Easter Thursday, April 8, 2021

Luke 24:35–48

The disciples of Jesus recounted what had taken place along the way, and how they had come to recognize him in the breaking of bread. While they were still speaking about this, he stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” But they were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost. Then he said to them, “Why are you troubled? And why do questions arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see I have.” And as he said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While they were still incredulous for joy and were amazed, he asked them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of baked fish; he took it and ate it in front of them. He said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. And he said to them, “Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” 

“While they were still speaking about this, he stood in their midst.” In St. Luke’s telling of the Resurrection, the Lord Jesus first appears to the Apostles together after he had appeared to the two disciples on their way to Emmaus.  He appears as these two disciples are describing his original appearance to them, as though to confirm their account.  He says to them all, “Peace be with you”, that is, Shalom.  While this was a standard greeting among the Jews, the Lord truly means for them to be at peace as well.  His appearance here and the use of the greeting mirror Luke’s telling of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary at the very beginning of his Gospel.  The appearance is sudden and completely unexpected.  Instead of an angel, it is the Lord himself.  The greeting he gives them, Shalom, would have been the Hebrew greeting the angel gave to Mary, but which Luke rendered in the typical Greek idiom.  His greeting to them was no mere formality, but an exhortation or even an order.  And yet, “they were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost.”  Now, the disciples who were going to Emmaus had told them how “they had come to recognize him in the breaking of bread”, but this has barely prepared them for the risen Jesus.  Thus, although the women disciples had told the Apostles what they had witnessed, and Jesus had appeared already to Peter, and now the two disciples had told them of their extensive encounter with him, the Apostles react in this way, and this on top of the fact that the Lord had spoken several times to them about his rising after his crucifixion and Death. Luke assembles these facts and reactions with an eye to the major objection the Greeks had to believing in the Lord: that he rose from the dead.  Luke himself would write of St. Paul’s address introducing the Lord in Athens that all went well until he mentioned this, at which point the Athenians shook their heads, got up, and left: “And when they had heard of the resurrection of the dead, some indeed mocked” (Acts 17, 32).  These Athenians were Epicureans and Stoics, followers of two philosophical schools of thought the founders of which were men of great intellect and renown, and whose writings relied on logical argument.  By emphasizing the initial disbelief of the Lord’s own followers, Luke shows that sympathizes with the objection of the Greeks, as a Greek himself, and so persuades them to continue reading.  

The Lord treats their fear calmly, without remonstration, and proceeds to show them in a very matter-of-fact way that he has indeed risen bodily: on the one hand, he is not the ghost that these superstitious Jewish people (as the Greeks thought of them) took him for; and on the other, he represents some entirely new reality, worthy of intellectual inquiry: “He asked them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of baked fish; he took it and ate it in front of them.”  Establishing his physical presence among them by this demonstration, he reasons with them calmly: “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.”  The Greeks would have approved of this procedure and they would have felt curious to understand this phenomenon.  At the end of his opening the Scriptures to the Apostles together, the Lord tells them that the “repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”  The Greeks now hear of the reason for why people like Paul are among them, preaching.  What the Apostles believe is not exactly a philosophy, nor it is exactly a foreign cult, like that of Isis, popular at the time.  Rather, it is a reasonable belief system rooted in recent historical events and preached by those who witnessed the miracles and words of the One around whom it was centered, Jesus Christ.  Indeed, Luke records the Lord saying to his followers on this occasion, “You are witnesses of these things.”  These words remind his followers of the reality of what they had seen and heard and of their obligation to render testimony, and are meant for the Greeks to hear as well, that the ones preaching to them are authentic and authorized.  They are, indeed, “sent”.  This accounts for the presence of the Apostles in their cities as well as for their zeal, which is not motivated by any desire for personal gain but for the love of their Redeemer, whom they had known themselves.

We have the words of these witnesses in the Gospels, the Letters, and the other writings collected into what came to be called the New Testament, and we have the writings of those who knew these original witnesses, men like Luke and Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Rome.  We too are witnesses of the Lord’s teachings, his miracles, his Death and Resurrection, and we too have a responsibility and the glory of bringing the Lord before the nations of our own day, in ways they can understand.

