Holy Week Two - CONDEMNATION - 2020

Satan has come to realize that he is not going to be able to deceive Jesus. So he now adopts a new strategy. Rather than trying to destroy Jesus directly, he now turns his focus on the people who are listening to Jesus and are trying to embrace a life of holiness so that they may be worthy to join the Father in His glory. Satan already has GAHENNA teaming with victims accumulated since the fall of Adam. Just keep deceiving and corrupting people and the mission of Jesus (as Satan understands it) will be completely made fruitless and he will have to return to his Father empty-handed. But now - what is this! "Neither do I condemn you. Go, your sins are forgiven."  From the very bowels of Gehenna a cry thunders forth with all the vehemence of a volcano. "NO, NO, NO!" Satan screams out with fire flowing from his mouth. "This is preposterous, sin is sin, quilt is guilt. All the rules of justice demand it. Justice demands the condemnation of the guilty. That is how I was treated, and so should she, should all of them. How dare He!" Satan has got it right. The guilty must pay for their crimes. Simply letting them go will only motivate them be smarter the next times and not to get caught. They have but one hope - Mercy. No one can can save themselves, they must be saved by another. Consider this illustration taken from the pandemic we are currently experiencing. A person is warned of the danger of this death-dealing virus. But they ignore the warnings, do not change their ways and eventuality contract the virus. At first they stay isolated as instructed but with frequent lapses. Their condition worsens and they have no choice they are moved to the hospital where their condition becomes more grave. They are put on a ventilator, a machine to live for them, but this too fails and they die. Unless someone comes along who can raise the dead back to life dead they will remain. This is similar to how sin works in the life of a soul. But Jesus can raise the dead back to life. In His public ministry He demonstrates this most dramatically, i.e the raising of Lazarus. But something more must happen. And to the sinful woman Jesus says, "... and do not sin again". But how will this be possible? These souls now forgiven were no match for Satan before, will he not just infect them again with sin? Jesus' plan for these souls to be saved by Mercy is unimaginably more profound.  Jesus does not send the forgiven back alone to be victims of Satan all over again, He goes with them. Jesus enters the soul of the one he forgives and lives within them and they within Him.  I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ LIVES IN ME. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Galatians 2:20  So when Satan returns to seduce the forgiven one it is Jesus he finds himself up against. The old person is gone and a totally new person has taken its place. In the Office of Readings for Tuesday of Holy Week, quoting St. Basil we read "First of all we must make a complete break with our former way of life, and our Lord himself said that this cannot be done unless a man is born again. In other words, we have to begin a new life, and we cannot do so until our previous life has been brought to an end." I know a person who upon returning from making the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius was greeted by his friends with: "What happened to you, we do not recognize you, you have changed."  When and how this "New Life in the Spirit" comes about may vary, perhaps in a dramatic hour of encounter with Christ, or over a period time while in pursuit of a deeper spiritual life. What matters is that it happens.

.

Second Reading, Tuesday of Holy Week From the book On the Holy Spirit by Saint Basil, bishop By one death and resurrection the world was saved. When mankind was estranged from him by disobedience, God our Savior made a plan for raising us from our fall and restoring us to friendship with himself. According to this plan Christ came in the flesh, he showed us the gospel way of life, he suffered, died on the cross, was buried and rose from the dead. He did this so that we could be saved by imitation of him, and recover our original status as sons of God by adoption. To attain holiness, then, we must not only pattern our lives on Christ’s by being gentle, humble and patient, we must also imitate him in his death. Taking Christ for his model, Paul said that he wanted to become like him in his death in the hope that he too would be raised from death to life. We imitate Christ’s death by being buried with him in baptism. If we ask what this kind of burial means and what benefit we may hope to derive from it, it means first of all making a complete break with our former way of life, and our Lord himself said that this cannot be done unless a man is born again. In other words, we have to begin a new life, and we cannot do so until our previous life has been brought to an end.  When runners reach the turning point on a racecourse, they have to pause briefly before they can go back in the opposite direction. So also when we wish to reverse the direction of our lives there must be a pause, or a death, to mark the end of one life and the beginning of another. Our descent into hell takes place when we imitate the burial of Christ by our baptism. The bodies of the baptized are in a sense buried in the water as a symbol of their renunciation of the sins of their unregenerate nature. As the Apostle says: The circumcision you have undergone is not an operation performed by human hands, but the complete stripping away of your unregenerate nature.  This is the circumcision that Christ gave us, and it is accomplished by our burial with him in baptism. Baptism cleanses the soul from the pollution of worldly thoughts and inclinations: You will wash me, says the psalmist, and I shall be whiter than snow. We receive this saving baptism only once because there was only one death and one resurrection for the salvation of the world, and baptism is its symbol.

.