Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Today we're continuing our series on Franciscan spirituality and one of the means of our incorporation into Christ, which is through suffering.
Once we, like St. Francis, are attracted into the orbit of Christ, our heart becomes inflamed with a holy passion, with a desire to become similar to him, to share in Christ's life.
The beautiful Babe of Bethlehem, which we'll celebrate in a week or so, turns into the poor, nude, despised, and crucified Son on Calvary.
So poverty, humiliation, and suffering are things which are not to be feared by those who love him.
Rather, the unions of our two lives, of my life and the life of Jesus, is, as Father Ciccarelli would say, welded together in the flame of suffering.
In this sense, you can arrive to what seems like a paradox.
You can arrive to love suffering, not in a sadistic way, but in a Christ-centered way.
That is, we can only love it when we understand it as a portion of the cup that Jesus himself wanted to drink, that portion of his cup which he reserved for each member of his mystical body.
And while it gives to us a last touch of that similarity with the head of the church, with Jesus, it also completes his passion, following what St. Paul says in Colossians 1:24, Quote, now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is the Church, unquote, says the apostle.
Our suffering is a share in the sufferings of Jesus, and Jesus' sufferings are what?
They are redemptive.
If you can grasp that, then you can even find joy in that most unexpected place in suffering, as St. Francis himself did.
Jesus loved the Father, and he loved us with a love which was both human and divine, with an infinite love, and for this, for the love of the Father, to repay the divine justice offended by sin, and also for our love, to bring us back to the Father, the Son submitted to suffering.
Jesus' suffering, though, in some way had a limit, even though it was the most atrocious suffering that can be imagined, and it also came to an end in time.
There's no longer a place in his physical body for those bleeding wounds, in his soul for bitterness, in his sensibilities for spasms and pangs.
Now that he sits at the right hand of the Father, those things can't reach him, but every human creature can carry his or her drop to that ocean of suffering.
Every person has their little sliver of the cross.
At the same time, though, by God's grace, it will always be Jesus who carries and supports the cross with us, not just us alone, but us with him.
So the redemption, objectively already completed, subjectively is being completed by being extended, to all the members of Christ's body in time.
So in the past, here and now, in the present, all the way up to the end of the world.
So why do Catholics have crucifixes and not just crosses?
Why do we represent Jesus still hanging on the cross?
Because he actually is.
Jesus still hangs on the cross through us, through his mystical body.
Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?
The risen and glorified Messiah said to Saul of Tarsus, who are you, Lord, was Saul's response.
I'm Jesus, whom you are persecuting, replied the Savior in Acts 9 verses 4 through 5.
What you do to them, my followers, you do to me, Saul, was what Jesus was affirming.
Their sufferings, so your sufferings, our sufferings, are my sufferings, Jesus says.
To a living member of the mystical body conforms himself or herself to the head, and in a certain way they relive in themselves Jesus's passion.
That's what you do in your sufferings.
In a certain way, you relive Jesus's passion.
There's a supernatural exchange.
Jesus makes my sufferings his, since they are the sufferings of a member of his mystical body, which I am through baptism, and I appropriate the sufferings of Christ because I share them in a union of grace.
I offer them to the Father, and I receive fruit from that offering, and others benefit as well from the grace that's received.
St. Francis felt, as so few others do, that his mission was to accept the invitation that the crucified addressed to him, fixing his eyes on Francis, his eyes full of suffering.
It was Christ's invitation to offer him the bread of compassion, as St. Angela of Foligno would call it, meaning it was an invitation to suffer with his Lord.
St. Francis accepted to be a little host with the big host, with Jesus his Lord.
He accepted to carry a small fragment of the true cross and to be crucified with the Crucified One.
St. Francis's book and his program of life were summed up in Jesus Christ, the lover and the sufferer.
The passion was Francis's preferred meditation, and his prayer culminated in a humble yearning request when he said, my Lord Jesus Christ, make me feel in my soul and in my body as much as possible that pain that you, sweet Jesus, sustained in the hour of your most bitter passion, so prayed St. Francis of Assisi.
So let's ask Our Lady for the grace to see suffering as God sees it, as a means to bring us closer to Him and to make us more Christ-like.
Praised be Jesus and Mary.