 Easter Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Luke 24:13–35

That very day, the first day of the week, two of Jesus’ disciples were going to a village seven miles from Jerusalem called Emmaus, and they were conversing about all the things that had occurred. And it happened that while they were conversing and debating, Jesus himself drew near and walked with them, but their eyes were prevented from recognizing him. He asked them, “What are you discussing as you walk along?” They stopped, looking downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, said to him in reply, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know of the things that have taken place there in these days?” And he replied to them, “What sort of things?” They said to him, “The things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, how our chief priests and rulers both handed him over to a sentence of death and crucified him. But we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel; and besides all this, it is now the third day since this took place. Some women from our group, however, have astounded us: they were at the tomb early in the morning and did not find his Body; they came back and reported that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who announced that he was alive. Then some of those with us went to the tomb and found things just as the women had described, but him they did not see.” And he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the Scriptures. As they approached the village to which they were going, he gave the impression that he was going on farther. But they urged him, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them. And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight. Then they said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?” So they set out at once and returned to Jerusalem where they found gathered together the Eleven and those with them who were saying, “The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon!” Then the two recounted what had taken place on the way and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

The Lord appeared on several occasions to his followers after his Resurrection.  He did not appear to any who had not followed him.  He did not appear to the chief priests or to the Pharisees.  He did not go where he would not be welcome.  Each time he did appear, he did so for a particular purpose.  He appeared to Mary Magdalene to comfort her in her enormous grief over his Death, and to make her the messenger to the Apostles who were hiding from the Jews rather than gathered at his tomb as they should have been.  He later appeared to the Apostles on Easter Sunday in order to confirm the word of Mary Magdalene and also to begin preparing them to preach the Gospel.  In the Gospel reading for today’s Mass, we see the Lord appearing to two disciples who were traveling from Jerusalem after the Passover to the nearby town of Emmaus.  He spends several hours with these two men, explaining the Scriptures to them.  We might wonder why the Lord does this when, if his purpose was to reveal to them that he had risen, he had not simply appeared to them and announced himself to them if they failed to recognize him.  But these two men had already heard that he had risen.  The Lord’s purpose here was to teach them “what referred to him in all the Scriptures” so that they could teach others.  

“Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?”  Their hearts burned with their desire to understand and with their growing faith.  They heard the Lord, the Author of the Scriptures, go point by point, presenting the whole drama of salvation to them from the fall in the Garden through Noah, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, and the Prophets.  Suddenly they saw how it all foretold the Son of God coming amongst them, and his Death and Resurrection.  Now they understood and they burned to preach and teach others.  Still without their recognizing him, he “broke bread” with them.  This ancient idiom means very broadly “to eat”, particularly at a meal with others, but for Christians these words evoke the Last Supper and the Mass, and the words of the Lord: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world” (John 6, 51-52).  Making this final connection for themselves, they finally recognized him with them.  And then, having accomplished his purpose, the Lord left them.

Let us pray so that through his grace, our hearts may burn for him as we ponder the words of the Holy Scripture and worship him at Holy Mass.

 Easter Tuesday, April 6, 2021

John 20, 11–18

Mary Magdalene stayed outside the tomb weeping. And as she wept, she bent over into the tomb and saw two angels in white sitting there, one at the head and one at the feet where the Body of Jesus had been. And they said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus there, but did not know it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” She thought it was the gardener and said to him, “Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni,” which means Teacher. Jesus said to her, “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and then reported what he had told her.

The details St. John gives us of the Lord’s tomb are absolutely consistent with the archaeological evidence of the tombs of wealthy Jewish families of that time period.  Here, for instance, John speaks of the two angels “sitting there, one at the head and one at the feet where the Body of Jesus had been.”  Inside the tomb complex, niches would have lined the walls where the bodies of the deceased would be placed.  A bench carved out of the stone would have served to set the body of the deceased so that it could be properly prepared for entombment with various oils and spices, as well as the careful wrapping of the linen cloths around the body.  The fact that Mary Magdalene and the Apostles had to “bend down” to see inside the tomb is also consistent with the evidence, for the entrances to these tombs were low, certainly not the height of the average person.

“Mary Magdalene stayed outside the tomb weeping. And as she wept, she bent over into the tomb and saw two angels in white sitting there.”  Neither Peter nor John had seen angels.  They saw the burial cloths, and then left, presumably to return to the house where they had been staying in order to tell the other Apostles.  But Mary stayed, as though now she had nowhere else to go.  And indeed, she wept both for her Master’s Death and for his missing Body.

