He gave up everything, everything most dear to Him: His
Spirit, His Mother (Which is His body). His heart was pierced and we -the
Church- became engrained, married into Him.
At creation, Adam was put into a deep sleep, and from his
ribs Eve was fashioned (Gen: 2 : 21 – 23). This deep sleep of recreation was
Christ’s death on the cross, the fashioning of His spouse, the Church, was
through the blood and water that gushed forth from His side. Abraham
also went through a deep agonising sleep which was the process of God’s
covenant with him (Gen: 15: 12-21). The ‘deep sleep’, which brought forth the
origin of Eve from Adam, our father in the flesh; and of the Covenant from
Abraham, our father in faith, signifies death and finds an eternal plenitude
within the great deep sleep: the death of Christ.
He gave us – sinners that we are- His heart. He is married to
sinners. Look and believe. Calvary was a complete immolation and dismemberment.
His Spirit was in heaven, His body was on earth and His soul was in hell. His
head is of heaven, but His heart is for us on earth; from it gushes out mercy:
no condemnation, no fear. Of the head, He said: “Into Thy hands I commend My Spirit”, of His heart
He said: “Son, behold thy Mother”. The summit of mercy is His heart. It is the shortest route to
heaven within His body and it is through Mary – call it the Immaculate Heart –
that this mystery would be known in its fullest treasure.
The 2 greatest treasures He’s got are His Spirit and His Mother,
the combination of His constituent: Spirit and body. His Spirit, unto His
Father He giveth. His Mother, unto us –through the beloved disciple- He
commended.
Love and care for Mary is the part given us. His Spirit did
not initially fall under our correspondence; it is commended to the Godhead
through His head. The safer route from Calvary is to deal with Mary and walk
our way up to the God-heart, put it in a better way, to acquire the Spirit of
Christ through His Sacred Heart.
The blood and water which gushed forth from Christ at death
was the origin of this mystery. ‘This is My body, which will be given up for
you’. He, being the head, gave up the Spirit through His head (take this
literally). But this Spirit returned to humanity, not through the head, but
through the heart at His piercing.
He gave up the Spirit, back to the Father and, while
everything seems lost, by shear providence, beyond every calculation, from the
providential action of the piercing of His heart by Longinus, blood and water
gushed forth, creating a gateway, an access, a return afresh of the Spirit
given to the Father. This is a great means of regeneration, of recreation, through
the blood and water from His earth, which is the sacramental Baptism and the
Eucharist.
When all hope seemed lost, mercy and life gushed forth within
the font of this heart. This is the seal of the new and the eternal covenant,
this is the origin of the Church, which is the true spouse of Christ, the new
Eve which was borne out of the deep sleep of Adam from his rib. Here is the
fulfilment between the Adamic and the Abrahamic mystery of the deep sleep.
This final and lasting act of mercy is the drama emanated from
the heart of Christ on the cross at Calvary.
Ipinlese. The beginning of a real access to God is through the opening
forth of this heart from His body on Calvary. The busting forth of His Spirit into the world through
His heart, from whence gushes forth elements to be used by the Church for an access to the heavenly
Godhead. The Blood and Water for sinners.
His Spirit, which otherwise would have been sealed in heaven,
found an eternal route to the earth through the Sacred Heart of Jesus, His
body. From this heart comes forth the 3 witnesses to the world as proclaimed by
John: The Spirit, the Water and the Blood (1 Jn 5:7), without which heaven
would be impossible for man.
This sacramental blood of the Eucharist and the Water of
Baptism gushing forth from His heart, the heart from His given-up body, the same
body signified from the bounty of His love at the Last Supper, the same body offered
up by Mary, in life, and on the cross of Calvary. presents a direct route and
access for the 7 Spirits of God (Is 11: 2-3), Incarnated in the womb of the
Virgin Mary, made manifest to us after His Baptism at Jordan, delivered back to
the Father by Christ through His death on Calvary –confirming His poverty of
Spirit-and whose legacy we’ve got at Pentecost, actually found a gateway through
the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the commencement of our rebirth and of the new and
eternal covenant of mercy, through the visible blood and water which gushed
forth from His side. This is the visible mercy promised to our Fathers, to
Abraham and his sons forever.
