Christ opened his arms
On Good Friday, Love was crucified.
It did not resist, and It pleaded with the Father to forgive those who did not know what they were doing.
In his agony, Christ did not unleash fiery condemnations of the world or on the evil that did this to him. He accepted all, because that is what Love is - the fullness of all things, the union of all things. In Love, nothing is rejected or spurned - rather, Love finds a way to bring all things together.
The cruciform image of our Lord is the icon of Love. His arms nailed to the cross were, at the same time, Christ’s open invitation to the world. His arms opened wide to accept all peoples, all life, all of the cosmos. No one or no thing is rejected, but now we wait for the consummation of his embrace, when all things in heaven and on earth will be “summed up” in Love (Eph 1:10), in that final horizon of history which all of us groan for.
Woe to us when we reject and spurn in the name of Christ, and make a mockery of Love crucified.
Participating in Love
All of us are called to enter into the Love of Christ, into his radical openness to all things, even to the point of death. Not physical death, though through history some are called to that sacrifice. Rather the death of our “self” - that part of us which clings and controls, and therefore shuts us off to the radical openness that Love demands. That part of us that resists the flow of what is, and restricts the Spirit which blows where it wills and no one knows where it has come from or where it is going.
To let go of this false self, or ego, is painful. It is to surrender all our projects, our attachments, our compulsions, and our human will. In such a way, we let God or Being or Life have its way with us. This is not to say that we cease fighting injustice, but the injustice we fight is in no way about “us”, it is not about making the false self feel better. It is rather an expression of our natural capacity for good action once we surrender to Love.
It is the mystery of the cross, where Christ’s apparent defeat was in fact his victory over death and the powers of darkness.
This is the ultimate meaning of the cross, of surrender, and of the death of self. The apparent defeat and desolation is transformed into the resurrection. The heavy burdens of our material existence and “body of death” (Romans 7:24) are suddenly and unexpectedly lifted. Like Christ in his resurrection body, we now seem only lightly tied to earth, or perhaps more accurately, the cosmos for us is transformed into a friendlier sphere.
Or as St Ephrem the Syrian said:
From their abodes
The children of light descend,
They rejoice in the midst of the world,
Where they had been persecuted;
St Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise
The horror of the cross is not the end, and the pain of our dying to self is but the birth of a new life.
A new life where, participating in Love, we are open to all people, all life, all being. A new life where nothing is rejected, but all is embraced. A foretaste of the consummation of all things in Christ, who in the end will be all in all.
Happy Easter to you all.