“Woman, why are you weeping?”  The angels, of course, know why she weeps.  They ask her this question not for their benefit but for ours.  “They have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they laid him.”  She does not seem surprised at their appearance, nor does she demand to know who they were.  All she can think of in her grief is her Lord.  “When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus there.”  Now, she was not in the tomb, but she was bent over looking into it.  Perhaps she heard a noise behind her, or she had an intuition of another’s presence.  At any rate, she turned around.  Possibly she glanced back first, then seeing that a man was standing several feet away she stood up and turned to face him fully.  “But did not know it was Jesus.”  Neither would the disciples going to Emmaus recognize him, nor the Apostles when they later went fishing.  This has been explained as that the Risen Lord’s Body was now glorified, but it may be too that it was so fixed in their minds that Jesus had died that even face to face with him, they did not know it was him.  This difficulty in knowing him makes the fact of his having risen even more convincing, and more astounding.

“Woman, why are you weeping?”  Jesus repeats the question the angels had posed.  Perhaps after a pause, the Lord asked a very revealing question: “Whom are you looking for?”  There was no hint in Mary’s conduct that she was “looking” for anyone.  She was a woman mourning at a place of burial, to anyone who saw her.  But this is a question that brought Mary’s response, because she in fact was looking for Someone.  “She thought it was the gardener.”  This gives us some indication of how the Lord appeared to her, that he seemed very ordinary, a working man in his working clothes.  “Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him.”  In this interesting sentence, Mary addresses the man she took for a gardener as Kyrie, that is, “Lord”.  The word could also mean “sir” or “master”, but this was how Mary customarily had addressed Jesus.  It is an odd choice of word to address a gardener.  “And I will take him.”  The Greek word here translated as “I will take” actually means “I will raise up”, or, “I will lift up.”  So, Mary saw a “gardener” who worked among the tomb complexes, and she suspected that somehow and for some unknown reason he had moved Christ’s Body; she addresses this gardener as “Lord”, and then proposes to raise up the Body of her Lord.  However, this was not a Lord of the dead but of the living, and he would one day raise up her body.

“Mary!”  This one word in this one place is perhaps the most moving moment in all the Scriptures.  A woman in the greatest distress, alone and heart-broken, and her name called by the One who was the love of her life, who was presenting himself to her as alive after all.  “She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni,’ which means Teacher.”  For Mary, Jesus was both Lord and Teacher.  Since John was evidently writing to Jewish Christians living in Judea, we might wonder why he feels the need to translate Hebrew or Aramaic words, but it is also clear from the fact that John quotes from the Septuagint as a matter of course that these Jewish Christians spoke Greek as their first language.  We ought to try to imagine Mary Magdalene at the moment she realized the truth.  She would have frozen suddenly at the sound of her name in the exact way the Lord had always pronounced it when speaking with her.  She would not have spoken at all for an instant.  She may have trembled in shock.  And then her face would be filled with powerful, new emotions.  

In the very next sentence, John relates, “Jesus said to her, ‘Stop holding on to me.’ ”  John does not tell us that Mary ran to him and threw her arms onto him.  John does not tell us how Mary held him.  Traditionally it is thought that she lay before him on the ground, embracing his feet, but it is not too much to think that in her rapture she held him in her arms without a thought to propriety.

“Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers.”  We do not know if this is all the Lord said to her.  His words certainly impress us as very matter-of-fact and void of emotion, but we should think of the Lord as telling her this with emotion in his voice, possibly even whispering.  Perhaps Mary never told anyone, not even John, what the Lord said to her on that early Sunday morning when the whole universe held its breath at the wondrous rising of its Maker.  

 Easter Monday, April 5, 2021

Matthew 28:8–15

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went away quickly from the tomb, fearful yet overjoyed, and ran to announce the news to his disciples. And behold, Jesus met them on their way and greeted them. They approached, embraced his feet, and did him homage. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.”  While they were going, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had happened. The chief priests assembled with the elders and took counsel; then they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him while we were asleep.’ And if this gets to the ears of the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” The soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has circulated among the Jews to the present day.