Man’s re-creation happened through the return of the Spirit,
the source of which was the humanity of Christ, through the gateway of His Most
Sacred Heart. The Spirit comes to recreate us and to renew the face of the
earth through the Divine Mercy borne of His Sacred Heart and revealed through
the mystery of the blood and water which gushed out from this heart, a reality
of the sacrament of Baptism and the Eucharist.
Ultimately, it is this singular piercing of the heart of Jesus,
by the mighty arm of God, through the providential act of Longinus that has
become our ultimate rescue. Not the mercy of Abraham, not even that of Mary. Even,
Jesus at a stage lost the sense of the meaningfulness of everything as He cried
“Father, why have You forsaken Me?!”. But what is synonymous with everyone
aligned with this covenant of mercy, irrespective of its depth and its timeliness,
is the fact that its protagonist trusted in God and hopes against all hopes. This
sense of poverty, humility and trust is what wins the victory.
The return of the Spirit was the force which gushed forth
blood and water from the side of His humanity, through the human act of
Longinus’ spear, from the depth of His Most Sacred heart. It was not from an
earthly act, for He had been dead and immolated. It was borne of a complete
sacrificial and immolating love which caused a new paradigm from the creativity
of the Holy Spirit. This Trinitarian act is intermingled with the human
elements of Christ and the human act of Longinus. What great mystery, that
which is contained within the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus!
Christ’s unparalleled trust is the link and bond and
continuity in the covenanted mercy between God and the Patriarchs. A providence of the Father, which
does not make any mistake in ordering our lives, who tells us that the strands
of our hair has been numbered, caused Longinus to pierce the heart of Christ
and the seal which John almost despaired of in Revelation was opened.
This positive providence is that which occurred during the
piercing of His heart, in ensuring that no bone of His broken, in directing
Joseph Arimathea and Nicodemus accordingly regarding His body’s burial, in
moving the heart of Pilate to let go of His body, in constructing further
events according to His plans and purposes.
Underneath the quantic incorrigible events of the world lies
an absolute precise understandable theory of relativity and it is only by
following this Christian mystery that we understand the Theory of Everything!
It was the rending of the sacred heart that caused the
rending of the temple veil. We recently entered the Church, the house of God,
through the Jubilee door of mercy, but the real door of the Church –His Body-
from whence we enter the mystery of the Divine Mercy of heaven is through the
Sacred heart of Jesus, where we discover the principal sacraments of Baptism,
Eucharist and Penance, from whence flow the Divine mercy which gives no judgement
or condemnation.
Our route to the Divinity is not simply an abstract or a
spiritual one. It is a journey through the humanity of Christ within the
Church’s sacraments.
From an Incarnation derived from Mary, through the route of
His body, the Church, signalled in the mystery of the Sacrament of Matrimony and Holy Order, entered through
the gateway of that body: His sacred heart where we discover the corpus of water through Baptism and of blood through the Eucharist, these two, confluence through the sacramental actions of
Penance and Anointing of the Sick and the 3 binary Sacraments finding a cyclic
Trinitarian confluence in the Sacrament of the Holy Spirit: Confirmation, which is the life of the
Church,, the spouse of Christ, which acts though her, with her and in her.
Everything is embedded within the merciful plan of the
Father. Leave it with Him. Everything is embedded within this positive divine
plan, but we must stick to His heart to understand this mercy.
Sins and weaknesses are ugly, but we need an enlightenment
that thrives, not only in spite of them, but such that sees in them a great
utility for progress and a positive paradigm for salvation. Sin fuels progress
for a man who is not only discomforted by them, but is full of confidence, in a
way that these anomalies indeed become manures for the next level of progress.
Herein lays the wonder and triumph of mercy. O happy fault!
I believe that the Spirit, which returned to earth, almost
immediately after His heart was pierced, would have to find Mary out. Mary, who
is the manifested synergy of His body and thus a co-redemptrix in the ‘sword
that pierced their hearts’. A physical spear pierced His Most Sacred heart but
a spiritual sword pierced her sorrowful and Immaculate heart. This human and divine
interventions are necessary for the redemption of man.
The Spirit would have to find Mary out again at Pentecost
before the Church could fully understand the meaningfulness of the action of
Calvary through the revelation of the mystery of His Sacred heart, of the
Sacraments, of the purpose and relevance of the Church: His body and spouse.
The link between the ephemerality of this world and the perpetuity of Wisdom is
found in the reasonability within the nothingness of Mary.
