Truth? We can't handle the truth.

Our emblem - the Cross, is a horror.

Just look at it.

Drawing by St John of the Cross

A gentle, loving, absolutely good and innocent man painfully breathing his last after being tortured. He is naked, bloody flesh torn to shreds by sharp metal scourges and thorns, bruised from kicks and punches, sickly pale with the pallor of death, breath rattling in his collapsing chest, face contorted in immeasurable pain from the nails hammered into his hands and feet upon which the whole weight of his body is hanging. He is shivering from pain and shock. He is utterly lonely, abandoned and bereft in his pain.

Horrible.

What we see here is the reality of sin. Our sin. This is what sin looks like.

Terrible.

We sin, oh, so often, oh, so blithely, not grasping that this horrible sight, this agonising death of the only truly innocent human being who ever lived among us, is the terrible degree of damage our selfishness and greed do to us, to ourselves, to our loved ones, the world.

This is the shocking insult we offer to the creator of the world by our dreadful abuse of the holy freedom given to us from the first moment of our existence, which only begins at all because, from all eternity he sees us and loves us and so bring us into being simply so that we can love and be loved.

And now look at the work of our hands, so lovingly made by our loving Father. Look at what we are doing to his beloved Son.

Why the Cross?

To show us what sin is like. To show us its effects. Its true nature. Sin is suffering and death.

Only Divine love and Power can overcome sin, and did, when Jesus was raised from death on the third day. The only human person ever to return from death, because He was then and remains and always will be the divine Son who lived, died, was buried and returned glorified in absolute victory over sin and death.

Oh, we are so proud, so vain, so stupid, so unwilling to face the truth and ourselves, that it takes the Cross to bring us to our senses.

Truth? That's Truth - the Cross. The Death and Resurrection of the Son of God.

In the midst of our self-occupied lives, in the midst of the busy-ness of the world we are remaking in our own image, we are deaf to the truth of God's almighty love, and deaf to the truth of what the Divine Love has been prepared to do in His incredible condescension and kindness to his beloved creatures. The Absolute, the ground of all that exists, became one of them - became human, became one of us, so that we might learn from Him directly, in language we can understand, what Divine Love is. It is the Cross. It is bearing all imaginable suffering on our behalf, out of a Love we cannot ever grasp and which it takes eternity even to begin to comprehend.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that God will not give us to show us His Love.

And even when this profound mystery begins to dawn on us, when our sorrow for sin begins, even then, what do we give Him in return for His giving us everything, from our own immortal soul to His own Life? Ah, so little. So little.

When St Thomas Aquinas received the grace to comprehend the infinite love of God, he laid down his pen, regarding all his life's great work, on which as Christians we still depend, as straw. Christ asked him what he wanted of Him and his answer was simple and brief. 'Only yourself, Lord.'

What does God want of me? 'Only yourself, my love.'

Then here I am, Lord, just as I am. Not as You made me, though, but wounded and soiled by my own wilful hand. Have mercy on me.

Lead us away from temptation, Father, and deliver us from evil.

Take out of me this heart of stone, and give me a heart of flesh instead, so that I may begin to understand what I see when I look at your Cross.

Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.