks from now we conclude.
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We are going to then look at the victory from the depth of being.
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And then we're going to see some really important key themes. It's like Christ is tying some loose ends. There's a restoration and a recapitulation of three covenants, Adam, Abraham and David, all baked into this narrative. Then there's the new Exodus. St. John's Gospel is not like the synoptics. In the synoptics, Jesus goes to Jerusalem over a period of three years. In the case of St. John, it's a straight arrow.
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He goes once. St. John, therefore, is looking at Jesus going to Jerusalem as an Exodus. Not an Exodus to Jerusalem, an Exodus from Jerusalem.
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An Exodus from Jerusalem. So we'll look at the Exodus, which is with the completed Passover. And then we're going to look at how the church is born from His side. So not only is He going to now affect what He said, what He showed, He's now going to conquer death in a universal way. When He raised Lazarus from the dead, it was a sign, like St. John says, of His power. But it was specific to Lazarus. None of us could benefit from Lazarus being raised from the dead other than having faith in Christ. But this victory over death is for all of us.
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It is in the victory of death that His new kingdom is now established.
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It's in defeating death that He defeats the world and establish His everlasting kingdom.
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One passion for covenantal science.
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So again, I'll give you a quick moment if you want to grab this and if you want to ask questions during the lecture.
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While you're doing this, I will again reiterate the point that I made all through this entire study.
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We were not doing the study to become theologians as in, you know, published papers and go to academia and do these wonderful things which are great and needed to be done. That's not our goal. This is not what we're doing here.
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What we're really doing here is simply trying to understand how we
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can be happy.
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This is all about finding joy in Christ.
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And I hope that you don't come here, listen to me, then go home and then focus only on soccer. However great soccer is.
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I hope that it's kindling a fire in you to become contemplative, to enter into that spiritual journey and to seek Christ for Christ, not because you want something from Him, just for Him.
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If you do that, you'd be reading the Gospel of St. John for the rest of your life without even reading it.
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All right, please stand. Let's start with the word of prayer.
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In the name of the Father, of the Son, of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your spirit and then shall be created and you shall renew the face of the earth. O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and ever enjoy His consolations through Christ our Lord, Amen.
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May we see the wisdom, great St. Joseph, St. John, all the angels and saints in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Please be seated.
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So the passages are, I'm sure you're very familiar with all of them.
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First, the rest in the garden in which Jesus assert His divinity and they are basically they fall back down because He said, "I am He," the divine title, "I am that I am," which shows you that at every moment in time it isn't somebody who's trying to catch Jesus, Jesus who gives His life. He's not coerced into doing it, He chooses to do it. Then we have Anna, Skypha, St. Peter's denial. And then by the way, Peter's denial is by far more grievous sin than Judas's treason.
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Jesus said, "By the time the cock will crow three," what is three? Remember three? Told you three? It's a superlative, right? So it's the maximum because in fact, St. Peter was crucified upside down. You know he was crucified upside down? Because the third time he denied Christ, he put himself under a curse.
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Cursed am I if I know Him.
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Judas didn't go to that such extreme.
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Then the crucifixion, inscription, His mother and it is finished, and finally pierced side, blood and water, burial in the garden.
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So from the arrest to the burial, you can look at it with two different lens. One is the destruction of everything Jesus did, beginning to end, everything He's tried to do, He's gone to waste. The other, you look at it as the foundation of a new kingdom that will reign eternally.
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And I don't want you to just look at it academically. I'm not asking you to look at it from a purely logical process, although it's important to do so.
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I am asking you to look at it as a recapitulation of your own life. Your life is here in these events.
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And hopefully when you start to look at this as a reflection, as a mirror of your own life, you might start to be able to make peace. Some of the things that right now you don't want to look at or you're ashamed of, or some of the things you regret,
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because this was very messy. See, chaotic, messy, and it's failure after failure after failure, and it led where? To glory.
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That is the consolation that you get out of St. John. If you really pay attention and you read your life, like don't try to read the Gospel for the Gospel's sake. Try to read your life in the Gospel. Use the Gospel as a mirror of your own life.
