April 21, 2024
Dear St. Rita Families,
The Easter sequence that can be sung at Mass during the Easter Octave begins “Victimae Paschali laudes”, or “Praise to the Paschal Victim” – Our Lord, of course, who at Passover became the sacrificial lamb led to the slaughter (Is 53:7). It is a glorious and holy way to approach Our Lord after He has died and risen for us. We worship Him and rejoice in thanksgiving for what He has done for us. We hear the same sentiments in the Easter Prefaces during Holy Mass: “It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, at all times to acclaim you, O Lord, but in this time above all to laud you yet more gloriously, when Christ our Passover has been sacrificed.” Our response to Christ’s victimhood is one of praise and thanksgiving, and to top it off, it is joy that closes out these same Prefaces: “overcome with Paschal joy,” we sing the hymn of His praise: Holy, holy, holy!
Christ’s victimhood is the lens through which we as Christians are called to see all suffering – our own and that of others. The modern world is filled with sentiments of compassion and the desire to remove all suffering, but Christ’s victimhood invites us to approach these things in another way. I am reminded of the words of Our Lord to St. Rose of Lima, when she complained to Him of her deep suffering, namely that His suffering was yet more than hers.
Jesus’ words – along with the colloquial spiritual advice to “offer it up” – are not an expression of scorn towards human weakness, but are rather an invitation to experience the fullness of that human weakness. Such an invitation is utterly incomprehensible to some ears, because the only goodness they can comprehend is their own strength. Christians are invited to look towards the strength of Another, the Paschal Victim, Our Lord and Christ, Jesus. In Him who carried our sins and bore our weakness (Is 53:4, Mt 8:17), we find incomparable strength and courage to seek charity, mercy, and forgiveness where the world demands justice, compensation, and reparation.
You see, it is a strange thing for men to fight amongst themselves about justice and reparation when they are all unjust before God (see the parable of the unmerciful servant in Mt 18:21ff). As the Psalmist says, “How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good things He has done for me?” (166:12), and likewise the Prophet Micah: “With what shall I come before the Lord…? Shall I come before with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” (6:6-7). In other words, before God our case is hopeless; that is, it is hopeless if we don’t have the Paschal Victim.
It is the Paschal Victim who justifies us – who makes us just before God. He does not, as some Protestant denominations state, simply cover our wretchedness with a blanket of snow. He actually justifies us and makes us righteous. We are transformed in the depths of our being. And the real kicker is that we have been given this gift undeservedly. Not only did I murder God by my sin, but I was also forgiven and raised to inexplicable heights of glory through no merit of my own! For this reason, the Psalmist above continues after wondering how to respond to God’s gift: “I will take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord” (116:13). What else can I do? I have received everything freely up until this point, and so I must continue to do so.
What, then, about those who have suffered so much injustice and hurt over the course of their lives? What about those who carry deep wounds and scars from their earliest years? Do they not deserve some sort of recompense for their suffering? Particularly in these hard cases, but in everyone’s case as well, it is good never to forget the basics: the Son of God became man to suffer for us and with us. He bore our weaknesses and took our sins to the Cross. He was there in those moments of pain, darkness, and isolation. He was there because He promised not to leave you orphan (Jn 14:8).
Christ’s presence in our suffering allows us to seek the thing that He also seeks – the repentance and forgiveness of all. Even the justice He exacts from us is not so that He can regain what He lost because of our sin (remember, anything He lost ‘due’ to our sin, e.g. His human life, He lost voluntarily, because we have no power over Him, cf. Jn 10:18, 19:11); His justice is so that we and others can be fully converted and united to Him, because that is what our hearts truly desire, even if we don’t recognize it. Notice the charity in God’s justice. He seeks only your good, and He seeks to convince you of that by paying back what you owe through His suffering and death.[1] This sort of charity is not the tenor of modern ‘justice’, which seeks payback to regain what was lost and vengeance, for others to experience the pain that was previously inflicted on oneself.
Such a false sense of justice breeds likewise a false sense of victimhood. While it is utterly tragic that so many people have been the victims of violence, rape, abuse, and the like, it would be even more tragic if through that false sense of victimhood, they were to believe that a vengeful style of justice that seeks payback could actually bring healing and peace. It cannot. But there is a Victim who can. Victimae Paschali laudes!
In Christ,
Fr. Christensen