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+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
“Surely he has borne our grief and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4)
During the middle years of my first rectorship at The Church of the Ascension, Staten Island, New York, in the early 1980’s, I was part of and witnessed a powerful spiritual phenomenon. It centered around a lovely Italian woman named Rosemary Colca. Rosemary was a very beautiful woman whose faith was strong and whose spirituality was deep. She had lost her first husband to suicide. Extreme depression led him to shoot himself. I solemnized the marriage of Rosemary and her second husband, Carmine, who were both pillars at Ascension.
One Sunday after Mass, Rosemary told me about her eight year old niece who had a rare form of cancer, and who was in severe pain from it. Rosemary asked me for my prayers for her niece’s healing, and then asked if I would lay my hands on her head and pray that God would take the pain away or a large portion of it from her niece and place it upon Rosemary. I never had anyone make such a request. I hesitated, and asked Rosemary if she truly desired this. She said, “Yes, Father;” and knelt down at the communion rail and bowed her head. Before I laid my hands on her, I did think of St. Paul’s statement in his letter to the Colossians, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col 1:24) ― a statement from St. Paul that I didn’t really understand, but it seemed to speak in a way to what was being requested. When I laid my hands on Rosemary’s head, I prayed in the Name of Jesus that her love and compassion would be honored by our Lord, and her prayer request would be granted. Suddenly, Rosemary fell back from the communion rail on her side, and lay there writhing in pain, groaning, and with a contorted face. Her condition lasted for at least five minutes, and then she lay there very peacefully. After another five minutes or so, she stood up and smiled.
Her niece did die a few weeks later, but Rosemary learned from her niece’s parents that on the Sunday when Rosemary asked to be a substitute for and a recipient of her niece’s pain, the little girl’s pain was absent and it lessened dramatically in her final days.
I share this story with you today because Jesus willingly does this for us. He invites us, “Come into me all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you,” and we find refreshment as He assumes our pains and sorrows. But there is something more that He did specifically on this day. He took upon Himself our sins and the sins of the whole world ― past, present, and future for man’s atonement—man’s at-one-ment with God. In Judaism, on the day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) we read in the Book of Leviticus, “…Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins; and he shall put them upon the head of the goat, and send him away into the wilderness…
The goat shall bear all their iniquities upon him to a solitary land; and he shall let the goat go in the wilderness” (16:21-22).
In Christ, He is both priest and victim of the New Covenant sealed by his shed blood. God the Father sent His Son who is Jesus Christ to be the remedy for our condition of alienation from God due to sin. The time had come for a new and fresh beginning for God’s relationship to man, and man’s relationship to God. It is said so well in that great hymn, “Praise to the Holiest in the height,” which was our final hymn for the Fifth Sunday in Lent: “O loving wisdom of our God! When all was sin and shame, a second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came”. The hymn writer based this stanza on what St. Paul wrote in I Corinthians: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ” (15:22-23).
St. Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians says this about our Lord Jesus Christ, “For our sake he [God the Father] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (5:21). St. Peter in his first epistle wrote, “He committed no sin; no guile was found on his lips” (2:22). St. John, the beloved Apostle, wrote in his first letter, “you know that he appeared to take away sins, and in him there is no sin” (3:5). St. Paul writes in Galatians, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us… (3:13).
Jesus Himself at the Institution of the Eucharist in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, stated in reference to the drinking of His Blood, “Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (26:27-28). So we see that Jesus was without sin and came to assume sin, to be the sin-bearer, the sacrificial and substitutionary offering for our sins to satisfy God the Father’s requirement that a penalty for sin was owed Him, that divine justice be satisfied.
The great Passiontide Hymn “There is a green hill far away” (which we sing today) states it accurately, “He died that we might be forgiven, He died to make us good, that we might go at last to heaven, saved by his precious blood”.
“There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin. He only could unlock the gate of heaven, and let us in”. We see more clearly that the prophet Isaiah was indeed a mouthpiece of God when 800 years before the Incarnation prophesied the work of Jesus for us. “… he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed… it was the will of the Lord to bruise him; to have put him to grief, when he makes himself an offering for sin… he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors” (Isaiah 53:5,10,12).
I think it would be wise, and sobering, and is necessary for all of us to go painfully deeper into what Jesus did this day, and consider what Jesus bore this day ― for the past, the present He lived in, and for the future in which we now live ― to realize what wounds, bruises, chastisements, and stripes we individually afflicted upon Him, and which He bore for us before God the Father.
Going back to Rosemary, she writhed in pain with her niece’s sickness. Jesus writhed in pain because of our sin and disobedience. Let us for a moment be very singularly and personally focused to realize what the weight of the sin is (those things we have done and those things we have left undone, those sins of which the burden is intolerable for us) which He bears upon and within His sacred sinless Body. Think upon that which has hurt Him and hurt others which hurt Him in relation to ourselves and to so many others. Think of casual devotion, double-mindedness, and the lack of faith, trust, obedience, and generous giving to Him who put us back with God, who was justifiably very angry.
I say all of this not to put a guilt trip on you, but rather to take you on a reality trip.
He (Christ Jesus) has done it all. He suffered and died for us. He endured loneliness and abandonment to a height and to a degree that we will never know.
Our offering is to be our hearts, hearts of thankfulness and praise; but today hearts that are stricken with grief for what He bore because of you and me, and for you and me.
+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
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