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That's how you enter into a conversation with Christ.
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You open the Gospel, see yourself.
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If you read it detached, it's okay, it's the events that happened, Jesus did this and then the other, but you're here and there, there, you're wasting your time.
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This is a reflection of your own life. This is your life.
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And mine, and everybody else's life.
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So the narrative is visible, the covenantal meaning runs beneath it.
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Let's begin. Victory from the depth of being. So we enter now the hour, the hour that Christ has been speaking about.
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And then St. John is not writing these two chapters to depress you. St. John is writing these two chapters to give you hope.
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So again, if you read these two chapters and you feel depressed, you need to dig into this. Why are you getting depressed? This is supposed to give you hope.
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He's showing you the passion as glory, not collapse.
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You see, there is one thing that's really, sort of really interesting. I'm going to mention it here. I wasn't planning on, but it just came to mind. I think it's worth mentioning.
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You all know that a Catholic marriage is a sacrament, right? It's very interesting is that most married Catholic people never call on the power of the sacrament to help them with their marriage.
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They use the sacrament of confession. They use the sacrament of baptism. They use the sacrament of reconciliation, the Eucharist regularly. But you'd be hard pressed to find one of them calling on the power or the sacrament of marriage to help them with their marriage.
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They kind of ignore it, which means they ignore the vehicle of grace that Christ instituted precisely to help them with their marriage.
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And in so doing, they ignore Christ. So just keep this in mind. No matter how hard your marriage is, no matter whatever challenge you're facing in a marriage, whether you or people you know, right? I'm not, I can't read your minds. I'm just saying, no matter how difficult it is, all these difficulties
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do not amount to a drop compared to the graces you get out of the sacrament of marriage. The sacrament is far stronger than all those difficulties. If you
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put your faith in it.
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So your life can be this. It's all this mess and all the difficulties and the challenges and maybe you're not able to talk or you communicate or you have issues. Whatever the case may be.
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That's the passion. The sacrament of marriage is the glory.
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It's what underpins the whole thing, what supports it, what gives it its meaning, its purpose, its destiny, its direction. Call on the graces of the sacrament of marriage and trust that the God who cannot be deceived nor deceives will see you through.
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The cross is judgment, sacrifice, throne and birthplace. Okay. It is obviously judgment because through the
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cross, Christ judges the world.
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He was, he died in 33 AD there about and he had prophesied about Jerusalem and within one generation around 70 AD, the Romans came down and then wiped out the whole city.
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And there were, there were curses prophesied by Moses and Leviticus and Exodus that came true of the worst possible form.
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They're documented by Josephus who was a Jew, was captured by the Romans and who chronicled the war. It's called the war of the Jews.
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And these curses that were written about what would happen happened.
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So it was judgment. It is sacrifice. Christ didn't need to sacrifice himself to save us. You understand that? There was no intrinsic requirement that said that unless Christ died on the cross, we can't be saved.
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could flick his finger and we would all be saved. That's the hard thing for us to consider. Why then did he choose this way?
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Why did he choose the cross? He chose the cross
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to show us how we're supposed to love and help and how we're supposed to be joyful.
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He chose the cross to tell us, look, I'm going to show you this. I'm going to take you with me to the depth of hell and I'll show you that'll be all right. You'll be fine. Do not be afraid. He didn't do it because he needed to. He did it because we needed it.
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Because unless somebody can penetrate all the way to the depth of our fear
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and show us how that fear can be turned into glory, we will not believe.
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He show us because of the hardness of our heart. The cross isn't the sign of the father's justice. The cross is a sign of our hardness of heart.
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It's also his throne from which he gathered all the people to himself and it is the birthplace of the church.
