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Continuation of Commentaries
on the Maxims on Love of St. John of the Cross
by Fr. Bruno Cocuzzi, ocd
Maxim 23
- He who seeks not the cross
of Christ seeks not the glory of Christ.
This maxim gives us the opportunity to reflect upon what
is meant by the glory of Christ, and so give us a better understanding
and appreciation of the cross of Christ, because it seems to me that St. John+
is suggesting that the cross of Jesus constitutes His glory. That is, His Cross and His glory are one
and the same thing. Also, of
course, since the appearance of His Glory in the Resurrection followed Jesus
experience of the Passion and Cross, we can also say that the way to eventually
share His Glory is first to share His Cross.
We
can ask the question: What is the
true glory of Christ? Perhaps we
can answer that by a process of elimination.
Right away we can say that the radiant splendor that
surrounds and permeates the Risen Jesus' Body, and the rays of light that issue
from His wounds, especially the wound of His Chest and on His Heart is not the
"glory" that is His. That is only
symbolic of His true glory. The eye
is always the apt symbol of the intellect or understanding so that just as
brilliant light and radiant splendor overwhelm the eyes of the body and dazzle
our faculty of vision, so also knowledge of the true glory of Christ is what
overwhelms and dazzles the faculty of our understanding.
Furthermore, just as white light can be broken up into
its constituent colors, so also the glory of Christ can be said to be composed
of separate constituents. Rather,
there are different glories that combine to create the overall Glory that is
His.
We
also have to remember that the glory which is His was manifested in His
humanity, a humanity which is identical to ours in all things except sin. It is thru the different ways in which
His Humanity was the instrument through which the Infinite Love and Mercy and
Wisdom and Power of God, of the Divinity was manifested that constitute the
glory of Jesus.
The
first way in which Jesus in His humanity reveals the Love which is the Life of
the Trinity is through His obedience. Because He has a human will that is
distinct from the Divine Will, while on earth He was able to love in the
most essential and fundamental way:
by uniting His human will to His Father's Will. As we have had occasion to say before,
the faculty of willing (or choosing) is also the faculty of loving. When we choose what God prefers for us,
we unite our wills to His and we are united to Him in
Love.
When the will of God is identical to the natural and
spontaneous preferences that arise in our human wills, then it is so easy to
unite our wills to God's will. But
this does not require a high degree of love, perhaps it requires no love at al,
that is, no love of God, because even without knowing that it is also God's will
for us, we would be able to make or carry out those natural choices and do the
things to which our wills are attracted.
It is only when the will of God for us is something that our humanity
experiences as painful or repellent, so that our natural, spontaneous
preferences, our human will wants to avoid or escape, that a great deal of love
for God is required to enable us to join our wills to His and be united to Him
in Love. Thus, to choose and to
embrace with our human wills the upper limit of the suffering we are capable of
enduring with our humanity for the good of another, is to love to the
upper limit of our capacity. When
God Himself wills that we undergo that degree of suffering, our choosing to
unite our wills to His in accepting it, we are loving God to the upper limit of
our capacity. To do that, of
course, is to sacrifice our entire humanity, through our free choices, to God
and to His Will. And that is why
there is never any authentic love, that is, any great and remarkable degree of
love, that does not entail sacrifice and suffering.
Here we see then, why the Cross is the glory of
Christ. It doesn't seem possible
that anyone could suffer more, and in so many ways as Jesus, such that there
could be nothing more repellent and more painful to all aspects of human nature
than what Jesus endured in His Passion and Crucifixion. He suffered terribly in mind and body
and spirit. There was the suffering
in the Garden of Gethsemane that was spiritual and emotional and caused Him to
sweat blood. there was the betrayal
by Judas, the denial by Peter, the running away of all the disciples except
John. There was the excruciating
suffering of the physical nature in the scourging and the crowning of thorns,
the carrying of the Cross, the falls, the stripping of His garments which
adhered to His wounds, the nailing to the Cross, the hanging on the Cross, the
fever, the thirst, the sense of abandonment by His Father, and I forgot to
mention, the hatred and injustice at the hands of the Sanhedrin and the
cowardice and injustice of Pilate.
