The cross is the centerpiece of the Paschal Mystery
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Father Perry D. Leiker, pastor.
By Father Perry D. Leiker, pastor
“You can love a person dear to you with human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.” — Leo Tolstoy, “War and Peace.”
“Paschal Mystery” is today’s word of God in two words. It is expressed in several different ways.
Jeremiah the prophet declares: “You duped me, O Lord; you triumphed; all the day I am an object of laughter; … has brought me derision and reproach; I will speak his name no more, but then it becomes like fire burning in my bones.”
The Responsorial Psalm eloquently describes the yearning of the spirit for God and the emptiness without him: “My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God; my soul thirsts like the earth, parched, lifeless and without water.”
St. Paul’s letter to the Romans pointedly challenges: “Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.”
Then Jesus foretells his journey and the journey of every disciple: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me; whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
The Paschal Mystery involves dying, emptying, losing, and finding.
The Paschal Mystery involves struggling, enduring, thirsting, longing, and waiting.
The Paschal Mystery involves being rejected, and the cross.
All of this is really about discovering more how to love, how to hope, how to give, how to live.
It would be foolish to think we can make it through this life without the cross.
There is physical and emotional suffering, failure, the dashing of our hopes and dreams, betrayal and rejection, misunderstanding, and loss of esteem.
And, in the end, death itself.
Are these the crosses we all must bear? Or is the cross bearing these struggles like Jesus did: without losing faith or hope in God, looking into the face of hatred and injustice with love and forgiveness, always discovering more within his spirit which could help him to “find himself by losing himself”?
Jesus models for us a limitless ability to trust, love and find life — even in dying.
“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me; whoever loses his life for my sake will find it,” Jesus said.
Are we ready to follow and to live the life of the disciple? Are we ready to embrace the Paschal Mystery? Are we ready?
Father Perry D. Leiker is the 14th pastor of St. Bernard Catholic Church. Reach him at (323) 255-6142. Email Father Perry at perry.leiker@gmail.com. Follow Father Perry on Twitter: @MrDeano76.