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So the cross, the fathers of the church, the saints always place a central importance on the meditation on the cross
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and on the importance of the cross and trying to understand why is the cross so important. This is why, by the way, in Catholic churches, it is required to have a crucifix. You can't have an empty cross. You have to have Christ on the cross. Why? Because it is Christ on the cross that does all these things. It's Christ on the cross that reminds me of the hardness of my heart. He reminds me of his love for me. He reminds me of salvation, of authority, of kingship. All those things are wrapped up in the cross. So meditation on the cross is very helpful.
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So the paradox of the passion. There is a paradox in the passion because humanly speaking, the passion looks like a collapse. Jesus is betrayed. He's arrested. He's abandoned. He's interrogated. He's mocked. He's scourged. He's condemned. He's crucified and buried.
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Anything like that happen to you?
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So betrayed, arrested, abandoned, interrogated, mocked, scourged, condemned, crucified and buried.
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Humanly speaking, it's a complete collapse. Measured by visible effectiveness, his actions appear futile. His agony does not remove the cup. He prayed, "Remember, Father, let this cup pass by me, but not your will." What happened? The cup stayed.
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The cup stayed.
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See, this is the constant dissonance. We kind of go, "Yeah, yeah, but this is Jesus." What is it happening to me?
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See, we have this constant dissonance.
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He prayed. The cup stayed. It didn't go away.
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He's innocent, completely innocent. It doesn't prevent his condemnation.
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He's God, God incarnate. He can't convert Pilate.
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Jesus Christ, Son of the Most High, God from God, light from light.
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that cause you suffering.
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That's where the glory lies.
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If you can endure them, that's where the glory lies, if you trust. Counterintuitive, isn't it? Very counterintuitive. Very counterintuitive.
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His action appear futile. His agony doesn't remove the cup. He can't convert anybody. His love does not stop the nails. His death looks like failure. And this is the shallow, arithmetic way of the world to look at something like that. It is shallow, but it's very dangerous. It is shallow, but it lead to despair. It is shallow, but that's where the devil hides. In the shadow of that the devil hides because all the devil wants to do is lead you to despair. That's all he wants. Get you to despair.
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You're not important. Your life is not important. You messed up. You did things wrong. That was not the right way to do it. Nobody cares about you. You're all alone and on and on and on and on. And guess what? We are far more prone to listen to him.
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Then if somebody came and told us, you're wonderful, you're great. What you did was amazing. I'm so happy you're here. We tune them off. Don't we? Immediately we tune them off.
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We're much rather have somebody abuse us and insult us and have somebody come and compliment us because we don't trust them.
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We're primed this way,
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but it is, it is the
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way we set these equations in place.
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Well, by that measure,
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Christ's love is a failure.
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Didn't do anything.
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St. John is going to force us to go deeper. The passion is glorious, good. Suffering remains an evil and a wound of the fall.
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No, I'm not here to extol suffering and tell you, hey, suffer is good for you.
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Not at all. Emphatically not. My point isn't to make you focus on the suffering. My point is to make you focus on the one who suffers.
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It is because he is God that there is glory. Not the glory makes him a God.
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We tend to think this way. I must be successful. I must be rich. I must be beautiful. I must do all things. Then I will be loved. Then I will be worth something. We put the doing before the being.
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And that's what leads to misery.
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With Christ is the exact opposite. The being precedes the doing. The doing is the proof of the being.
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So the apparent victim is the sovereign son. The one being judged is the judge. The one being lifted up in shame is being enthroned. The one apparently losing everything is giving everything. Paradox. Paradox of paradox. Paradox of paradox. But that's what it is. You can start to see your lives this way and value it not because of what you achieved,
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but because it is precious in the eye of God for whatever reason. Doesn't matter why. Don't ask why. It is precious and that's why it is valuable.
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At the arrest Jesus steps forward. I am he. The armed company draws back and falls. His enemies can bind his hands. They cannot alter who he is. The passion reveals the manner in which he has always reigned. I am he. Whom do you seek? Jesus of Nazareth. I am he. They drew back and fell to the ground.
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They collapsed before the declaration of his identity. Our Lord doesn't show up and say, "Oh, you want to catch me? I'm going to warn you. I am a black belt and take one doe."