St. Matthew presents a contrast in these verses of his Gospel.  There are two groups of people who have two very different reactions to the same fact — that of the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead — and who are given two different sets of orders.  On the one hand, the women were “fearful yet overjoyed”; on the other, there were the soldiers, who were panicked over the appearance of the Angel and also that the tomb they had been told to guard was empty.  In ancient times, the escape of a prisoner meant the execution of the guard.  But the guards did not know what else to do but to plead their case.  The women are told to go to the Apostles, whom the Lord for the first time calls his “brothers”, and tell them to return to Galilee, where he will meet them.  These women are to bring the glad tidings of the Resurrection to them.  They thus fulfill the office of the Angel who was sent to them.  The guards, full of dread, are ordered by the Jewish leaders to lie about what they had seen and to lie about the Apostles.  The lie, in fact, would be harder to believe than what actually happened, since people would be asked to imagine the guards sleeping through an operation that would have involved several men, a number of torches, the use of levers, and a certain amount of time.  And if the guards could say the Apostles stole the Body, they must have been awake at any rate.  And if they had seen the Apostles steal the Body, why did they not stop them, or chase after them?  Surely they could have caught up with men loaded down with the Body of a dead man?  But this was the story that they told.

This sums up the positions of those who believe in the Lord Jesus and those who refuse to believe.  Those who believe are overjoyed in the promise of the Lord that they may be with him forever; those who refuse to believe are unhappy people who seek to spread their unhappiness and to prevent the believers from expressing and sharing their joy.  The believers are free in the knowledge of the truth; the unbelievers are chained to their pathetic lies and their darkness.  Let those of us who believe speak with our joy and our love to those many people who do not know Jesus, so that they may enter into his truth too.

 Easter Sunday, April 4, 2021

John 20:1–9

On the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him.” So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first; he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in. When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place. Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed. For they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead. 

“They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him.”  Mary Magdalene so loved the Lord that even the care of his dead Body was of the greatest concern for her.  First, devastated and broken-hearted by the Lord’s Death, now she finds his tomb empty.  She does not know whether the Jewish leaders have stolen it to prevent its veneration or if those who laid it in the tomb meant it to rest there on temporarily until it could be buried after the Sabbath, since he had not belonged to the family whose tomb it was.  It seems, though, that it was the first possibility that alarmed her.  The “they” who she thinks moved his Body sounds like she was referring to the “they” who killed him.  It was not enough for them that the Lord was dead: they had to hide his Body as well.

She ran directly to Simon Peter and to John to tell them.  She would have known where to find them because John was with her under the Cross on Golgotha and would have learned this from him.  The two Apostles seem to have run off for the tomb without speaking to her, although she must have told them where the Body had been laid to rest, or perhaps John knew from remaining at the Cross until it was taken down by Joseph of Arimathea.

“When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.”  It is significant that the cloths were found thus, because this proves that the Body had not been stolen or taken away.  Whether thieves or the Jewish leaders, they would not have bothered to unwrap the linen cloth from the Body before taking it, much less roll up the cloth that had covered his head and then set it aside.  It as though the one who had died had gotten up off the stone bench on which he had been laid and folded up the linen cloth and rolled up the cloth that had covered his face and head, and then discarded it on the floor in a corner.  This is why John can say that he and Peter “saw and believed”.  Previously, “they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead”, and even now they could not connect the prophesies in the Scriptures to this, but they would. 

 Holy Saturday (the Easter Vigil), April 3, 2021

Mark 16:1-7

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go and anoint him. Very early when the sun had risen, on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb. They were saying to one another, “Who will roll back the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back; it was very large. On entering the tomb they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a white robe, and they were utterly amazed. He said to them, “Do not be amazed! You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Behold the place where they laid him. But go and tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.’”

The Gospel writers all make it clear to us that the women who followed Jesus were poised to go out and buy the prescribed spices for his proper burial as soon as the Law allowed the markets to reopen after the Sabbath.  The Body of the Lord had to be buried quickly on Friday because according to the Law, the dead had to be buried before sunset of the day they died.  The Lord having died late Friday afternoon with just a few hours before sunset, when the Sabbath began, and since no one could be buried on the Sabbath, there had been no time for anointing or anything of that sort.  