For our sake, Jesus accepted all that. He chose to suffer it out of obedience
to His Father's will. Thus, no
humanity could possibly have loved more than Jesus did in His humanity by thus
uniting Himself in Love with the Father for our welfare. Could Jesus possibly have thought that
His Father was being cruel and unreasonable in requiring Him to suffer so
much? I don't think so! Jesus, being divine, knew that he in His
humanity was being offered an opportunity to attain the highest, most
mind-boggling and awe-inspiring degree of love possible to Him. And He was deeply and profoundly happy
and grateful for that opportunity.
As He Himself said before-hand,
"I have a Baptism to be baptized with, and how straitened (anxious and
eager) I am to see it accomplished."
So that was one component of the glory of Christ that was attained in and
through His Passion and Cross.
That certainly was the chief component of Jesus' glory.
But a second component also required an extraordinary degree of love.
And that was the love that he manifested in the hands of His persecutors
and executioners.
In
the sermon on the Mount, Jesus told us that we are to love our enemies. He said: "... do good to those who hate
you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who maltreat you. When someone slaps you on one cheek,
turn and give him the other..." He
says again: "Love your enemy and do
good.. you will rightly be called
children of the Most High, since He Himself is good to the ungrateful and
the wicked." Since God Himself is Infinite, subsistent Love, the fact that He
continues to be good to those who offend Him and reject Him and blaspheme Him by
accusing Him of being cruel and unloving, means that only those whose own
participation in His infinite love reaches the upper limit of human possibility
welcome the opportunity to do good to those who hurt them and even seek to
destroy them. It is precisely by
being compassionate by pardoning and forgiving of such souls that they can
satisfy and find an outlet for the intense love that burns in their hearts for
all souls, made in the image and likeness of God. Because it is those souls that hate and
persecute that have defiled the image of God in themselves the most, they also
offer the greatest scope for loving, for merciful love. Jesus not only had this love for the
ones who hated Him and caused His suffering and most cruel death, He also
manifested it toward all of us sinners who have ever existed and now exist or
will exist in the future, because it is we who by our sins had inflicted His
great suffering upon Him. Thus,
what love He showed to the Chief Priests, the elders and Scribes and Pharisees
and to His executioners He showed also to us. He was meek as a lamb in their midst and
He prayed for them. Having first
forgiven them Himself, He asked His Heavenly Father to forgive them and all of
us. To return the greatest possible
good for the greatest possible evil is the second component of the love that is
the glory of Jesus, and again, it was manifested in and through the context of
His cruel Passion and Crucifixion and death on the Cross.
One
final component of the dazzling degree of self-sacrificing love that I can think
of that Jesus manifested and which is His glory was His paying the price of our
redemption, or in other words, in purchasing for us our freedom from the tyranny
of and slavery to evil, sin and death.
As you know, the price He had to pay had to be infinite, because infinite
was the damage done to God's Justice and Majesty by our sins. The infinite debt that lay so heavily
upon us all was created not only by the sin of Adam & Eve, but also by all
the sins committed by us human beings since then and will still be committed
until the end of time. Jesus, took
upon Himself, (and Mary His Mother shared in this in a subordinate way) the
punishment - an eternal one - that would satisfy the demands of Divine Justice
and appease the outraged Infinite Majesty of God.
Since it is a necessary and indispensable aspect of love
both to desire the good and
then enrichment of the beloved, and to do what is required to make that
desire effective, whenever one gives his/her entire substance and entire
possessions to accomplish it, then love has reached the upper limit of
possibility. But that is precisely
the degree of love Jesus nourished for us in His Heart and caused Him to give
His entire being, and His only and most previous possession, His Mother, to
satisfy the debt of eternal punishment owed by every human being, Himself and
His Mother excepted, who was, is, or will be born into this world. Again, it was by His Cross, the
word that sums up all His cruel sufferings. The agony in the Garden, the scourging,
crowning with thorns, and crucifixion, and death on the
Cross.
Perhaps the preceding is not the final
component of the Glory of Jesus.
Surely another would be the love He manifested toward us in giving us His
Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist.