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He doesn't point to what he is. He doesn't point to who he is.
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And that existence is enough.
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So think about your own lives. How much of your life is spent on doing versus being?
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His victory is rooted in being. He is the eternal Son. The word made flesh, the I am, remains perfectly united to the Father.
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They can't, his enemies cannot prevent him from loving. They can't prevent his obedience. They don't understand it. And that's why he tells Pilate, "You could have no power at all against me. You would have no power at all against me unless it had been given you from above." Meaning ironically, from me.
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Pilate imagines he holds the power of life and death.
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Jesus reveals that even his authority is permitted and subordinated. The passion does not make Jesus victorious. It reveals that he already is victorious because he is the Son of God. Try to see your life the exact same way. Your life isn't a victory because of what you are doing. Your life is a victory because your names are written in the book of life in heaven.
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Try to see it this way. That's a biblical way of looking at your life.
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Now, Jesus is powerless.
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He is powerless.
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He's scourged. He's shuttled between authorities who mock him, who write him, don't understand him.
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Soldiers also mock him, put a crook from the thorns on his head. He's forced to carry across. He's powerless.
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Why is he showing us that? Because again, he's trying to tell us it is not what you're doing that's going to make you victorious.
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It's not your actions. It's not what you can accomplish. All those things are important. So I'm not saying sit down, wither your thumb and do nothing. I'm not saying that at all. You have to do what you have to do. You have to make a living. You have to take care of people. There's a lot to do. Wonderful. Do it. Question is, where is your heart?
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Where is your heart? Would you rather, if you're given a choice, would you rather be doing these things or sitting at the feet of Jesus?
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If your heart is still in the doing, well,
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that's going to be really tough because that's going to happen to you. One of these days, you're going to be on the bed and you'll be powerless and your organs will fail and people can do whatever they want and you can't stop them. It is going to happen.
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It's not a question of if, it's a question of when.
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And if you've spent your life and your heart is in the doing,
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how will you be able to
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go through this journey peacefully, joyfully to meet the Lord? How? Don't kid yourself.
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You won't. That's why so many people die miserably.
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Spend their lives training themselves
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to do things and they get to the gates of death and things are being done to them and they can do anything. They're utterly miserable. They don't understand that the loss of control is where the glory is because in the loss of control is where all the love because when you let go of control, you're telling God, I love you.
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You can't tell God, I love you. You can't tell God, I trust you, but I'm driving the car.
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You're with God in the car and you say, no, no, I trust you, but I'm driving. But you have to pick. This is why this is really hard on all of us. This is why in the life of the church is only one week for the passion. Imagine if the passion was like a whole season of six months. Six months of the year we're meditating on a passion. First of all, that will turn us all into saints or we'll empty the church. Most likely we'll empty the church
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because it is so against the way we live.
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We don't want to hear about defeats and betrayal and scourging and the cross.
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No, we don't really. We
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Why? Because our hearts is in the doing. Our hearts and the value, our own self-worth is in what we do, not that we are beloved by God. Oh yeah, we say it. Of course we say it.
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This is what honestly irks me with this whole mercy thing. God is mercy. God loves you.
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Okay. And then if he does, and if he's merciful, he loves me. Why do I have to go through all of this? Explain that to me, please.
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Is he merciful or is he cruel? If he's so merciful, why do I have to go through all of this?
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So agony is obedience. Rest is self surrender. Scourging is a gift.
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The cross becomes the throne and death is a passage.
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Now he's not asking us to do all of that. Most of us will not have to suffer to such a degree. Most of us will suffer. It'll be a cancer. It'll be heart attack. It'll be diabetes. It'll be something. It's inescapable. We'll suffer. Can we see it this way? Can we train our selves now? Start now training ourselves that when these things happen,
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we're able to see it the same way. We're able to live it the same way. Well, okay. Let me take that back. Maybe that's too much. At least try. Just try. And God will be happy if we just try. Not be successful. Just try. Just be aware. Or maybe I should do that. That's already something for him.
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"Shall I not drink the cup which the father has given me?" There you go.
