The Pain of Taking On Our Sins
How I envision Jesus's Passion now
Finally! We are in the middle of the Triduum, and tomorrow (or for most of us, at tonight’s Easter Vigil), Jesus Christ will rise from the dead.
But first, I want to talk about what came before His glorious Resurrection. I’ll make it short because Easter is a very busy time for all of us.
In the following YouTube Short, Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, talks about the tremendous suffering he went through during the making of the movie.
So, now take Jim’s pain and suffering and multiply that by 100… or 1,000… or a million.
You see, when I was barely a Christian, I used to wonder what the big deal was about the Crucifixion. Sure, it was a very cruel way to die, but back in the day, men were extremely creative in coming up with new and inventive ways to torture people.
When you read about the Catholic martyrs, they were chopped in half, roasted over a spittle, quartered (that is, torn into four pieces by horses their limbs were tied to), flayed (that means skinned while alive), women had their breasts cut off, and so forth. Some of the Apostles were themselves crucified.
So why was what Jesus endured so much worse? Why is it depicted as the ultimate suffering? Is it because He was God and the affront was so much more outrageous?
I actually asked Him some years ago—slightly apprehensive, halfway expecting to be struck by lightning for my audacity: “What was it about your suffering, Jesus, that made it so much worse?”
He did respond. He reminded me of the fantasy/horror TV show I used to watch years ago, titled Sleepy Hollow (no, not the movie with Johnny Depp). One of the episodes was called “The Sin Eater.” It was about a man who had the ability to absorb other people’s sins, but the task was so horrendous that it overwhelmed him and completely drained his energy.
“That’s kind of what I did,” Jesus said in my mind. “In that moment on the cross, I absorbed the sins of the whole world.”
I shuddered. I remembered how the TV show depicted what the “sin eater” went through when he did his work: He saw and felt so much darkness and depravity and pure evil, it nearly killed him—and that was just from one person. Now imagine the sins of the whole world, taken onto the shoulders of one God-man, or better, INTO Himself.
It truly takes the King of the Universe to accomplish a feat like that. Reason to thank Him every day for what He did for us. Praise the Lord—He is risen!
God bless you!
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