When we have met Jesus, and have been shaken to our core by His love and mercy, we cannot help but want to exclaim alongside the Samaritan woman: “Come and see!” (Jn. 4:29a). We want everyone to behold that precious Face which has gazed upon our lowliness with kindness—seen us in our wretchedness and known us fully, yet loved us—we want them to share in this “living water” which He offers freely to all. But so often, when we invite them to come with us to Mass to meet Jesus, they express reluctance because of what they have experienced of Christians. Echoing Gandhi, they often protest that, although this Jesus guy seems pretty great, it’s His followers they just can’t stand.
They aren’t wrong to point it out: in any group of Christians, there will be plenty of self-aggrandizement, self-centeredness, gossip, cliquishness, lying, snobbery, cheating, and every other form of human sin. Further, burned into our minds by newspaper headlines are the grievous sins against innocents perpetrated by the very men who claim to act in persona Christi at our altars and in our confessionals. Those who do not reject God’s existence, and accept in some ways Christ and the Bible, often stop short of accepting His Church on account of the gross failure of Christians to act anything like the Jesus they claim to follow.
I am a recent convert from a non-denominational background; this past Easter is the sixth since I was welcomed into the Catholic Church with my husband and both of our young adult children. This past Good Friday, my heart was particularly heavy with thoughts of friends and loved ones, specifically those who have blamed of the sins of Christians for their alienation from corporate worship. As I entered the nave, I noticed that the near life-sized crucifix above the altar was draped, obscured from view. At once, an idea was impressed upon me so strongly that I scribbled it down as soon as I took my place in the pew: “When we object to Christians’ flaws and failings, we are rejecting His bloody, damaged, broken Body—His countenance is not one that would draw people to it.” Later, the lector read from Isaiah:
[T]here was in him no stately bearing to make us look at him,
nor appearance that would attract us to him.
He was spurned and avoided by people,
a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity,
one of those from whom people hide their faces,
spurned, and we held him in no esteem.
Yet it was our infirmities that he bore,
our sufferings that he endured,
while we thought of him as stricken,
as one smitten by God and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our offenses,
crushed for our sins;
upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole,
by his stripes we were healed.
Isaiah 53:2b-5, NABRE
I gazed up at the drapery behind which I knew hung the pierced, bloody Christ, and looked out over the parishioners I have known for years, who, like me, are living examples of the weight of sin. Those who are wounded, and those who wound others on account of the wounds they have received, from damaged families or perverse culture or folly or sheer rebellion, all bowed their heads in unison. Every wound, a scar of sin: their own, or someone else’s. The staggering correlation between the two—the wounded, broken Body of Christ around me in the pews, obscured in the smiling faces of the worshipers, and the wounded, broken Body of Christ, obscured from my sight by mourning draperies—overwhelmed me.
In the churches where I grew up, I never saw a crucifix hung—only the naked Cross—but I was never specifically instructed against them. I assumed, when it even crossed my mind, that the corpus must just be out of fashion; something old-timey and European that didn’t match the slick modern décor. I didn’t know much about the second wave of iconoclasm which had struck such things from Protestant walls during the Reformation until more recently. I was never a Calvinist, and I’ve always been fond of crucifixes. But I’ve learned there is indeed a very specific wrath against the corpus; that afternoon, the reason why flooded in on me. Dr. Regis Martin, in his book Suffering of Love, quotes a poem by Hans Urs von Balthasar: “All suffering stares from that head. / Impossible to wrap it in a great and festive forgetting.” Though wrapped in fabric, I could still feel the weight of that suffering staring at me from the crucifix that dark Friday night.
When the Jews looked forward to the Messiah, they pictured the ruddy heir of David described in Solomon’s Song: virile, kingly, irresistible. According to Dr. John Bergsma, the prophecies in Isaiah were even believed by some to describe a second Messiah, a “suffering servant” who would come alongside the kingly Messiah—for how could they be one and the same man? The stately monarch, vital and magnetic, the lover wooing his bride Israel—and this poor fellow, the scapegoat whose “appearance was marred beyond that of a man” (Is. 52:14), someone from whom people would hide their faces: both are Christ.
When we are first drawn to Jesus, it is usually because of His goodness, His promises of healing, love, and peace. The Lover of our souls woos us, pursues us; His love letters are inscribed in every sunset and flower. He offers us meaning, purpose, and belonging; forgiveness, restoration, and hope. We feel the weight of our sin, and His knightly offer to bear it away for us and carry us off to His kingdom makes princesses out of paupers; we are flattered by His affection and devotion, humbled by our undeserving. It is not strange that we would flinch at reminders of His suffering, because after we have begun to return His love, we wince that it was our sin that put Him on that hideous Cross. But the discomfort goes so much deeper than that.
It is not only our separated brethren who are uncomfortable with the corpus; the Jews could not abide the idea of God as a man at all, let alone one crucified. Pope St. John Paul II describes it thus:
“Is it any wonder that even those who believe in one God, of whom Abraham was a witness, find it difficult to have faith in a crucified God? They hold that God can only be powerful and grandiose, absolutely transcendent and beautiful in His power, holy and inaccessible to man. God can only be this! He cannot be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He cannot be Love that gives of Himself and that permits that He be seen, that He be heard, that He be imitated as a man, that He be bound, that He be beaten and crucified. This cannot be God!”
Crossing the Threshold of Hope
We anticipate a conquering king, not a miserable wretch, to lead us out of the darkness in which we cower. This Scandalum Crucis, he goes on to say, is a stumbling block until we recognize it for what it is. “God is not someone who remains only outside the world, content to be in Himself all-knowing and omnipotent. … His omnipotence was manifested in the omnipotence of humiliation on the Cross. … the crucified Christ is proof of God’s solidarity with man in his suffering. God places Himself on the side of man.”
In Christ, the Word of God, God reveals God to man, but God also reveals man to himself. And one of the truths Christ reveals is our alienation from God. Cardinal von Balthasar puts it this way:
“…the whole tragedy of the alienation that exists between God and us, the tragedy of sin and the sinner’s inability to return to God by his own power, is undergirded by the Father’s sending of his Son to be “with” us, even to the extent of being “with” us in our separation from God. Here the Apostle makes liberal use of the vital word with: we suffer with Christ, we are crucified with him, we die with him, to be raised with him and taken up into heaven with him. Thus Christian ethics means rejoicing with those who rejoice, weeping with those who weep, simply “being with” all those with whom God is. The fact that we did not want to be with the Son but crucified him is taken by our redeeming God and used in a deeper context, namely, that the Son took upon himself our refusal to be with him; he was “with” us in this very form.”
“Trinity”, You Crown the Year
No man has ever known the depths of alienation Jesus knew on the Cross, when He was separated from His Father, for no man has ever known the radical unity of the inner life of the Trinity. Balthasar, in Theology of History, asserts that “the alienation of Christ on the Cross is the supreme revelation of love, whereas the alienation of the sinful Christian is what first unveils the mystery of guilt; but it is also a unity, since it is in suffering that the Redeemer wraps the royal mantle of his love about his Body, his Bride, and draws her alienation into his own.” He identifies with His people; He is not separate from them; their suffering is His suffering so that His victory might be their victory.
There is nothing attractive about the disfigured body—stabbed, bruised, practically flayed—which hangs on that Cross. So also there is nothing attractive about a group of sin-stained people who form His visible Body here on earth. Backbiting and bitter Susan in the choir loft, hot-tempered James who browbeats his wife in the parking lot: neither are mere mortals, says C.S. Lewis, but are instead immortal creatures whose glory is “so heavy [a load] that only humility can carry it”. When the sun has darkened, the stars all burned themselves out, the planet spun itself into dust, Susan and James will still exist, whether winsome or wicked. “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself,” continues Lewis, “your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your sense. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.” Balthasar presses this even further, challenging that the further and more “other” a person is to us, the more we find Christ in them; it is the stranger that is our neighbor.
Over a lifetime of lay service to the church, I have witnessed the faith of too many believers shipwrecked on the rocks of suffering or scandal. Dr. Martin recounts the story from Elie Wiesel’s Night, where a young boy is hung as an example by the Nazis, and all are forced to watch as the “sad-eyed angel” suffers for thirty minutes until he finally expires. When “the grisly business is at last at an end … both God and the child at the end of the rope are dead. Indeed, their fates literally fit into the same noose.” And so God did die. Christ chose to descend into the deepest levels of human suffering and desolation, into God-forsakenness: He chooses “‘take upon himself’ the sin of the world… to remain in agony until the end of the world, in order that from the vantage of his own singular and unrepeatable anguish and abandonment—his willed descent into the wordless, lifeless dark of Sheol—every single experience of human extremity and loss might then derive its deepest, most ultimate and salvific meaning.”
Each of us who chooses to follow Him must follow Him into this mission. If we remain in Him and He in us, we are plunged into it whether we know it or not. Every wound on each of us is a mark on the disfigured corpus, stretched in anguish on the rough-hewn wood. Sin made each stripe: on Him, and on us. It is terrible to behold. But there is hope: by His stripes, we are healed. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.” (1 Pt 2:24, NRSVCE) For Wiesel, the darkness of Holy Saturday was never broken by the sunrise of Easter morning. The difference—the only difference—between the bleeding wounds of those inside the Church, and those outside it, is that whatsoever wounds are united to, or subsumed into, Christ’s wounds, become a source of healing rather than of more destruction. United to Christ’s wounds, our wounds are empowered to destroy death instead of life—and not only for us, but for the whole world. Louis Dupre who says that Christ is crucified “in me, not in Jerusalem. … [Grace] is as personal as my suffering. Indeed, it is my suffering. For in this world there can be no grace but through redemptive suffering, through Jesus’ death—in me.”
In The God Question and Modern Man, Balthasar’s essay on the “Sacrament of the Brother” describes how we must find Christ in our brother. At the final judgment, Christ is clear that when we serve “the least of these” we are serving Him. But we really do serve our brother as well: “For charity is not asked to discover Christ “behind” the brother, “representing” him in a kind of hide and seek game, still less to love Christ “in place of” the brother… It suffices for him to love the brother together with Christ; then he will love him with a love that ascends towards the Father, seeing, too, through the hidden and disfigured face of the brother the original of all this disfigurement—for love.” We mistakenly anticipate a victorious Church full of living saints whose feet barely touch the ground and for whom life is a pleasure-palace; we would rather see tangible evidence of the rewards for the hard work we see before us in the Christian life. We don’t want a suffering Church any more than the Jews wanted a suffering Messiah. If we are His Body, our wounds become His wounds, and His wounds become ours. When we refuse His wounded Body, we refuse Him.
Photo by Henrique Jacob on Unsplash
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