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I'll be driving on the highway. And then some genius would decide to come and then slide into my lane driving 30, 40 miles slower than me. "Do you think I say shall I drink the cup that the father has prepared for me when that happens?"
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Just that. Just that.
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Just that. Right? I'm not talking big pain and suffering. This little insignificant detail and grand scheme of things really doesn't matter.
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"Shall I not drink the cup which the father has given me?"
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"Shall I not drink the cup which the father has given me?"
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So all our weaknesses are in his passion. The frailty, the failure, the depression, the loneliness, the abandonment, the humiliation and loss. All of them are in his passion.
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And all of them can lead to glory. They're meant to lead to glory.
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God's glory and then yours.
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But if you're obsessed with doing, you're not going to be able to see that.
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You won't.
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"United to Christ, even weakness can become love." I want you to understand that precisely.
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I am not saying that if you decide to unite your weakness or your loneliness or your depression, whatever you're going through to Christ,
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then it becomes love. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you take your loneliness, you give it to Christ, guess what? It still is loneliness. There's no magic formula.
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Just as he didn't get rid of the cup, just that he didn't convert Pilate, your loneliness doesn't go away. It doesn't change. It still is loneliness. It still is depression. It doesn't change.
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The fruit change. What it produces change.
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That's the difference. And you have to see it in faith.
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That's what happens. "United to Christ, your weakness can become love." Let love may not be for people around you. That love may not be for people living even in this century.
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It is love that God liberally distributes to whomever he wills.
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You don't get to see this right now.
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Because if you did, then guess what? It isn't love. We're back to transaction. "Oh, here is Christ the machine. I put some love here. I get result out of here." Wonderful.
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We're back using Christ and Santa Claus.
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That's not abandonment. That's going to the car wash.
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Get a dirty car in, get the, you know, clean car out. "Oh, I did something."
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Now, complete abandonment, complete let go. You don't see the results. You don't see the fruits. And more importantly, you get to a point where you don't even ask.
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All that matters to you is that you're giving it to Christ. And in that giving, you find your joy.
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The enemy tells you, "Recognize your limitations. Protect yourself."
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God says, "Recognize your limitations and give yourself to me."
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Self-love closes the soul upon itself. Self-giving
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opens the soul to God.
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At Christ, at Calvary, Christ conquers by giving himself completely.
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It's the giving of yourself that conquers everything. But you won't be able to give of yourself like this example of the ticket, the five bucks, unless you knew with certainty that you're going to find yourself.
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And that certainty is in Christ.
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So the closer you go to him, the closer you stay with him, the closer you focus on being with him and less on doing, the more that certainty comes into your heart. The devil at the end of the day is shallow. He is self-love because sin curves the soul inward. God is in the depth of self-giving because divine love goes outward in gift. The son receives everything from the father, and gives himself completely back to the father for us. That's what we ought to do.
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give you the readers digest version of this, because there is no way. I'm almost out of time, and I only finished one section. So I'm going to give you the readers and I invite you to read these slides when I publish them.
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In the Passion of St. John, if you actually take the Passion and set it side by side with Genesis chapter 3, I think where basically Adam and Eve are condemned, you will see that Christ takes upon himself the curses that were given to Adam and Eve.
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So for instance, Adam was told by the sweat of your brow, you will make a living.
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What did Jesus do in the agony? He sweated blood.
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Eve was told that it is in the pain of childbirth, and then the fathers compared the suffering of Christ on the cross as the pain of childbirth.
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So effectively, he recapitulates in himself all the curses of Adam and Eve on the cross. He basically goes through all of them, suffers through all of them, including what? Including loneliness? I mean, Christ was kicked out of Jerusalem because he was crucified outside Jerusalem. Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden. St. John starts in the garden. That's not coincidental that Jesus was in the garden and he was taken out of the garden to be crucified. He was taken out of Jerusalem. Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden. They suffered loneliness. They suffered pain. They suffered loss. They suffered death. He recapitulates all of that in his passion. Incidentally, there is a beautiful tradition among the Eastern churches, and you can see it depicted if you ever go to Holy Angels, which is a Byzantine Catholic, Roman Catholic Church here in San Diego after 805. If you go to this church on the left side of the altar, you will see a crucifixion, the crucifixion of our Lord. And then at the bottom, there is a and St. Matthew tells us he was crucified on the hill called Golgotha, which means the skull. Well, the tradition holds that when Noah went through the flood, his son Shem took with him the skull of Adam.
