CHAPTER XVII

HOLY WEEK II

And after they had mocked him, they took the robe off from him, and put his own raiment on him, and led him away to crucify him.

S. Matt.  XXVII, 31.

Forgive, O Lord, we beseech thee, the sins of thy people:  that we, who are not able to do anything of ourselves, that can be pleasing to thee, may be assisted in the way of salvation by the prayers of the Mother of thy Son.  Who.

Having partaken of thy heavenly table, we humbly beseech thy clemency, O Lord, our God, that we who honour the Assumption of the Mother of God, may, by her intercession, be delivered from all evils.  Through.

OLD CATHOLIC.

The way of the Cross is indeed a Sorrowful Way.  We have meditated upon it so often that we are familiar with all the details of our Lord’s action as He follows it from the Judgment Seat of Pilate to the Place of a Skull.  I wonder if we enough pause to look with our Lord at the crowds that line the way, or at those who follow Him out of the city.  It is not a mere matter of curiosity that we should do so, or an exercise of the devout imagination; the reason why we should examine carefully the faces of those men who attend our Lord on the way to His death is that somewhere in that crowd we shall see our own faces:  it is a mirror of sinful humanity that we look into there.  All the seven deadly sins are there incarnate.

It is extremely important that we should get this sort of personal reaction from the Passion because we are so prone to be satisfied with generalities, to confess that we are miserable sinners, and let it go at that!  But to stop there is to stop short of any possibility of improvement, because we can only hope to improve when we understand our lives in detail, when we face them as concrete examples of certain sins.

There was pride there.  It was expressed by both Roman and Jewish officialism which looked with scorn on this obscure fanatic who claimed to be a king!  Pilate had satisfied himself of His harmlessness by a very cursory examination.  This Galilean Prophet with His handful of followers, peasants and women, who had deserted Him at the first sign of danger, was hardly worth troubling about.  The only ground for any action at all was the fear that the Jewish leaders might be disagreeable.  Those Jewish leaders took a rather more serious view of the situation because they knew that through the purity of His teaching and His obvious power to perform miracles, a power but just now once more strikingly demonstrated in the raising of Lazarus, He had a powerful hold on the people.  They, these Jewish leaders, declined a serious examination of the claims of such a man in their pride of place and knowledge of the Scriptures.  They were concerned to sweep Him aside as a possible leader in a popular outbreak, not as one whose claim to the Messiahship needed a moment’s examination.