Soon all faithful followers of Christ will lay
prostrate before His holy passion. Soon
the Body of Christ, the Catholic Church, will be nailed to the Holy Cross with
her Savior. Soon all of us who have made
the great journey of Lent will stand in the cool mist of Easter morning to see
for ourselves the Risen Lord. Let us
contemplate the mysteries that lie before us through the beautiful teaching of
Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Father and Doctor of the Church.
Death
trampled Our Lord underfoot, but he in his turn treated death as a highroad for
his own feet. He submitted to it,
enduring it willingly, because by this means he would be able to destroy death
in spite of itself. Death had its own
way when Our Lord went out from Jerusalem
carrying his cross; but when, by a loud cry from that cross, he summoned the
dead from the underworld, death was powerless to prevent it.
Death slew him by means of the body
which he had assumed, but that same body proved to be the weapon with which he
conquered death. Concealed beneath the
cloak of his manhood, his godhead engaged death in combat; but in slaying Our
Lord, death itself was slain. It was
able to kill natural life, but was itself killed by the life that is above the
nature of man.
Death could not devour Our Lord
unless he possessed a body, neither could hell swallow him up unless he bore
our flesh; and so he came in search of a chariot in which to ride to the
underworld. This chariot was the body
which he received from the Virgin; in it he invaded death’s fortress, broke
open its strong room and scattered all its treasures.
At length he came upon Eve, the
mother of all the living. She was the
vineyard whose enclosure her own hands had enabled death to violate, so that
she could taste its fruit; thus the mother of all the living became the source
of death for every living creature. But
in her stead Mary grew up, a new vine in place of the old. Christ, the new life, dwelt within her. When death, with its customary impudence,
came foraging for her mortal fruit, it encountered its own destruction in the
hidden life which that fruit contained.
All unsuspecting, it swallowed him up, and in so doing, released life
itself and set free a multitude of men.
He who was also the carpenter’s
glorious son set up his cross above death’s all consuming jaws, and led the
human race into the dwelling place of life.
Since a tree had brought about the downfall of mankind, it was upon a
tree that mankind crossed over to the realm of life. Bitter was the branch that had once been
grafted upon that ancient tree, but sweet the young shoot that has now been
grafted in, the shoot in which we are meant to recognize the Lord whom no
creature can resist.
We give glory to you, Lord, who
raised up your cross to span the jaws of death like a bridge, by which souls
might pass from the region of the dead to the land of the living. We give glory to you who put on the body of a
single mortal man, and made it the source of immortality for every other mortal
man. You are incontestably alive. Your murderers sowed your body in the earth
as farmers sow grain, but it sprang up and yielded an abundant harvest of men
raised from the dead.
Come then, my brothers and sisters,
let us offer Our Lord the great and all-embracing sacrifice of our love,
pouring out our treasury of hymns and prayers before him who offered his cross
in sacrifice to God for the enrichment of us all.