“Who will roll back the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?”  The common people of the land were buried in the ground in a cemetery outside of the town where they died, with a marker for the grave.  The wealthy were laid in niches carved into solid rock in tombs which themselves were cut out of solid rock, or which were built out of stone.  Bedrock formations run up and down throughout Judea, and natural caves, some very large, offered ready-made hiding places for bandits — or holy hermits — in ancient times.  But they also provided the locations for numerous family tomb complexes.  The Body of Jesus had been laid in one of these.  There would be room enough in one for an entire family, with niches, like recessed benches, for the bodies of the deceased.  We see this in John 19, 41, which tells us that the tomb had not been used before the Body of the Lord was interred there — no family members had yet been buried there.  These tomb complexes were carved out of the rock with a single entrance, which would be covered by a rock that might well weigh several hundred pounds and be nearly impossible to move except by several men with levers.  St. Mark emphasizes this, relating that the rock “was very large”.  The question of rolling the rock back speaks to its great size and weight — purposeful, to guard against grave robbers — and also the haste of the women, since they had not thought of this before embarking on their mission.

To the amazement of the women, they found the stone rolled back, but with no sign of anyone who might have done this, or of the levers or ropes they would have used.  They may have stood outside, looking around a bit, before going inside.  Once inside, “they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a white robe”.  It is not clear whether they had brought a lamp for their proposed work in the tomb, or whether it was partially lit by the rising sun, or whether the “young man” cast off light himself, for he was an angel.  He was “sitting” on the right side of the tomb as the women went in, which is an interesting detail.  He would, in fact, be sitting on a stone bench where a body would have been set.  

“They were utterly amazed.”  The sense is “stupefied” and unable to talk.  The young man in the white robe tells them, “Do not be amazed! You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified.”  The young man does not identify himself but rather the One whom they sought.  This must have added to their amazement, since except for themselves and those who buried him, very few would have known where the Lord had been buried.  The young man deliberately added “the crucified” in speaking of Jesus, leaving no room for doubt that he had died.  “He has been raised; he is not here. Behold the place where they laid him.”  We should try to hear these words as the women would have: He has been raised?  What does this mean?  Taken away? And by whom was this done?  How can this young man speak so calmly?  Who is he?  Is he one of those who raised him?  Their heads would have rung with many questions.  Did they wonder if those who had lain him in this tomb had taken him from it, since Jesus was not of the family, and buried him elsewhere in the ground?  “Behold the place where they laid him.”  The women would have seen there the linen in which the Body had been wrapped.  But if the Body had been taken away, the linen would hardly have been left behind.  The Body would have been carried out still wrapped.

“He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.”  The women heard this in silence, their minds whirling.  Like the Virgin Mary, hearing the Archangel tell her that she, a Virgin, would conceive the Son of the Most High, they must have wondered, “How can this be?”

Pondering the events of Easter morning through reading the four accounts of these earth-shaking hours (and indeed, St. Matthew tells us of such an earthquake at that time), may we also be stupefied at the power of  God and of his only-begotten Son.  

 Good Friday, April 2, 2021

The Gospel reading today is the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to St. John.

Just a few notes on St. John’s Passion.  When we hear it or read it today, we should pay attention to the majesty with which John presents the Lord throughout his sufferings.  We see the Lord utterly in command in the Garden of Gethsemane when the thugs come to arrest him.  The Lord completely maintains his composure while his enemies fall down and seem to lose heart.  We get the impression that the Lord could only have been arrested if he had positively willed it.  He is not so much brought to the Sanhedrin as that he goes along with the crowd to it.  He stands unimpressed by the chief priests.  When he is brought before Pilate, the procurator almost treats him as an equal.  He is clearly of a mind to release the Lord and hands him over for crucifixion only under great duress.  Then, hanging on the Cross, the Lord is the one on control, giving his Mother into the care of his Apostle John.  He is careful to fulfill even the last bit of Scripture, calling out, “I thirst”.  And then, as John tells us, “He gave up his spirit.”  That is, it was not taken from him, nor did it depart solely out of the weakness of his Body, but the Lord sent it forth.  He died because he willed to die.

Such is the dignity and majesty of our Savior even in his terrible sufferings.  In like manner we are called to live our lives, ever looking beyond this world to the blessed repose in the next, alongside our Lord.