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And after they settled down, it was on that hill that he buried that skull.
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And so the idea is that the blood of Christ trickled down on the skull of Adam, redeeming all of humanity. So he recapitulates all of the curses of Adam and Eve. And I don't know if you know that, but in a Catholic church, we hold that Adam and Eve are actually in heaven.
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So in a sense, they're considered saints of the Old Testament, they're in heaven.
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So the curse is assumed and reversed. That which caused them all the separation and pain and sorrow remains as is, but now it causes union with God. It causes eternity.
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It causes supernatural life.
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Abraham is fulfilled. Abraham took his son Isaac to sacrifice him and was there was a ram that substituted for him, Christ is that substitute. He fulfills therefore the requirement for the sacrifice that Abraham was supposed to hold for all the faithful. And that is also fulfilled in Christ. Not only is it fulfilled in Christ, but that ram that was going to, that was sacrificed and eaten only by Adam, by Abraham and Isaac has become the one who is perpetually present and feeding all the faithful throughout all time.
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David is restored. As you know, David committed several sins and because of his sins, essentially the whole kingdom blew up and was destroyed. Well, now the kingdom is being restored. How do we know that? Well, because in the Davidic kingdom, the queen could not be the wife of the king because a king had many wives. The queen was always the queen mother, the Gebi-Ral.
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And in his case, it was Bathsheba. In the case of Solomon, I mean with Bathsheba, was the queen mother and Solomon went to her and told her, anything you ask, I will do.
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Anything you ask, I will do. And here at the foot of the cross from his throne, we have
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the revelation of the Gebi-Ral, the queen mother.
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Obviously, Jesus already told Nicodemus, when I'm lifted up, I'll bring all to me.
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Here's a really interesting thing that I don't have much time to spend on, but I'm just going to mention it briefly. In the Gospel of St. Matthew, I think chapter 26, right after St. Matthew tells us that right after singing some hymns, they left to the garden.
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That caused many Jewish scholars to tell us that St. Matthew could not be Jew because the cedar meal, which they were basically celebrating, had a very set liturgy associated with it. And that set liturgy required them to sing hymns.
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There was a specific spot where they have to sing hymns, which is right after the third cup. There are four cups to drink in any cedar meal. And
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So like I said, in the Gospel of St. Matthew, chapter 26, verse 30, it records that after they had sung a hymn, they went out to Mount Olive. The Hillel requires songs 113 through 118, which are all called songs of the ascent, to be sung during that meal. So we know that they went after these hymns. Those hymns are sung after the third cup before the fourth.
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So that would tell you that basically here are a bunch of Jews who cut short the whole ceremony and left before finishing it.
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But what does Jesus say on the cross? It is finished. When does he say it is finished? After what?
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After drinking the fourth cup.
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So the cross is the continuation and culmination of Passover. It what closes it.
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So it is Moses renewed.
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It is the entire Mosaic order now is superseded by the new covenant. St. John is the only one to tell us that when they brought vinegar to Jesus to drink, they put it on a hyssop branch. It is really interesting that you said hyssop. Again, as you know, I mean, you've seen me point that out to you many times. As soon as St. John points a little seemingly insignificant detail, you know, it is really important. The reason why it is important is because in Passover, what they were supposed to do is sprinkle in order to be saved from the 10th plague when God came in Egypt and killed all the firstborn, they had to do something. What did they have to do? They had to sprinkle blood of the lamb on the door, doorposts using what?
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Hissop.