True love always is associated with life. Divine Love is identical with Divine
Life. Authentic human love is
always open to and fruitful in new life.
Then authentic human love always diligently and generously nourishes and
enriches and brings to perfection the new living beings it has brought into the
world.
The
Love of Jesus the God-Man was so exalted and so perfect that it regenerated us
to divine life or children of God by adoption. This happened when the side of Jesus was
pierced by the soldier's lance while His Body hung in death upon the Cross. that lance reached and opened His Heart,
out of which was born the Church, of which all of us are children and
members. As we said, human love not
only brings forth new human life, it nourishes and enriches it and brings it to
full, mature perfection before launching it out to continue the cycle of loving
and giving life. We see that Jesus'
dazzling and awe-inspiring love of us could not be satisfied with merely
bringing us to birth as children of God by adoption. It could only be satisfied by nourishing
and enriching and causing us to grow to mature sanctity. Jesus does this, not only out of His
possessions, as human parents do by purchasing for us our food and all those
things our human life requires, Jesus gave us His very self, His complete
self. Body, Blood, Soul and
Divinity in the Holy Eucharist. If
it is true (and it is) that greater love no mere man has than to lay down his
life for a friend, it is true also that no greater love the God-Man Jesus has,
than in not only laying down His life for us sinners, while we were still His
enemies, but also in giving us of His very substance to maintain us in Divine
life and perfect that Divine Life in us.
Now
that we have reflected upon and, hopefully, correctly identified the various
components of the Love of Jesus for His Father and for us that in His glory,
we have to ask: How do I go about
seeking the Cross of Christ that is the same as, or at least leads to, the
glory of Christ.
I
think we can understand this in two ways:
1st - how do I seek the Cross of Christ for the purpose of
experiencing the infinite, personal love that Jesus has for me as a unique
individual. 2nd - how do I
seek the Cross of Christ so as to seek to participate in the love of
Christ that is his glory.
To answer the 1st
question. Since the Cross is
a sign of contradiction, I am convinced we have to do so by means that contradict
our natural inclinations and preferences. (When I see how much it costs me, doing
little things, I get a handle on how infinitely more it cost Jesus.)
Ordinarily, we naturally and spontaneously experience a
love, an affection for, and an attraction to, those things we experience as
good. Thus it would seem
that we would attract the love of Jesus upon ourselves by being very good, by
holy deeds. But that is just the
opposite of what is true. Jesus is
Saviour. He is what His name means. Jesus, as Saviour and as Mercy is
attracted to and reaches out toward misery. His love finds its most perfect scope in
relieving misery, in forgiving sins.
We seek and find His love and draw it upon ourselves by acknowledging our
sinfulness and misery and need to forgiveness. Of course, we don't deliberately commit
grievous sins in order to draw His love upon us, (which is His glory), we
just never forget how terribly we offended Him in the past, how desperately we
need Him to preserve us from offending Him again, so great is our weakness and
helplessness. That attitude
is a cross for us because we are so proud by our sinful nature that we
loath and resist having to face up to our abject nothingness and incapacity to
perform any good action of ourselves.
In this we have the teaching and example of St. Therese herself, a Doctor
of the Church.
To
answer the 2nd question. How do we
seek the Cross of Christ so as to share in the love that is the glory of
Christ? By doing as Jesus did. Again, it is through contradiction as
rather, many contradictions that we find the Cross that leads to sharing in
Jesus' love. We seek the
contradiction that is obedience.
We seek every opportunity to crucify self-will by embracing the will of
God thru obedience to lawful superiors.
We
seek the contradictions that returning good for evil represents. Naturally by fallen nature, we try to
escape and avoid, even by doing violence to, anything or anyone that causes us
to suffer in body, mind or spirit.
By being good to those who hurt us, especially if they do so out of spite
or hate, we have achieved a love that is like the love that is Jesus'
glory.
And
the same goes for our natural tendency to identify justice with everyone receiving
their due. Especially we think
that every criminal must be punished to repair for the damage done by his
crime. When we can contradict
this natural tendency of ours by accepting to suffer ourselves to pay the
debts of sinners to God, we indeed attain the love that is a component of
the love that is the glory of Jesus.
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