Thursday is the day before Friday, and the day of Our Lord's last supper before He was betrayed and abandoned Himself to His enemies. The apostles ate well and fell asleep just when Jesus began to confront the savgery that was about to engulf Him.
As such, it is a day before crucifixion which He encountered the night of His last supper, and so rightly, deserves to be commemoratedby Christians as the day He began the cylce that will save the Church and the faithful of Christ.
I have grown accustomed to Fridays being days I encounter suffering for Jesus in my daily life, more so than on other days. I had long prayed to share His passion with Him by manifesting His wounds in me, an unbelievable arrogance on my part. The Lord's love forgive a multitude of sins, but something is demanded in return. I have perceived it not only as physical suffering, but the other kinds of deprivation which manifest themselves as degrees ofun pleasant miseries, always alone. Jesus might have been on a different planet; He saw what He was accepting as loving us enough to endure to erase the suffering of encountering our sins. It is bad enough not to care enough to recall His suffering but not to care if He is near or not, when He wishes us to be filled with light and love at a time when darkness and and sorrow engulfed HIm without relief.
He always ends what He begins. He began accepting rejection and loneiness along with blowd and scourging and nails. St. Padre Pio finally encountered the end of his own participation oin the passion of Jesus, effectively offering his own personal experience of the passion alongside with the fullness of His own passion suffering so that a potent remedy might be brought to bear on the reality of our sins.
The world is teeming in billions of people, all of which must reconcile with God for our sins. We must atone for what we acknowledge, and we should always be ready to encounter the terrible deprivation that is caused by sin. My prayer to share in His passion was not ignored; to the contrary, the fact that my body is intact and not bleeding is proof enough of the way He would share it with me and I might confront my selfishness in even desiring it. One way or another the present human race will encounter catastrophes that are so terrible in their import. People still betray one another and condemne each other to catastrophic anihilation, feel in their rage that they are justified.They will confront the end of such thinking when He reveals His love after civilization is impoverished and ceases to exist.
His love is what He offers and that which He desires us to acknowledge. He is not counting so much the depth of our sins but the greatness of the greatness of His love in forgiving us and asking to little in return.
He sees the unspeakble ways human beings are assaulted by evil and the consequences of human lack of concern. He comes for everyone, for each individual man woman or child. In the end, He reckons with us and we are welcomed if we wish His welcome. The tragedy that exists is that so many do not care and are not moved for even a moment. He alons knows fully what that means, and He alone has dealt with it for each individual. He can deal with a million as easilly as with a billion. He knows how to provide for them and how to care for each individually even while we struggle to be reconciled with Him.
I live alone and He dwells with me, and I try not to trouble Him unduly in His work, to care for me in my misery. He has not asked much, mostly that I recognise my sins and selfishness and try tosurpass these things and receive His love, overcome as I am, with my sins.
Do not be put off with the evident pain of my passion. I feel your poverty and wish to fill you up with my love.
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