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So you can see that in the entire passion, there is this recapitulation of the Mosaic order and overtaking of it, allowing Christ basically to fulfill the purpose of the Passover and turn it into a sacrament in his own life. So Adam, Noah, Moses, I mean, Abraham, David, all recapitulated those two chapters. They come to an end and now the new covenant supersedes all of them.
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And again, you can see, I have quite a few details. The last bit I'll share with you, I think it's important, is this little conversation he had with our lady and St. John. You all know right? He looked and he saw his mother and the apostle he loved. And then he told her, "Woman, behold your son." And then to St. John, "Son, behold your mother." I only got to point out a few things to you that is really just to help with this whole passage. First thing is Jesus knew he was going to
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undergo his passion. More importantly, he knew he was going to be raised from the dead. So he's going to be gone for about, let's say, three days max. If as some claim, Jesus was taking care of business, like he's on the cross and he could free his hand, he would have gone, "Mom, I forgot about mom. Oh, hey John, can you take care of mom?"
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If that's what he intended to do,
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knowing that he's going to be back in three days, don't you think he would have done that privately before?
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For a Jewish man to give his mother to someone who is not part of his family is one of the worst possible ways in which he can humiliate her.
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If he's going to do that, can't you just do it privately?
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The other important detail is this. Who does he speak to first? St. John or Our Lady?
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Who does he give home to whom? Does he give Our Lady to St. John or St. John to Our Lady?
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Think of the time when you had babysitters come home. You had a bunch of rowdy kids and the babysitter show up. Do you talk to the kids first, then the babysitter? Or do you talk to the babysitter first, then to the kids? Yeah, you talk to the strong party first, then the weak one.
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this is part of his institution of his kingdom and the crowning of his mother as queen mother over all the believers.
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I have more to say about that, but I will stop here because I don't want to take too much of your time. But that is essentially something that you can also meditate on. He gave you his mother. He gave you his mother.
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And then the last bit, take two more minutes, the church is born from his side, right? Plasma, water and blood came forth, and that's the birth of the church. It represents also the sacraments, right? Baptism and the Eucharist. All right.
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But let's think about it for a second. How was the church born? Was the church born in glory?
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Was the church born fully organized?
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With people knowing what they were supposed to do? Where were they, by the way? They weren't even there. There were absentee. They're only St. John was there. All of them had run away.
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So how did the church, the church was born with nobody in the pews other than St. John and Our Lady, and that's it?
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Again, it's not about the doing.
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That doesn't work this way. God doesn't work this way. He never works this way.
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The chaos in the church, the mess, the challenges, all of it is patterned after the passion of our Lord. All of it.
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And through it all, God's glory shines in ways we can't understand. Because it is not about the doing. It's about the being.
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You know, you would gain yourself so many more races if you were able to go and sit before the Blessed Sacrament or the exposition of the host, sit for 10 minutes and say nothing at all.
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Just sit.
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If you could.
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It's in the being that the deepest prayers are found, not in the doing.
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So the church is born with betrayal and fear. Nothing much has changed.
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Peter, the shepherd who fell. I don't have to go through all the details. The members are weak.
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That's not why the church is victorious. She's victorious because of her head, not because of her members. Again, when you walk into the church, don't look at the people around you. Look at the crucifix.
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And then in Calvary, all the covenants converge. Adam is restored. Abraham is fulfilled. David is enthroned. Moses is surpassed. The church is born. Blood and water flow from the side of Christ. It is finished, not ended. It is accomplished. Now the church can begin. So let us end here with the word of prayer. We'll take a quick break and we'll come back for questions. Please stand in the name of the father of the son of the Holy spirit. Amen. Dear Lord Jesus, we want to thank you and praise you and give you glory for every inspiration, every good thought you've given us tonight.
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We ask you, Lord, we pray that you send the Holy spirit to inspire us and help us and help us put these words that you've given us into effect. We ask this to the intercession of our lady, the queen mother as we pray. Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now in a dia of our death, amen. Saint Joseph, Saint John, all the angels and saints. Name the father of the son of the Holy spirit. Amen.
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