Without God’s grace, we all falter. What makes things “easier” for the martyrs, is the particular
grace God gives them in their crucial hour. They need never feel abandoned by God. On the other hand, our Blessed Lord did experience a type of singular “aloneness” during His Crucifixion, so that his abandonment might be more complete. We may never have words to adequately describe His abandonment (who could ever describe God the Son’s feeling of being abandoned by God the Father , as he hung dying on a Cross …) , but Christ’s own words “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”, attest to this fact.
We sometimes get “caught” , in our efforts to contemplate Christ - God .
In our perception of Him, we need to avoid inadvertently restricting his ability to experience things to those limitations of our own personal ability to experience - our own “aquired knowledge” we might say.
Although He became man, we still need to be careful not to “reduce” God . (I once heard a priest put it this way in a homily : “We humans are created in God’s image, but we seem to exhibit this tendency to try and re-create God in our own image.”)
Contemplating what Christ did for us will always draw some type of grace to our souls. Yet our efforts in this regard are more fruitful when we keep a firm grip on both truths : that Christ is both God and man. Grasping the next duality; that Christ is both Priest and Vicitm provides further insight.
If we cannot contemplate Christ the Priest, we remain with a more limited knowledge of what happened to Christ the Victim. In very simple terms: A deeper appreciation, awareness, and/or meaning of what Christ
suffered can be found in contemplating what Christ *offered *(and continues to offer at each celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass).
What Our Lord endured during his Passion - no human could ever endure. He saw every sin which would ever be committed. One wonders if this alone could ever be described in it’s totality even were we to consider all of His accounts to the saints…several excerpts for consideration :
**Divine Mercy **
ewtn.com/devotionals/mercy/novena.htm#9
“…Today bring to Me the Souls who have become Lukewarm,
and immerse them in the abyss of My mercy. These souls wound My Heart most painfully. My soul suffered the most dreadful loathing in the Garden of Olives because of lukewarm souls. They were the reason I cried out: ‘Father, take this cup away from Me, if it be Your will.’ For them, the last hope of salvation is to run to My mercy…”
Father John A. Hardon, S.J. ; With Jesus in Gethsemene
therealpresence.org/garden/gethsemane.htm
*"…And Jesus dreaded the prospect of death for sins He had not personally committed but that others deserved to expiate themselves. And most mysterious of all, because He foresaw the future, He saw that not all whom He would suffer and die for would profit from His Passion. There is nothing more sad than wasted suffering.
The bloody sweat of Jesus in the Garden of Olives reveals, in the words of the physician Luke, the intensity of Christ’s agony. Known to medical science, it is the most extreme form of suffering of which a human being is capable. The bloody sweat was induced by interior suffering, which is always the worst. Animals can have pain, but it is all in their bodies. Strictly speaking, only the human spirit can suffer because, even when the pain is bodily-caused, it is the soul that experiences the pain. But when the source of the suffering is from within, this is the acme of human endurance…" *
I personally encounter considerable difficulty in viewing anything Jesus went through for us during his Passion as being
easy or
easier.