Love is the only utility for progress, and the reservoir for
this love in its entirety is found within the Sacred heart of Jesus. Love
conquers everything and it is fostered from a disinterestedness unison perspective
between what God does for us and what He does in others. We can look at the
glory of others and rather than envying, we rejoice on progress once we see the
reasonability in the universality of His works. Rejoice with the joyful and be
sad with the sorrowful.
We see how John’s commentary regarding the 3 things that bear
witness makes sense (1 Jn 5:7). He called them Spirit, water and blood. The
total annihilation and absolute poverty of Christ as He commended His Spirit to
the Father, from a supreme act of providence, caused a return of that Spirit as
a form of recreation, as occurred during the 3 great baptismal acts of God: In
the Virgin’s womb at Incarnation, at River Jordan in His Baptism, and now on
Mount Calvary in His crucifixion; we see the initiative of the Holy Spirit in
these 3 great acts, which manifested out of a great act of humility and
obedience.
We must not take Christ’s individual words at the
institutionalising of the Eucharist at the Last Supper for granted. His
distinctive words regarding His body and blood have great significances.
Of His body, He said:
“Take this, all of you and eat it, for this is My body, which will be
given up for you”
His body is exclusively, for His friends, the Church. One
becomes grafted within the Church and its divine mystery the more one receives
His body in faith. The personification of His body, which was buried, has
resurrected, ascended into heaven and is now glorified, in human terms, is found in Mary, for He
derived His body from Mary. So, there is a close similitude between the giving
up of His body at the Last Supper, on the cross and unto John the beloved at
Calvary. But it is from this body that the constituent of His heart from which
commeth blood and water, which leads to His next words at the institution of
the Eucharist.
Of His blood, He said:
“Take this all of you and drink from it, for this is the chalice of My
blood, the blood of the new and the eternal covenant, which will be shed for
you and for many(all), so that sins may be forgiven; do this in memory of Me”
This second gesture shows specifically how he meant to fulfil
His plans by the utilisation of His blood. As it is usually said:
‘Without the shedding
of blood there is no redemption’.
It is His blood that flows out of His Sacred Heart, which is
His body, which is His Church. The blood gushes from His Church for all
humanity. This flow of His blood is a movement, like the command His disciples
to go out to the entire world and make disciples of all nations, baptising them
in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
This Baptism whereas, is through the water from His side. The
blood, also from His heart is a movement on a mission. The two, that is, both
blood and water, took their actions by the Holy Spirit.
As John said-, together with the water and the
Spirit, is one of the principal witnesses for the salvation of humanity. As
such, the Church is deeply engrained with the particular mission of the
Divinity and Trinitarian actions of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,
started from the Heart of Christ as Water, Blood and Spirit respectively. That
Heart of Christ is His body of which we are its principal constituents. It is
so much a unity such that these actions of ours and the Divinity are difficult
to separate in the Heart of Christ.
It is this Trinitarian mission of the 3 elements, which first
sought out the Apostles and grafted them into His Sacred Heart into becoming
the Church, His Body, and through this Heart they also become agents of
Trinitarian mission, become water, blood and Spirit, and witnessing through
them to ever bring humanity into the heart of Christ, His body. Mission starts
from the Heart. Peter may have a close relationship with His head as the head
of the Church, but he is also saved through the Heart. Love conquers all, not
faith, reason or perception.
It is this blood and water that should be utilised more and
more by the church the living membrane of His body, through the action of the
Holy Spirit, the third witness, to seek out all that are lost and the whole
human race, that they may be grafted into His body, starting from His Most
Sacred Heart. When His blood and water flow, they become mercy which forgives
‘70 x 7 times’, by faith through the Holy Spirit, its energy, until all are
integrated into the mystery of His mystical body.
Remember, the Holy Spirit is within the Godhead. Christ’s
head that was crowned literally is exclusively given over to the Father when He
handed back His Spirit –the Holy Spirit- back to the Father as He said “Into
Thy hands I commend My Spirit”, and yet, how impossible it is for one to disjoint
His body from His head, even though we see how distinct they can be. This is
the sort of unity between Him and His bride, the Church, between His humanity
and His Divinity and between Him and the Trinity.
One cannot separate His body
from the head nor His heart from His body, nor His blood from His heart, nor
His water from His blood, yet all these are distinct but they are still the
same Christ.
At the end of the day, all humanity, including all creation
is a unity when perceived from the lenses of His most Sacred Heart. Great and
lavish a mystery embedded in His divine mercy!
