Lifted up by Christ

This Sunday's Gospel includes the story of Christ's mention to Nicodemus of Moses' brazen serpent - the cure God prescribed for those who were bitten by venemous saraph (i.e. "burning") serpents in their sins against him; the people afflicted were to gaze upon the bronze serpent and find healing. "As Moses lifted up the brazen serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up." If we are to find healing at all for what afflicts us in this life, it will be in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, who for our sake became the image of the punishment of sin and sinners (though he himself was without sin) and was lifted up on the Cross .

I knew a young man who was injured in a motorcycle accident. He had been your typical working-class youth, loving girls, beer, and fast machines. When he was clipped by a car trying to pass him, he broke his neck and was made a quadriplegic. This event changed him completely. It could not do otherwise. He could move his neck a little, but nothing else. He could speak, but he was stuck in his stretcher bed as if he were nailed to it.

When I knew him, he had been going for a number of years to Lourdes with the Dominican annual pilgrimage to that center of healing. His family made sure he got there every year, hoping, of course, for a miraculous cure. However, by the time I met him, he himself was no longer looking for a cure, but rather a deeper embrace of the Lord Jesus Christ. This young man,- who might well like Job have cursed his luck and the day of his birth, and even perhaps unlike Job could have gone on to curse the God who let him suffer their injury he had, - had no bitterness or anger left in him. By the time I had met him, he told me, he had come past that. Now, nailed by his injury to his bed, he found himself daily in union with the heart of the Savior who was nailed to a cross for his sake. This young man was able to rouse and cheer up the other sick by his relentless good humor, his kindness, and his evident love of Jesus. He was able to give a few witness talks to the other pilgrims, speaking from a clip on microphone attached to his shirt.

On that pilgrimage I witnessed a few truly miraculous cures: one pilgrim's retinas, detached by his diabetes, were healed; another woman, silenced by Lou Gehrig's disease, began to speak again. My young friend in the stretcher was glad for them, though he did not himself receive a healing. A few years later, his body, enervated by inaction and the continued degeneration of his nervous system, finally gave up, and he died. But to the end, his peace and good humor perdured. And in this way he finished his being lifted up into the mystery of the cross of Jesus Christ which was to be his final healing.

I remember this young man, and then I look at my own weaknesses. There's always something in a person's life that needs purification, that needs to be caught up in the mystery of the Cross. The Cross sorts us out; it makes us make choices we would prefer not to; it discloses the depths of our hearts and the good and evil that is in them. The two thieves crucified with Christ come to the cross alike as two peas in a pod; but one finishes by joining the mob of Jesus' enemies screaming for his death, rejecting everything Jesus is, while the other humbly begs to be remembered as the Lord enters his kingdom. Sheep and goats are separated at the foot of the Cross, anticipating the final judgment, and the human heart gives up its deepest secrets in the presence of the Crucified.

To look on the Cross is to open your heart to judgment; do that, and the Lord himself will sit down with you to refine it as a refiner purifies silver. Whatever dross is in our hearts, whatever secret sins lurk there, whatever demons riding us prevent our own mastery of our passions and desires, our angers and fears,- he will cast it all out as we hold up our hearts to the Savior who was lifted up on the Cross for us. We need to keep looking at this Cross and the holy divine and human fruit it bears. We need to keep opening ourselves up to Jesus for this healing, painful as it is, for he will heal us eventually even from death, and in the present age will knead into our being that goodness, beauty and virtue we see in his own person.

The Victory of the Cross is seen in us, at last, in the conquest of our secret sin, of our favorite and hardenened attachments to desire and avarice, to fear and anger and pride. It is through the embrace of that particular form Cross we are afraid we cannot carry, of the Cross that we will not bear, precisely by this gracious and painful and particular embrace of our share of the Cross of Jesus, that will make us, raised up by Christ, a saint and a friend of God.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner!