SPIRITUALITY
tvc.dsj.org | March 20, 2018
By Father Brendan McGuire
Pastor of Holy Spirit Parish, San Jose, and Vicar General
for Special Projects, Diocese of San Jose. Email him at [email protected].
March 25, 2018 – Imitate Christ By Love
About this time in some places around the world, people voluntarily have them-
selves scourged, crowned with thorns pressed sharply into their heads, then have real
nails nailed into their hands and real nails put into their feet in imitation of Christ’s
crucifixion. They are then taken down from the cross and typically rushed to the
hospital for attention.
When Christ said “imitate me” that is not what he meant! The physical suffering
of Christ on the cross and its sheer brutality was not emphasized in scripture. We
have to ask why did the evangelists – those who wrote the Gospels –choose to omit
the gory and bloody details of the murderous act on Christ Jesus? The sum totality
in Mark Gospel–“and they led him out and they crucified him.” That is it! No more
description. We have to ask why. There has to be a reason why the Gospel do not de-
pict the scene the way Mel Gibson did in his movie of the “Passion of Christ.” Instead
the evangelists give more description to the emotional and the spiritual suffering of
Christ in these moments.
Many of us will experience some physical suffering in our life although not to the
depth of the suffering of Christ. Most all of us will experience the loneliness of betrayal
and the emotional pain when somebody you love hurts us and pierces our heart.
Imagine how Jesus felt at the cross. His best friend, Peter, not only left him but
denied publicly that he even had anything to do with him and cursed the person who
claimed he did. Every one of his closest disciples completely abandoned him in his
lowest moment. Only the women disciples stayed with him through the cross; they
looked on from a distance. Everybody abandoned him.
This emotional and spiritual pain is something all of us will experience somewhere
in our lives; when somebody betrays us, somebody hurts us, somebody goes against
us and we feel the hurt deep down into our heart.
Jesus wants us to imitate him not in the physical way–to love one another from our
heart. We often hear “love is never having to say you’re sorry.” That couldn’t be further
from the truth. Love is finding out how much more you need to say you are sorry.
That is what Christ has asked us to imitate. He does not need for us to climb up
on a cross after him. He does not want us to be in any more physical pain than we
already have. We have enough crosses to come our way. We do not need to climb up
on another one. We need to find a way to patiently suffer the crosses that come our
way and to reach much deeper into our hearts and souls to serve other people. Love
comes from first and foremost through forgiveness. Forgiveness for the pain that has
been inflicted on us by other people; those people often closest to us have inflicted
on us. And in other Gospels we hear the Lord say, “Forgive them for they know not
what they do.” As we celebrate the Lord’s passion, we come not to imitate his passion
in a physical way; we come to imitate his self-sacrificing love for us by loving one
another even to our death.
15
Sunday Homilies
April 1, 2018 – Light of the Christ
There is a story told of a 19 th century municipal worker, who worked nights
as a lamp-lighter. In those days, lamp-lighters, would go from light-to-light-to-
light to turn on the street lights by literally turning on the gas and igniting the
flames in each of the lamps. At the end of the night, it was their job to extinguish
the gaslights.
Once this particular municipal worker was asked by a reporter, “Don’t you
find your job difficult that you have to go out in the middle of the night when it
is cold and damp?” The old man said, “No. No. There is always a light in front
of me that I must move to extinguish.” The reporter replied back, tersely saying
“What about the last light? When you put out the last light then what?” The old
man smiled and said, “Ahh, but then the dawn appears.”
At the Easter Vigil in the dark of the night, we celebrate the coming of Christ,
the Dawn of Salvation. The prophets foretold of him and each one of them was a
light along the way that lit the way for humanity through the darkness; sometimes
in the darkest of our times. Now the dawn arrived and a new day had come in
Christ Jesus. We were born into newness of light and life.
The fire of Easter Vigil symbolizes the light of Christ and each of us is given a
light. We are called to keep that light of Christ burning. We are called to witness
to the new dawn. The Easter fire and light symbolizes that the love of God in
Christ conquers the darkness. No